Colin McCrate and Brad Halm
Skipstone
You see raised beds popping up in your neighborhood; squash and pumpkin overflowing from your neighbor’s yard, gardening is easy, right?
Yet, how many of us feel that starting a food garden feels daunting? Where will we find the time to water the plants, add compost, fertilize, not to mention, weed the garden? And what if we don’t have a space to garden? With so many challenges a beginner gardener could face, why does it seem like everyone is growing-it-yourself (GIY)?
Growing even some crops saves money on the grocery bill. When gardening is taken in a step-by-step process with the right guides (a book, DVD, or master gardener), it offers a rewarding experience beyond fresh lettuce for a daily salad. These days, urban gardening businesses have cropped up, along with (in western Washington), non-profits that send out volunteers to tear out lawns and start raised beds. Authors/ master gardeners Colin McCrate and Brad Halm founded an urban garden service in the Seattle area, and if you don’t live anywhere near Seattle, you can pick up their comprehensive backyard gardening guide, “Food Grown Right, In Your Backyard.”
I admit this book falls on the thick side so it took me two months to actually pick it up and read through the chapters. I felt jealous of people with garden space or decks with their apartments, since I have neither. While these gardening guys don’t take the sweat and toil out of gardening, they offer beaucoup advice, from their many years of gardening failures and successes. First, you choose the right spot to garden, then you design the garden based on what you can grow in your region and your yard (Washington State has micro-climates, sometimes in the same neighborhood), then you amend the soil, add compost, fertilizer, and add seeds or transplants.
But there’s more, much more. The authors give advice on how to protect plants from pests, weeds, and animals, how to set up an irrigation system since these plants are part fish, and you even get photographs of the pests so you can identify what’s destroying your plants. Since these guys use organic methods, you learn about natural remedies for pests, and fertilizers. If you’re a type-A personality, you’ll love this book’s diagrams, month-by-month tasks, informative sidebars, and pages full of photographs to keep you on track. I wonder when these gardeners had the spare time to write a comprehensive guide, but thankfully for budding gardeners, they did.
http://www.skipstonebooks.org