Growing Heirloom Flowers explains in simple terms how to grow the fullest, richest, and most aromatic blooms possible. Heirloom flowers have stood the test of time. Prized for their beauty, scent, hardiness, or other star qualities, these vintage varieties continue to capture our imaginations and decorate our gardens long after they first came to be. These flowers have experience, and now you can enjoy the experience of growing them. In Growing Heirloom Flowers, author Chris McLaughlin takes you on a tour of these alluring blooms, covering the benefits, challenges, growing requirements, and everything else you need to know about more than 40 heirloom flowers. Along the way, she offers tips, tricks, and creative projects for making the most of your heirloom garden, from arranging and preserving to dyes, drinks, and more. With a wealth of information and stunning full-color photography, this book is the perfect guide to adding heirloom beauty to your life.

Design a beautiful and self-sufficient garden; learn the secrets of heirloom vegetables, herbs, and flowers; and enjoy 60 seasonal recipes featuring the fruits of your labor—all with one book! WINNER OF THE GARDENCOMM SILVER AWARD “An heirloom garden is an opportunity to plant a piece of history that provides a deeper connection to the food you eat, the people you love, and the landscape that surrounds your home.”—from the Introduction Whether you have a small plot of land just outside your kitchen door or a wide-open field waiting to be tamed, you have an opportunity to honor the past and discover the future through long-lost plant varieties that are full of flavor, fragrance, and old-fashioned charm. By digging deeper into their history, you’ll learn why saving and planting heirloom seeds are key to the past, the present, and the future of our food gardens. In The New Heirloom Garden, award-winning food and garden writer Ellen Ecker Ogden guides you to designing and harvesting from your own kitchen garden, with expert advice, twelve themed garden designs, and sensible tips for a successful harvest. Each design includes an illustrated layout based on a historical garden with a detailed plant key featuring the best-tasting heirloom vegetables you can grow. Discover the unique stories behind the fruits, vegetables, herbs, and flowers that have been growing in gardens for centuries, and why seed saving is vital to maintain food diversity. An avid cook, Ellen attended cooking school in Italy and Ireland, and shares her 60 best garden-to-table recipes, organized by plant family, making it easy to learn how to substitute with what is growing seasonally and regionally. With a range of soups, salads, entrées, and desserts, you’ll revel in delicious fare that includes cold Summer Squash Soup with Parsley-Mint Pistou, Fennel and Watermelon Salad, Rainbow Beet Spoonbread, Rhubarb Pie with Ginger and Lemon, and Mint Granita, making this book a must-have for cooks who love to garden.

Master gardener Becky Homan explains in clear, user-friendly terms the different gardening conditions in each part of Missouri, so readers can identify which of the widely varying soils, temperature zones, and precipitation levels they are dealing with. These detailed regional descriptions make this book a standout. Gardeners and horticulturists from across the Show Me State contribute hands-on advice for each region, from when to start plants from seed to when to water in drought or where to get soil samples analyzed. This is the must-have garden bible for Missouri residents.

Heirloom seeds are more than the promise of next summer's crookneck squash or jewel-colored zinnias. They're living antiques handed down from one generation to the next, a rich inheritance of flavor and beauty from long ago and, often, far away. They are sometimes better adapted to pests and harsh conditions than many modern varieties and often simply smell or taste better. Gardening with Heirloom Seeds serves as a resource for gardeners, cooks, and plant lovers of all levels of expertise who want to know more about finding, sharing, and propagating the seeds of heirloom flowers, fruits, and vegetables. In these beautifully illustrated pages, Lynn Coulter describes fifty treasured heirloom species, from Frenchman's Darling, a flowering herb whose seeds were pocketed by Napoleon Bonaparte when he invaded Egypt in 1798, to Snow White beets, an old Dutch favorite that will not stain the cook's fingers red. Most of the plants included here will grow all across the United States; a few are best suited for warmer climates. The text is sprinkled throughout with practical advice from heirloom gardeners and lists sources for finding the seeds of many old varieties. Because it also provides ample room for making notes, Gardening with Heirloom Seeds can be used year after year and can become an heirloom in its own right--a personal journal to pass along to the next generation of gardeners.

This is a complete seed saving guide that describes specific techniques for saving the seeds of 160 different vegetables. 80 photos.

The Gardener's Guide to Growing Vegetables is the perfect guide for beginning gardeners as it has the basic information needed to grow twenty of the most popular vegetables in the garden. Using this gardening handbook readers will learn how to grow, harvest and store many vegetables to cook for nutritious meals. Nothing beats home grown vegetables fresh from the garden and served directly to your dining room table. Imagine fresh picked lettuce for tasty salads, flavorful carrots for casseroles and soups and sweet corn ripe and ready for roasting on the grill. Learn to grow tomatoes, squash, potatoes, peppers, sweet potatoes, green beans and cabbage in your garden. Gardening beginners will find many hints and tips for successful vegetable gardening. The satisfaction gleaned from growing your own food in a priceless life experience and a skill to be passed down to your children and grandchildren. Growing your own vegetables in the garden is a rewarding, life enhancing experience which the Gardener's guide to Growing Vegetables can teach you. Vegetable gardening for beginners, guide book, vegetable garden essentials,vegetable garden handbook, gardening basics, vegetable harvesting, hints and tips for your garden

The bouquet-building bible gardeners have been waiting for! Learn the ins and outs of growing gorgeous blooms at home with professional flower farmer Lisa Mason Ziegler of @gardenersworkshopfarm. Whether you’re cultivating fresh-cut bouquets for yourself, family, and friends or for others on a small commercial scale, you’ll go from sowing seeds to cutting armloads of colorful, long-lasting blooms with ease. Lisa’s unique approach and easy-to-follow advice on multi-season planting and harvesting uses the natural warm and cool weather cycles present in almost all growing regions to maximize cut flower production. This logical and nature-driven method is also a signature hallmark of her super-successful online flower-farming courses, and it’s one that translates equally well to both small urban backyards and large rural flower farms. Growing your own cut flowers means you can avoid bouquets laden with pesticides (who wants that on their wedding day?) and you can skip the trips to your local flower shop or grocery store to pay big bucks for a bouquet that has racked up more airline miles than you could ever hope to. Included in this essential cut flower growing handbook are: 50 extensive flower profiles divided into their preferred season of growth. Cool-weather favorites include poppies, snapdragons, and bells of Ireland. Warm-season beauties include zinnias, sunflowers, and celosia. Planting tips for a succession of blooms that carry over from one growing season to the next without any additional work from you. Illustrations showing how to pinch plants for more blooms, how to make your cuts, how to erect support netting to keep your flowers straight and upright, how to dig a planting bed, and more. Over 200 photographs of the best cut flowers for home gardeners to grow, the most effective methods for their care, and the most productive ways to organize them in the garden. Advice on caring for a cutting garden, locating the best planting site, starting plants from seed, making the harvest, prolonging the life of your cut flowers, and so much more! The Cut Flower Handbook is the perfect balance of inspiration and education for anyone interested in bringing more beauty into their lives by growing cut flowers at home.

Get garden-tested guidance for beautiful blooms with this comprehensive, practical, and gorgeously illustrated study of the art of growing flowers. In Mastering the Art of Flower Gardening, author Matt Mattus offers expert tips on growing both annuals and biennials (including native and heirloom species) based on his decades of first-hand experience in his own garden and greenhouse, made popular on his blog Growing with Plants. Accompanied by lush photography, every variety or species presented includes detailed information and tips that go beyond the very basic information typically available on the seed packet or a nursery tag. You’ll discover: Basic growing methods, including how to start seeds, soil, sowing, hardening off, transplanting, and growing on. Advice for growing a wide range of different flowers, organized by blooming season, including annuals from seed, summer bulbs, vines such as wisteria, and even blooming shrubs like lilacs. In-depth profiles for a selection of flowers that include more-detailed growing techniques along with their histories and varieties. Pro tips, including how to grow challenging annual poppies and biennials from seed and forcing flowers for winter blooms. Just a small selection of the flowers covered: heirloom and exhibition chrysanthemums, larkspurs and annual poppies, delphiniums, peonies, lilacs, and wisteria. Bulbs include spring and summer bulbs such as anemone, ranunculus, tulips, lilies, gladiolus, and cut flower dahlias, while winter indoor bulbs cover every aspect of forcing bulbs indoors like narcissus, amaryllis, South African bulbs—and even how to force Lily of the Valley. Whether you’re interested in raising a small cut-flower garden, enhancing your flower border or containers, or just admiring the beauty of flowers, Mattus has it covered.

Transform a Good Garden into a Great Garden in One Season What's the secret? It's a mix of ingenuity and efficiency, accented with fun! Newspaper, Pennies, Cardboard, and Eggs-For Growing a Better Garden contains more than 400 clever solutions for easing garden troubles, new techniques for turning around an underperforming garden, and innovative ideas that will amaze even long-time gardeners. If you're looking to add more nutrients to garden soil, whip up a kitchen scrap smoothie and pour the juiced-up liquid right in the planting hole. If you need to chase away bulb-hungry voles, a little sharp-edged driveway gravel around the bulb will do the trick. And if digging potatoes is too tiresome, discover the no-dig, no-shovel method that lets you grow potatoes in a heap of straw mulch. You'll also discover: - Intriguing and new plant varieties for sweeter corn, delicate salad greens, and handsome winter squash - How to fill a shady spot with color, find affordable bulbs, rejuvenate peonies and perennials, and enjoy blossoms even when there's snow - A creative arsenal for dealing with backyard weeds, including vinegar, hot water, plastic, and flames - Ways to turn inexpensive items from the garden, closet, and pantry into indispensable yard and garden helpers Filled with usable, earth-conscious, and creative ideas and tips, this lively book will help you discover how to work smarter-not harder-to cultivate a better garden, year after year. Let a few of these suggestions and projects take root, and you'll have the better-looking, more productive, and more rewarding garden in just one year.

A comprehensive reference for growing flowers, fruits, vegetables, herbs, and more—with step-by-step instructions and over a thousand illustrations. Gardening: The Complete Guide lets you enjoy the process of gardening as much as the finished product. With plenty of inspirational photographs and hands-on instructional pictures, it presents the latest techniques for the twenty-first century gardener with an emphasis on time-saving, efficient practices, and devotes considerable space to growing herbs, flowers, vegetables, and fruit. This book is perfect for the gardener who wants to know how things grow and why certain practices are more effective. Includes: Valuable information on planning, planting, and maintaining all types of gardens, including vegetable, fruit, flower, water gardens, and specialty gardens Illustrated Plant-by-Plant Directories with detailed information on annuals, perennials, bulbs, biennials, water-garden plants, herbs, vines, fruits, and vegetables Step-by-step planting and growing instructions for all types of garden plants Tables and charts filled with valuable information that will help get you organized Tips for harvesting and storing fruits and vegetables from the garden, and for drying flowers More than one thousand garden-related color photographs and watercolors