Recommended Gardening Books

There are so many good gardening books available that it can be hard to know which one to pick. This brief list will help you save time and money by jumping straight to the great books if you want to start growing more food for your family.

Many people start with smaller gardens – containers, square foot gardening, etc. That’s exactly where I started. I had my first garden when I was five. I planted two 1′ square containers with radishes in one and a tomato in the other. That’s fantastic. But container/small gardens are not the focus of this list. This list is for people who are curious about growing calories to feed their families without breaking their back or taking out a farm loan.

The Resilient Gardener

If you want to learn about growing food for calories with fewer back aches, you need to read The Resilient Gardener. This unique book shares Deppe’s process for growing most of her calories and back-saving tips for planting and harvesting. It also focuses on gardening when you don’t have tons of time to spare but still need to grow food. I love her time-saving “good enough” methods and put them into practice this past growing season.

I will freely admit that I don’t personally agree with everything Deppe does and wouldn’t necessarily follow all of her methods precisely in my gardens. But that’s part of the joy of this book. She lives in Oregon and experiences a very different climate from what we have in either of our gardening locations. Things that can work well on the East Coast, such as deep mulch, don’t work in Oregon.

Deppe has lots of advice for saving your back while planting, tending your garden, and harvesting. This practical advice can help you garden, even if you have mobility concerns, without expensive raised beds. She also offers advice on how to help your seeds germinate better and how to properly store your crops so they last. (This is something I’m personally working on – I can grow tons of sweet potatoes, but I’m honestly not that great at curing them.)

Deppe, a Harvard-trained geneticist, also offers advice on how to breed your plants and create varieties you love.

Compost Everything

Are you intimidated by the number of composting rules? Add this, don’t add that, turn three times by the light of the moon.

This book is for you.

David Goodman, known as David the Good, invites you to compost everything. Yes, everything. This short book is a fun and easy read. I applied his melon pit strategy with great success in West Virginia last year. I got tons of cucumbers, enormous zucchini, and watermelons in poor, compact soil by creating melon pits. I’m planning even more of them for next year.

David the Good has a great survival gardening YouTube channel. He currently lives in Alabama and has transformed native sand (which he called “antithetical to life”) into abundant, calorie rich gardens that help feed his family of 12. Yes, 12.

(If you love rules and hate humor, this book probably isn’t for you.)

Mini-Farming

Mini-Farming: Self-Sufficiency on 1/4 Acre is one of the first books I read when I first started looking into gardening for food. Markham is in the Northeast, so he has a very different perspective from Deppe. He’s an engineer, so sometimes his explanations are a bit technical. If you prefer concrete ideas, plans, and formulae, you’ll appreciate this book.

The one thing I don’t love about it is that he seems fairly set in his methods and sure of their success/wide applicability. All gardens are different – it’s okay to experiment and it’s okay if you decide to do something differently from the way The Book says.

The Year-Round Vegetable Gardener

If you feel like your climate is too cold for gardening, of if you miss fresh veggies in the winter, you need The Year-Round Vegetable Gardener.

I love Niki Jabbour’s books. They are fun, fresh, and filled with photographs. She grows all year round…in Canada! This book is filled with practical, low-cost advice for growing vegetables all year long, even in the cold.

This book does not focus on calorie crops like squash, tubers, and corn, but it does help you provide nutritious homegrown goodness for your family all year long.

She also has a newer book called Growing Undercover that talks about growing under cover in both summer and winter. It has a delightfully modern feel and beautiful photos. It includes greenhouse advice, so that book may be a better choice for you if you’re ready to upgrade to a greenhouse.

And those are my top four gardening books for right now! I hope you find something that inspires you.