The kids in Mrs. Connor's class are planting a garden! Everyone is excited to plant the vegetable seeds--except for Neil. He does not like vegetables. After all their hard work, will Neil find vegetables are not as yucky as he thought?

If you've ever wanted to grow your own food, but aren't quite sure how, this book is for you. It's designed for beginners, organized month-by-month, and gives specific advice for the Chicago growing region. Experienced food gardeners will benefit as well from the range of topics in this step-by-step guide.

Recommended by the American Community Gardening Association Community gardening enhances the fabric of towns and cities through social interactions and accessibility to fresh food, creating an enormously positive effect in the lives of everyone it touches. LaManda Joy, the founder of Chicago’s Peterson Garden Project and a board member of the American Community Gardening Association, has worked in the community gardening trenches for years and brings her knowledge to the wider world in Start a Community Food Garden. This hardworking guide covers every step of the process: fundraising, community organizing, site sourcing, garden design and planning, finding and managing volunteers, and managing the garden through all four seasons. A section dedicated to the basics of growing was designed to be used by community garden leaders as an educational tool for teaching new members how to successfully garden.

Adri promises to remember his parents' words of wisdom about how to live his life, such as "Find your own way. You don't have to follow the crowd" and "Make wishes on the stars in the nighttime sky."

Savor your best tomato harvest ever! Craig LeHoullier provides everything a tomato enthusiast needs to know about growing more than 200 varieties of tomatoes, from planting to cultivating and collecting seeds at the end of the season. He also offers a comprehensive guide to various pests and tomato diseases, explaining how best to avoid them. With beautiful photographs and intriguing tomato profiles throughout, Epic Tomatoes celebrates one of the most versatile and delicious crops in your garden.

Anna and her community gardening friends spring into action to help raise baby chicks in the third book in the Friendship Garden series. When Anna moved to Chicago, Kaya became her first real friend, so for her birthday Anna is determined to give Kaya the best present ever! The problem is, the thing Kaya wants more than anything is a pet, but her parents have a strict no-pets rule. Then Anna remembers that Mr. Hoffman’s third-grade class just hatched baby chicks! Anna decides that rather than sending the chicks back to the farm, she’ll convince her teacher to let the Friendship Garden raise them, so Kaya can have a pet of her own. But raising chicks is no easy task. It requires supplies (that cost money) and building things like a coop and a run. How is Anna supposed to get everything ready and keep it a surprise…especially when Anna and Kaya usually hang out every day? Kaya begins to suspect “fowl play” and assumes Anna is ditching her as a friend! Anna feels terrible and what was supposed to be the best birthday present ever quickly turns into the worst one. Will Anna be able to come up with a way to win her best friend back before the chicks get sent back to the farm for good?

A comprehensive manual to gardening in raised beds, with information on everything from construction, maximizing space and maintaining your garden. Raised bed gardening is the fastest-growing garden strategy today, and Raised Bed Revolution is the definitive guidebook to mastering this consistently proven and effective gardening method. Raised Bed Revolution provides you with information on size requirements for constructing raised beds, height suggestions, types of materials you can use, and creative tips for fitting the maximum garden capacity into small spaces—including vertical gardening. Enhanced with gorgeous photography, this book covers subjects such as growing-medium options, rooftop gardening, cost-effective gardening solutions, planting tips, watering strategies (automatic water drip systems and hand watering), and more. The process of creating and building raised beds is a cinch, too, thanks to the extensive gallery of design ideas and step-by-step projects. This gardening strategy is taking serious root. Why? Several reasons: · Raised beds allow gardeners to practice space efficiency as well as accessibility (the beds can be customized to be any height). · Raised beds permit gardeners to use their own soil, and they can be designed with wheels for easy portability if partial sunlight is a problem. · Water conservation is easier for gardeners who use raised beds. · Pest control is assisted because most garden pests can’t make the leap up into the raised bed. Find out more about why everyone is joining the raised bed revolution, roll up your sleeves and join in! “This is a great good for the experienced gardener as well as the novice.” —David Williams, Four Shires magazine