Now that growing your own food is back in fashion — for health, financial, and environmental reasons — Mariano Bueno gives full practical details on how to grow vegetables alongside fruit trees and a variety of aromatic, medicinal and ornamental plants and herbs. He gives the individual requirements of common garden vegetables and popular fruit trees and provides a calendar that describes how to care for the kitchen garden through the gardening year. Explaining how to meet the particular challenges of growing edible plants in a hot, dry climate, with advice on matters such as irrigation, the book will be useful for those who live in a Mediterranean area or find themselves gardening in ever-hotter, dry climates. But it is also abundant in expertise on gardening in other climatic conditions, too, and is available here to an English-speaking audience for the first time.

When the Spanish began colonizing the Americas in the late fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, they brought with them the plants and foods of their homeland—wheat, melons, grapes, vegetables, and every kind of Mediterranean fruit. Missionaries and colonists introduced these plants to the native peoples of Mexico and the American Southwest, where they became staple crops alongside the corn, beans, and squash that had traditionally sustained the original Americans. This intermingling of Old and New World plants and foods was one of the most significant fusions in the history of international cuisine and gave rise to many of the foods that we so enjoy today. Gardens of New Spain tells the fascinating story of the diffusion of plants, gardens, agriculture, and cuisine from late medieval Spain to the colonial frontier of Hispanic America. Beginning in the Old World, William Dunmire describes how Spain came to adopt plants and their foods from the Fertile Crescent, Asia, and Africa. Crossing the Atlantic, he first examines the agricultural scene of Pre-Columbian Mexico and the Southwest. Then he traces the spread of plants and foods introduced from the Mediterranean to Spain’s settlements in Mexico, New Mexico, Arizona, Texas, and California. In lively prose, Dunmire tells stories of the settlers, missionaries, and natives who blended their growing and eating practices into regional plantways and cuisines that live on today in every corner of America.

Mediterranean gardening offers a way of living in harmony with the earth without contrived effects or heavy spending. Born of long human experience on the land, it is frugal and fruitful, serves many purposes and gives many pleasures, year-round. Today, it adapts easily to our growing ecological awareness, to individual creativity and community sharing. Above all, it perpetuates a long-standing partnership between human beings and their environment, tested in Mediterranean countries for millennia. Mediterranean cooking grew from peasant roots but has become fashionable today all over the world without loss of local diversity. More than a mere trend, it has been widely adopted because of its underlying, enduring practices: it is seasonal, local, healthy and flavourful, economical but capable of great refinement. Mediterranean gardening has much the same base and similar benefits. Like the cuisine, Mediterranean gardening offers an approach that can be adapted to all climates and budgets, for better, sustainable living in harmony with the environment.

One of the best books for beginning and experienced vegetable gardeners, this clear, straightforward, easy-to-read gardening bestseller (over 500,000 copies sold) uses organic, biodynamic methods to produce large amounts of vegetables in very small spaces. To accommodate today's lifestyles, a garden needs to fit easily into a very small plot, take as little time as possible to maintain, require a minimum amount of water, and still produce prolifically. That's exactly what a postage stamp garden does. Postage stamp gardens are as little as 4 by 4 feet, and, after the initial soil preparation, they require very little extra work to produce a tremendous amount of vegetables--for instance, a 5-by-5-foot bed will produce a minimum of 200 pounds of vegetables. When first published 40 years ago, the postage stamp techniques, including closely planted beds rather than rows, vines and trailing plants grown vertically to free up space, and intercropping, were groundbreaking. Revised for an all new generation of gardeners, this edition includes brand new information on the variety of heirloom vegetables available today and how to grow them the postage stamp way. Now, in an ever busier world, the postage stamp intensive gardening method continues to be invaluable for gardeners who wish to weed, water, and work a whole lot less yet produce so much more.

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.

The acclaimed cookbook author guides you from your garden to your dining table in this volume of Mediterranean recipes, organic gardening advice, and more. Patricia Moore-Pastides, author of Greek Revival: Cooking for Life, heads to the garden, offering guidance on how to cultivate a healthy diet from the ground up. An accomplished cook and public-health professional, Moore-Pastides presents all new recipes focused on bringing the bounty of the garden to the table in easy and accessible ways. The growing section provides all the information necessary for growing an exciting array of fruits and vegetables in containers, raised beds, or yard gardens. Topics include preparing the soil, composting to create organic fertilizer, watering, working with basic tools, and dealing with common pests and problems. Greek Revival from the Garden then invites the reader into the kitchen. This section assumes little prior cooking experience and includes kitchen safety, common equipment, and cooking methods. Moore-Pastides also shares fifty mouth-watering recipes featuring your harvest of homegrown vegetables, including garden gazpacho, curried butternut squash and apple soup, and nut crusted creamy almond fruit tart.

A lavish guide to planning, planting, and maintaining a Mediterranean garden, featuring an A-Z of more than 1,000 plants and 500 color photos. No image of the Mediterranean is complete without flowering climbers, colorful shrubs, or lush gardens. Now you can enjoy Mediterranean plants in your own garden. With sections on specific plants and general care, Garden Plants for Mediterranean Climates will help you to choose and grow the region's most beautiful plants. This book includes: an introduction to Mediterranean climate and points to consider when planning a garden; key features of a Mediterranean garden, including climbing plants, palms, pots, and pergolas; advice on watering and soil care; ideas on which plants to use where; an A to Z of more than 1,000 plants; and 500 gorgeous color photos.