One of our main goals this year was to plant a fruit and vegetable garden. We were greatly affected by Michael Pollen’s writings and have incorporated organic and locally grown foods into our eating habits over the past few years. By putting in a potager, we hope to both improve the curb appeal of our house and grow local, organic, delicious food. Having no real experience with either of these tasks, we hired a landscape designer for the former, and relied on several works for the latter.

Food not lawns

Food Not Lawns promotes turning lawn turf (artificial, energy and resource demanding) into gardens (productive) and neighborhoods into communities. Weaving in theories and techniques derived from permaculture, kinship gardening, ecological design, and biodynamics, the book is a fun though radical read. We kept these concepts in mind when we put in rainbarrels and a porous pavers for our parking spaces. My favorite part of the book is a matrix of various habitats and functions types of plants fulfill.

square foot gardening

My parents have an older version of Square Foot Gardening, which I use as a valuable resource. We have incorporated raised beds into our master landscape plan to avoid lead issues and to better deal with the rocky New England soil. We’re also using Mel’s mix of vermiculite, compost and peat moss to fill our beds and plan on planting our seeds in neat little squares.

I prefer the more serious understated tone of the first edition. Bartholomew’s newer edition often reads like an infomercial (which sounds like there are a lot of exclamation points!!!)

60 minute garden

Last but not least is Jeff Ball’s 60 Minute Garden, also from my parents’ collection. Ball describes a system of raised beds (sans square grid) that is modular and can accomodate trellises, tunnels and netting. The engineer in Tig likes these features.