How to grow your own food in the Pacific Northwest!
There is nothing more regionally specific than vegetable gardening. What to plant, when to plant it, and when to harvest are unique decisions based on climate, weather, and first and last frost.
The Timber Press Guide to Vegetable Gardening: Pacific Northwest is a growing guide that truly understands the unique eccentricities of the Northwest growing calendar. The month-by-month format makes it perfect for beginners and accessible to everyone-you can start gardening the month you pick it up. Starting in January? The guide will show you how to make a seed order, plan crop rotations and succession plantings, and plant a crop of microgreens. No time to start until July? You can start planting beets, carrots, chard, kale, parsnips, and spinach for an early fall harvest.
This must-have book is for gardeners in Oregon, Washington, southeastern Alaska, and British Columbia. This Timber Press Guide features an A–Z section that profiles the 50 vegetables, fruits, and herbs that grow best in the Pacific Northwest and provides basic care and maintenance for each. Lorene Edwards Forkner is the author of several gardening books, including Hortus Miscellaneous, Growing Your Own Vegetables, and Canning and Preserving Your Own Harvest. Her writing has appeared in several national and regional publications including Organic Gardening, MaryJane's Farm, Northwest Garden News, and Edible Seattle. Supported by a degree in fine art and years of experience owning and operating Fremont Gardens, a specialty retail nursery in Seattle, Washington, Lorene is a popular speaker, eager to weigh in on horticultural mysteries, offer direction for design conundrums, and teach DIY gardeners. Preface
Growing fruits and vegetables is a crazy good thing. I love it. From that chilly spring day when I bundle up and venture outside to briskly poke pea seeds into the wet soil to hot summer afternoons spent staking tomatoes, their sticky foliage enveloping me in a slightly bitter herbal aroma and staining my fingers olive-I find the entire process endlessly appealing. But all that pales next to the sheer pleasure of going into the backyard and harvesting crops in their prime. It's all about the food people!
Several years ago while driving along with NPR on the radio, I caught an interview with Greg Atkinson, Northwest chef extraordinaire, recounting a conversation he'd had with esteemed food writer Ruth Reichl. Her assessment of our region's many resources struck me so strongly I immediately pulled to the curb to write it down. To paraphrase Reichl: the Pacific Northwest has a climate and a geography that makes human beings feel very welcome on the planet.
Indeed, ours is a land of plenty, ripe with potential. Ample rainfall (ahem), good soil, and moderate temperatures grant a long and hospitable growing season. But we grow things a little differently in the PNW (defined in this book as Western Washington, Western Oregon, and Southern British Columbia) All gardening is local and especially so if you happen to reside in a region embraced by mountains, bordered by salt water, or run through by rivers. Cool-season crops (like kale, carrots, and cabbages) yield generously, demanding little from us aside from the care of the soil and attention. But if you want your harvest to also include tomatoes, eggplants, cucumbers, and peppers it pays to approach the growing season with a definite plan and a few simple tricks to maximize summer heat.
This book will take you through every month and the many eccentricities of the PNW gardening year. You'll find tips and techniques as well as suggestions of plants and specific varieties proven to excel in our region. No matter what you're looking to harvest-a windowsill crop of midwinter microgreens, fresh salads spring through fall, a bumper crop of tomatoes, or a few savory herbs to enliven your dinner-thi
