Garden efficiently and grow more food - Huw Richards shows you how. Following the success of Veg in One Bed and Grow Food for Free, in The Vegetable Grower's Handbook Huw shares his tried-and-tested approaches from his own garden so you can unearth your garden's potential. With simple yet effective methods, such as nurturing healthy soil, optimizing space, and following a planting plan, anyone can be a productive vegetable grower while working in harmony with nature. As well as Huw's recommendations on good planning and infrastructure, he has tips for plenty of quick wins too, such as how to attract beneficial pollinators. You'll be amazed at what you can achieve by setting goals, planning ahead, and trialling new ideas. Every successful business has a strategy. Why not apply one to your vegetable patch?

At Clay Bottom Farm, author Ben Hartman and staff practice kaizen, or continuous improvement, cutting out more waste--of time, labor, space, money, and more--every year and aligning their organic production more tightly with customer demand. Applied alongside other lean principles originally developed by the Japanese auto industry, the end result has been increased profits and less work. In this field-guide companion to his award-winning first book, The Lean Farm, Hartman shows market vegetable growers in even more detail how Clay Bottom Farm implements lean thinking in every area of their work, including using kanbans, or replacement signals, to maximize land use; germination chambers to reduce defect waste; and right-sized machinery to save money and labor and increase efficiency. From finding land and assessing infrastructure needs to selling perfect produce at the farmers market, The Lean Farm Guide to Growing Vegetables digs deeper into specific, tested methods for waste-free farming that not only help farmers become more successful but make the work more enjoyable. These methods include: Using Japanese paper pot transplanters Building your own germinating chambers Leaning up your greenhouse Making and applying simple composts Using lean techniques for pest and weed control Creating Heijunka, or load-leveling calendars for efficient planning Farming is not static, and improvement requires constant change. The Lean Farm Guide to Growing Vegetables offers strategies for farmers to stay flexible and profitable even in the face of changing weather and markets. Much more than a simple exercise in cost-cutting, lean farming is about growing better, not cheaper, food--the food your customers want.

The Greenhouse and Hoophouse Grower's Handbook shares best practices for both large- and small-scale production of the eight most profitable crops - tomatoes, eggplant, cucumbers, peppers, leafy greens, lettuce, herbs, and microgreens. Every year, more growers are turning to protected culture to deal with unpredictable weather and to meet out-of-season demand for local food, but many end up spinning their wheels, wasting time and money on unprofitable crops grown in ways that don't make the most of their precious greenhouse space. This book levels the playing field with decision-making framework that goes beyond a list of simple dos and don'ts. With comprehensive chapters on temperature control and crop steering, pruning and trellising, grafting, and more, Andrew Meffer's book is full of techniques and strategies that can help farms stay profitable, satisfy customers, and become an integral part of relocalizing our food system. From seed to sale, this book is the indispensable resource for protected growing.--COVER.

The leading one-stop reference for commercial vegetable growers for more than 50 years Rooted in tradition, branching out to the future. For more than half a century, Knott's Handbook for Vegetable Growers has provided generations of commercial growers with the most timely, accessible, and useful information available on the subject. The Fifth Edition of this highly regarded horticultural mainstay provides readers with the reliable growing and marketing information they've come to expect, while including new and updated material throughout to maintain its relevance in our ever-changing world. Filled with valuable information, largely in the form of tables and charts--from hard statistics on vegetable production and consumption to essential information for today's international markets, such as vegetable botanical names and vegetable names in nine languages--Knott's Handbook is part Farmer's Almanac, part encyclopedia, and part dictionary. It also provides detailed, practical specifics on planting rates, schedules, and spacing; soils and fertilizers; methods for managing crop pests; greenhouse vegetable and crop production; insect pest identification; harvesting and storage; and vegetable marketing. Now available in a new flexible cover designed for ease of use on the desk or in the field, this valuable workhorse features new information on: * World vegetable production * Best management practices * Organic crop production * Food safety * Pesticide safety * Postharvest problems * Minimally processed vegetables * Plus, hundreds of Web site links related to vegetable information

The New Vegetable Growers Handbook is an updated version of Frank Tozer's acclaimed book The Vegetable Growers Handbook. Like the original, it covers every aspect of growing all of the common crops (and a number of uncommon ones). As a long-time home gardener, the author knows exactly what information you need to succeed and presents it in a clear, thorough, and even entertaining fashion. There are step-by-step instructions on soil preparation, variety selection, raising transplants, direct sowing, watering, protection, harvesting, storage, seed saving, and much more. He doesn't just tell you what to do and when to do it, he also tells you why, by explaining in detail how crops grow and why they sometimes don't. The original book received high marks from reader reviewers, with comments like "fantastic," "my gardening bible," and "this book provides more detailed and easy-to-read information on individual crops than any other gardening book I've seen." This new, revised edition has been expanded by 50 percent, with more information on more crops, with the aim of creating the most useful and practical book on vegetable gardening available anywhere.

Planning the garden. Plant growth. Soils and plant nutrition. Pest control. Harvest and storage of vegetables. Growing individual vegetables. Growing and preserving herbs.