A List of Books About Growing Vegetables (and fruit and berries)
This is a list of books for Liberals. The bad guys in the food chain – the giant chemical companies, the giant agricultural/processed food companies, factory farmers of meat, poultry, etc. (CAFOs), the giant food store chains and so on – all tend to be far right wing.
From California to Kansas to Pennsylvania a lot of farmers used to be Liberals (and sometimes Socialists) and still should be, but chemical and agricultural monsters grew, took over their farms, distribution, markets, money and, most important, all the media in their area, and many now tend to be what I call Stockholm Syndrome Conservatives.
The result is vegetables and fruit that is tasteless (processed food would be, too, if it wasn’t for added salt, fats or sugar), rapidly getting more expensive and often unhealthy, with the profits going into the hands of bad people.
This list is for ...
new and experienced backyard gardeners, patio or balcony gardeners, and even market gardeners (roadside stand and CSA), who are much more likely to be Liberals. This is not always the case, and I’ve met organic backyard gardeners who are Conservatives, proving that you can do good in one area and still be grossly gullible in another area.
Starting your first garden can be a bit daunting. Start small and keep going. Pick out a few of the books below and learn how to do it.
Even very experienced gardeners have failures, so don’t let that bother you. It quickly gets to be fun and very, very rewarding.
What’s In The List........
There are books in the list for beginning vegetable gardeners, books that broadly cover the subject, moderately advanced books on narrow sub-topics, and books on the periphery of the subject.
I haven’t gotten into fruit, berries and nuts yet, so there are only a few books specifically on those subjects, though many of the big books cover them as well as veggies. There are thousands of web sites with valuable information (and a lot with inaccurate information), but that would be another list.
My book buying bias:
I’m interested in food that is nutritious and delicious. I don’t have much interest in how it looks in the garden as long as it looks healthy.
If it’s easy to grow (growing your own seems to be the only way to get both nutritious and delicious) and not too susceptible to bugs and diseases those are pluses, of course, but not strictly required. Flowers and seed blooms are fine to look at, but I think the main value of flowers is in attracting pollinators for your food crops, and seeds are for saving for next year.
I’m also interested in fresh food year-around, so you’ll find a few books cover cool/cold weather growing/harvesting in a greenhouse (unheated, heated, and movable), hoop house, high tunnel, cold frame and under a cloche or row cover.
To reflect the modern movement toward organic vegetable gardening, many old (the last 20 yrs) books worth reprinting have been rewritten for growing “100% organic!” The switch from backyard chemical gardening to organic gardening has been stunningly abrupt and near total in books, magazines, many gardens, mini-farms, and lately some large farms. Raw beginners might still buy seeds at Walmart and spray their first gardens with Miracle Grow and Round-Up, but even they’re converting.
Books over fifteen years old have little nutrition info past basic vitamin and health content (taste, appearance and vigor seemed to be the almost exclusive concerns), though we’ve been eating food for ... well, longer than that. That’s changing – so rapidly it’s hard to keep up.
When learning about other subjects I often buy old books, but gardening isn’t like that; I want the latest science, so that’s mostly what you’ll find in the list.
It’s amazing that in many cases the scientific information is sparse, and the research is unclear. There is still a lot of disagreement among experts about things as basic as compost, mulch, plant spacing, compost tea, watering, digging, etc. I’ve tried to buy the most authoritative books from all viewpoints.
There are approximately 932 billion-gazillion vegetarian or vegan cookbooks. I only mention a few unique ones in order to point out that many are readily available. Many of the gardening books listed also contain a few recipes.
(And by the way, It’s a trend in modern vegetable gardening books to tell where and when each vegetable is thought to have originated – some are 10,000 years old, and other familiar veggies have been around less than 100 years. Another trend is to list the number of named varieties of each vegetable or fruit - i.e., Fuji, McIntosh, Cortland, Honey Crisp, Red Delicious, etc. are named varieties of apples. There are over 11,000 named varieties of apples, but a few fruits, vegetables and herbs have only two or three known varieties.)
The list is short, so the books are NOT in any order.
Three years ago I published a DKos diary of a list of political books http://www.dailykos.com/... which some still find useful. This list is in the same spirit.
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