Provides comprehensive advice on raised-bed vegetable gardening, including how to pick a location, when to bring transplants indoors, and how to save and store seeds.

Elevate your backyard veggie patch into a work of sophisticated and stylish art. Kitchen Garden Revival guides you through every aspect of kitchen gardening, from design to harvesting—with expert advice from author Nicole Johnsey Burke, founder of Rooted Garden, one of the leading US culinary landscape companies, and Gardenary, an online kitchen gardening education and resource company. Participating in the grow-your-own movement is important to both reduce your food miles and control what makes it onto your family’s table. If you’ve hesitated to take part because installing and caring for a traditional vegetable garden doesn’t seem to suit your life or your sense of style, Kitchen Garden Revival is here to show you there’s a better, more beautiful way to grow food. Instead of row after row of cabbage and pepper plants plunked into a patch of dirt in the middle of the yard, kitchen gardens are attractive, highly tailored food gardens consisting of easy-to-maintain raised planting beds laid out in an organized geometric pattern. Offering both four seasons of ornamental interest and plenty of fresh, homegrown fruits, vegetables, and herbs, kitchen gardens are the way to grow your own food in a fashionable, modern, and practical way. Kitchen gardens were once popular features of the European and early American landscape, but they fell out of favor when our agrarian roots were displaced by industrialization. With this accessible and inspirational guide, Nicole aims to return the kitchen garden to its rightful place just outside of every backdoor. Learn the art of kitchen gardening as you discover: What characteristics all kitchen gardens have in common How to design and install gorgeous kitchen garden beds using metal, wood, or stone Why raised beds mean reduced maintenance What crops are best for your kitchen garden A planting, tending, and harvesting plan developed by a pro Season-by-season growing guides It's time to join the Kitchen Garden Revival and start growing your own delicious, organic food.

#1 NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER • The former First Lady, author of Becoming, and producer and star of Waffles + Mochi tells the inspirational story of the White House Kitchen Garden and how gardens can transform our lives and the health of our communities. Early in her tenure as First Lady, despite being a novice gardener, Michelle Obama planted a kitchen garden on the White House’s South Lawn. To her delight, she watched as fresh vegetables, fruit, and herbs sprouted from the ground. Soon the White House Kitchen Garden inspired a new conversation all across the country about the food we feed our families and the impact it has on the nutrition and well-being of our children. In American Grown, Mrs. Obama invites you inside the White House Kitchen Garden, from the first planting to the satisfaction of the seasonal harvest. She reveals her early worries and struggles—would the new plants even grow?—and her joy as lettuce, corn, tomatoes, collards and kale, sweet potatoes and rhubarb flourished in the freshly tilled soil. She shares the stories of other gardens that have moved and inspired her on her journey across the nation. And she offers what she learned about planting your own backyard, school, or community garden. American Grown features: • a behind-the-scenes look at every season of the garden’s growth • unique recipes created by White House chefs • striking original photographs that bring the White House garden to life • a fascinating history of community gardens in the United States From a modern-day vegetable truck that brings fresh produce to underserved communities in Chicago, to Houston office workers who make the sidewalk bloom, to a New York City school that created a scented garden for the visually impaired, to a garden in Winston-Salem, North Carolina, that devotes its entire harvest to those less fortunate, American Grown isn’t just the story of a single garden. It’s a celebration of the bounty of our nation and a reminder of what we can all grow together.

Conscious foodies will love this easy-to-follow guide on creating garden-to-table meals—with tips on growing and storing your own harvest, plus delicious recipes From sinking a seed into the soil through to sitting down to enjoy a meal made with vegetables and fruits harvested right outside your back door, this gorgeous kitchen gardening book is filled with practical, useful information for both novices and seasoned gardeners alike. Grow Cook Eat will inspire people who already buy fresh, seasonal, local, organic food to grow the food they love to eat. For those who already have experience getting their hands dirty in the garden, this handbook will help them refine their gardening skills and cultivate gourmet quality food. The book also fills in the blanks that exist between growing food in the garden and using it in the kitchen with guides to 50 of the best-loved, tastiest vegetables, herbs, and small fruits. The guides give readers easy-to-follow planting and growing information, specific instructions for harvesting all the edible parts of the plant, advice on storing food in a way that maximizes flavor, basic preparation techniques, and recipes. The recipes at the end of each guide help readers explore the foods they grow and demonstrate how to use unusual foods, like radish greens, garlic scapes, and green coriander seeds.

Table of Contents Introduction Let Nature Decide for You Permanent Crops Catch Crops Annual Crops Manure and Crops Crop Rotation Why Go in for Crop Rotation 4 Course Rotation 3 Course Rotation Tuberous Crops Potatoes Soil Sprouting General Potato Cultivation Best Organic Manure Storing Potatoes Root Crops Carrots Soil Using Seed Drills Cultivation of Carrots Beetroot Parsnips Turnips Tips for Sowing Seeds Permanent crops Growing Herbs Growing through Cuttings Appendix Natural Manure Types of Fertilizers Conclusion Author Bio Publisher Introduction Voltaire once said “Happy is the man who has his own garden and true contentment is when he grows things in it.” Having your own garden may not be possible for many of us today busy in the rat race of the 21st century. Nevertheless, there are still many people fortunate enough to have open land outside their houses where they can make their own flower gardens or kitchen gardens. This book is going to tell you how to make an organic kitchen garden for pleasure and also for profit. Just like any other garden, a little bit of planning has to go into making your vegetable garden. It should have sufficient paths in it so that you can wheel about manures etc. in barrows, if necessary. You may also want to remove all the green vegetal rubbish accumulating while gardening. There is absolutely no need for your garden to be all paths if it is pocket-sized and you are strapped for space. In small gardens one path at one side is more than enough. Whatever the size of your organic vegetable garden may be, this book is going back to traditional methods of growing vegetables in a healthy manner. We are not talking about chemical fertilizers and poisonous pesticides. Instead, we are going to talk about natural manure, compost, and other traditional methods used by our forefathers to get a good healthy crop for family and neighbors. Many people out there would not want to grow all kinds of vegetables because hey, how many of us like eating greens? But then the moment we see them growing in our gardens and we pluck our first harvest, we begin to think in terms of healthy eating, especially when the meals have been made of organic vegetables grown in our own backyard. Your main priority is to see that the ground is fully occupied for most of the year and that no part of your garden is wasted. Think Japanese gardens. They know how to utilize every single inch of space and get the most out of it. All right, you may see their gardens on a small scale, but no inch of soil in a farm is left uncultivated if they can help it. This may look crowded, but it is not. So let us consider ourselves gardening newbies and begin our journey towards achieving the goal of the perfect long-term organic vegetable kitchen garden right now. Remember that your kitchen garden is not going to be restricted to just vegetables. You can also grow herbs in it. Who is stopping you from growing flowers in it? Your aim is to plan your kitchen garden in such a way that you gain lots of pleasure from it, and then you may decide to carry on to the profit stage.

Vegetables from your own farm to your own table We all love good food, and the fresher it is, the better! And what could be fresher than farm-to-table terms than vegetables you've grown at home? The new edition of Vegetable Gardening For Dummies puts you in touch with your roots in a thousands of years old farming tradition by demonstrating how easy it is to grow your own. And there's no need to buy a farm: all you need to become a successful cultivator of the land is this book and a small plot of soil in the yard, or a container set aside for some tasty natural edibles. Add water and some care, love, and attention—et voila! In a friendly, come-relax-in-my-garden style Charlie Nardozzi—leading horticultural writer and guest expert on shows such as Martha Stewart Living Radio—shares the nutritious results of a lifetime of vegetable-growing experience to delve into the nitty-gritty of micro-farming. It's not rocket science—quite the opposite—but you do need a bit of patience before you can reap your first glorious harvest. This book shows you how to master that, as you get down and dirty with the enjoyable work of building soil, starting seeds, controlling pests, and maintaining your garden. And as your early efforts turn to green shoots, you can dig deeper into information on special tips and tricks, as well as hundreds of vegetable varieties—many of which are beautiful to behold as well as tasty to eat! Plan out your garden Know your veggies, from tomatoes to chard Keep your plants happy and healthy Harvest, store, and preserve your crops Whether your thumb is a fertile green or you've never put plant-to-pot before, this book will bring out your inner farmer: you'll find everything required to transform your garden into a self-renewing larder—and complement every meal with a crisp, healthy, home-grown treat.