How This Book Is Organized

The Complete Idiot’s Guide to Vegetable Gardening is divided into six parts. Each addresses a different aspect of growing vegetables and herbs and offers a few fruits in the home garden.

Part 1, “Why Grow Food When the Grocery Store Is So Close By?” takes a broad look at why, when grocery stores are so convenient, you’d want to grow your own vegetables. Of course, it all has to do with things like health—both your own and the planet’s—quality, and freshness, not to mention saving money, having a steady or at least seasonal source of hard-to-find foods, the fun of it, and the sense of accomplishment it brings. This part of the book also helps you decide what kind of garden you want to make, how big it will be, what it will look like, and even how much help you might need. We include sections on gardening with kids, growing organically, and making the most of small spaces.

In Part 2, “Essential Planning,” we get into some of the important basics of gardening, including an overview of what tools you most likely need to have, where to put your garden, how to do the proper planning on graph paper, translating your plan to a plot, and exploring some design schemes that may appeal to you. We also look at some of the smaller, but no less important, details like fencing options, paths and walkways, environmental factors, and architectural elements of your property.

Part 3, “Getting Ready to Plant,” gets down and dirty. It’s in these five chapters that you learn all about the science of gardening, including the importance of soil and the biology of plants. It’s fairly complicated stuff, but we break it down into easy-to-understand tidbits. Part 3 also takes you step by step through creating garden beds where plants will thrive and the process for sowing seeds both indoors and directly in the garden, as well as how to transplant tender new seedlings.

Part 4, “What to Plant,” is essentially a catalog of dozens of garden edibles and chock full of what you need to know to grow them. We cover everything from the basics like lettuce, tomatoes, corn, and beans to peppers, peas, eggplants, leafy greens, and the Brassica family (cabbages and their relatives). Farther into Part 4, you “get back to your roots” with information on root vegetables like turnips and parsnips and others like onions and potatoes whose edible parts also grow underground. We also include a chapter on herbs, another on some vegetables that may be less familiar, along with a few exotic veggies, and one on fruits typically grown along with vegetables.

Part 5, “Keeping It Growing,” is all about maintenance: how and why to weed; the essentials of irrigation, pruning, trimming, and deadheading; and troubleshooting.

Finally, in Part 6, “Reaping the Rewards,” you learn how and when to harvest the edibles you’ve grown and then what to do with them when they’re in your harvest basket. Canning; freezing; drying; and making jams, jellies, and pickles are some of the options you learn about. There’s also a section on sharing the bounty of your garden. Part 6 ends with a look at the world of seed saving, taking care of tools, keeping records, and planning the next gardening season.

At the end of the book you’ll find two appendixes of further resources so you can continue learning about gardening and growing your own food.

Some Other Important Stuff

With the hope of making this book easy to read and conveniently organized for finding what you need to grow beautiful vegetables, we’ve added sidebars throughout that provide additional information:

Food for Thought

Find advice, tips, anecdotes, and even a little garden lore in these boxes.

Compost Pile

Don’t skip these boxes.

They offer gentle warnings and advice on what not to do.

Garden Guru Says

In these boxes, find bits and pieces of horticultural information, techniques, and cultural practice that will, we hope, improve your expertise in the garden.

Prof. Price’s Pointers

In these boxes, Prof. Price explains scientific, technical, historic, or academic aspects of gardening and gives definitions of some new terms.