Square Foot Gardening

Is It Ripe? Even the most experienced homegrowers get a little apprehensive when harvest time comes around. You've spent so much time and energy and money to grow beautiful produce and now the moment of reckoning is at hand. Savvy shoppers looking for the best produce have similar concerns as they peruse the aisles. It is ripe and ready to be picked or bought. Or is it? Maybe that tomato will be bigger or sweeter on Tuesday than it was on Sunday. Or maybe it will soften too much or fall off the vine or split, or wrinkle up in the produce bin. You know that once you make the decision to pluck your fruit from the vine or buy there is no going back. So you want to make sure you are doing it at the right time. Square Foot Gardening: Growing Perfect Vegetables helps you prepare for those moments of decision-making in your garden and at the market. Inside, you will find hundreds of beautiful photos that show you what your cherished produce should look like when it is ready for picking and buying, along with tips and clues to help you interpret what your plants are trying to tell you. Whether you garden in a Square Foot box, plant a conventional garden, or stick to the grocery-store produce section, ripe is ripe. This visual guide is your tool for picking and buying produce with confidence.

A Square Foot Garden is more than just a perfect place to grow vegetablesit is an ideal environment for sharing and learning with kids of all ages. This book teaches you how. For two generations, Mel Bartholomews top-selling Square Foot Gardening books have made his revolutionary system for growing vegetables available to millions of people. In Square Foot Gardening with Kids, Mel reveals all of the tips, tricks, and fun projects he has used over the decades in one of his most cherished pursuits: teaching youngsters to build and grow their own kid-sized SFGs. Because of its simple principles and fast payoff, Square Foot Gardening is perfect for children. The easy geometry of the gridded box breaks the complex world of gardening into digestible bites that are easy to approach and understand for enthusiastic young learners, and the sequence of tasks required to grow plants from seeds is repeatable and reassuring. Whether you'rea grandparent, parent, teacher, coach, or any kind of role model to young people, Square Foot Gardening with Kids offers you the proven methods Mel has developed himself to entertain and amaze the kid in all of us. And, in the process, many valuable life lessons can be learnedsuch as the importance of following instructions and doing your chores, basic skills like counting and water conservation, and learning to appreciate the nature of food and why it is important to respect it. But more than anything, this clever, colorful new book captures the essence of growing edibles for anyone, regardless of age: it is fun and rewarding.

This edition of “All New Square Foot Gardening” brings the world's favorite gardening method to a whole new generation of gardeners.

Square Foot Gardening Answer Book is for all of the world's square foot gardeners. The book shows you ways to get more from your gardening efforts. Using proven techniques, appliances and approaches, this book will put more harvest on your table, with no additional garden beds. For more than 30 years Mel Bartholomew has been answering questions from Square Foot Gardeners, and this book presents the very best of that information. Real solutions to real problems, from the inventor of the Square Foot Gardening method.

Calculate the return on investment for your vegetable garden and get the most bang for your gardening bucks! Get the most return on investment from your garden by calculating which vegetables, fruits, and herbs give the highest payback. To make the selection process of what to grow easy, Mel Bartholomew--author of the best-selling Square Foot Gardening--has a new book to maximize your garden's ROI. High-Value Veggies is an easy-to-use reference book helping gardeners choose edibles that make the most financial and spatial sense. Explore the thought processes and math behind growing vegetables and herbs in order to craft the best plan for your produce. Maximizing your garden's yield is no simple task. Consider the tomato; most people think it's a safe bet for a high-yield return - but which variety? Heirloom tomatoes typically cost $5 or more a pound at farmers' markets. You can beat that price by growing Cherokee Purples from seed at a net cost of only 80 cents per pound. If you plant purchased seedlings, the cost will go up to about $1 a pound--and that's including the cost of water and fertilizer. High-Value Veggies makes this cost evaluation for each vegetable easy. Whether you're interested in growing tomatoes, pumpkins, cabbage, corn, or anything else, it's wise to consider the invisible dollar signs sown along the way. The relative ROI for each veggie in High-Value Veggies is calculated based on dollar value generated for each square foot planted. You don't need to be a math whiz to plan your next vegetable garden. Bartholomew has done the math for you, and he has cost-effective answers.