Vegetable Gardening for Beginners: A Simple Guide to Growing Vegetables at Home

As the title says, this book is a very useful and practical (yet short and easy to follow!) guide to starting, maintaining, and harvesting your garden. I'm surprised how much the author was able to pack into this book to make it as comprehensive as possible, and yet it reads some quickly and is thankfully so easy to follow.The second part of the book gives very specific instructions to follow for many of the most popular vegetables one might plant in their garden. Very, very well-written book

When the pandemic of 2020 hit I reized it may be advantageous to do some gardening. Little did I realize there is more to it than sowing some seeds and resting on my laurels waiting for the harvest. In fact, I would say gardening is downright difficult. Fortunately, this book was a Godsend! It included directions for everything I hoped to plant. There was quite an initial cost to buying all the necessary basics but without this book I would have been lost. "Vegetable Gardening for Beginners" is a must have. 🙂

So many veggies and good tips learned so much

I've only got a few lessons in, but it is pretty basic. Very easy and basic guide to beginner gardening. It's been very useful in my class, teaching basic gardening concepts to first time gardeners.

I picked up some pointers in this book.I guess I'm not exactly a beginner at this point since I've been taking care of someone else's established garden for about 9 years.So I have found out about some of this stuff over those years by talking to other people and on the internet.Some of the information in this book doesn't apply for me since I don't start plants indoors and I don't used raised beds. So I didn't read all the pages in this book.However we do usually get tomatoes that were started by somebody else in a greenhouse or maybe some from places like Home Depot.Some things I've learned and can recommend are:Get your soil tested by Cooperative Extension or someplace like that. With fertilizers more is not always better. My cucumber plants keep giving me a lot of foliage and flowers but not very many cucumbers. There's too much organic material (manure) in my soil and the pH level of the soil is 7.6 which is too alkaline. My soil report says all it needs is small amounts of nitrogen fertilizer right now and only at the beginning of the season.I have saved myself many hours of backbreaking work by covering the empty rows between the plants with a weed barrier fabric. These fabrics allow air and water to get into the soil but it blocks the sunlight to kill the weeds. This book mentions using mulch for the same purpose which I may do for the spaces between the individual tomato plants.Most cucumber varieties are designed by Nature to climb like a vine. I built some simple circular cages that I place around my cucumber mounds. I use the thin fencing wire with the square openings in it. I tie them into a circle with zip ties. You can make four cuts into the wire where four of the squares intersect. Remove the cross shaped cutout and bend the cut wires back to create a place to reach your hand into the cage. Wear gloves and safety glasses when working with this type or wire. The cut off ends of the wire are sharp and they can swing back and hit someone in the eye. Cut off or bend back the cut off wires at both ends of the cage also.Books like this talk about organic gardening methods which can apparently take a few years to work well. I use the deadly SEVIN pesticide when my plants first start growing and I even spray the SEVIN into the soil within the rows. But then I switch over to organic pesticides when the plants start getting flowers so as not to harm the bees.I may switch over to soaker hoses this year for watering. Soaker hoses don't get the leaves of the plants wet. Wet leaves can cause fungal diseases like powdery mildew on cucumbers and zucchini.There are traps that come with bait that are specifically designed to catch Japanese beetles which appear in large numbers at certain times of the year.Here's a bee safe product to kill the dreaded squash borer moth which destroys zucchini plants:Safer Brand 5163 Caterpillar Killer II Concentrate, 16 Oz

Bought this for our ten year old grandson who is taking great interest in growing veggies! It's not a "children's" book, but definitely perfect for him and for any adult!

The weather hasn't cooperated for planting ... so I keep looking at this great resource and am planning, planning, plannings. The hope the rabbits stay away.

It’s really wonderful EXCEPT it doesn’t show the zone for any of the vegetables in the book. It says zone: but does not have the zone for any of them which, yea, I could go look it up but it’s just dumb and annoying. Why even put “zone” in there. Almost feels like a trick. But good info for sure. Just that one little thing really irked me for some reason.

Lots of great information packed into this book.

Really interesting little book, well written and nice illustrations too. A good introduction to vegetable growing, without the use of harsh chemicals or elaborate equipment.

Really a good book for beginners to build up the essential basics. I recommend this book.

As a general guide to vegetable growing it is a solid platform to start from.

Very helpful and informative. Let’s me know when I can plant certain vegetables.