Seed Library

How home gardeners with limited time and garden space can reclaim the joy and independence of seed saving

Beginning Seed Saving for the Home Gardener explores how seed saving is not only easier than we think, but that it is essential for vibrant, independent, and bountiful gardens.

Many home gardeners refuse to eat a grocery store tomato, but routinely obtain seeds commercially, sometimes from thousands of miles away. And while seed saving can appear mysterious and intimidating, even home gardeners with limited time and space can experience the joy and independence it brings, freeing them from industry and the annual commercial seed order.

Coverage includes:

• Why seed saving belongs in the home garden
• Principles of vegetative and sexual reproduction
• Easy inbreeding plants, including legumes, lettuce, tomatoes, and peppers
• Plants with a few more challenges, including squash, spinach, onions, and parsley
• Brief discussion of more difficult crops, including corn, carrots, and cabbage.

Written by a home seed saver for the home seed saver, Beginning Seed Saving for the Home Gardener is a comprehensive guide for those who want to reclaim our seed heritage, highlighting the importance of saving seeds for you, your neighbors, and most importantly, subsequent generations.

Stop wasting money on store-bought seeds and create a garden you can truly call your own. With easy-to-follow instructions for lettuce, beans, corn, onions, and much more, you'll soon be creating your very own heirloom plants that will keep your garden growing strong and your family eating well. Learn how to save only the best from all your vegetables and create a wealth of seeds your family can use for years to come.

Seed to Seed is a complete seed-saving guide that describes specific techniques for saving the seeds of 160 different vegetables. This book contains detailed information about each vegetable, including its botanical classification, flower structure and means of pollination, required population size, isolation distance, techniques for caging or hand-pollination, and also the proper methods for harvesting, drying, cleaning, and storing the seeds.

Seed to Seed is widely acknowledged as the best guide available for home gardeners to learn effective ways to produce and store seeds on a small scale. The author has grown seed crops of every vegetable featured in the book, and has thoroughly researched and tested all of the techniques she recommends for the home garden.

This newly updated and greatly expanded Second Edition includes additional information about how to start each vegetable from seed, which has turned the book into a complete growing guide. Local knowledge about seed starting techniques for each vegetable has been shared by expert gardeners from seven regions of the United States-Northeast, Mid-Atlantic, Southeast/Gulf Coast, Midwest, Southwest, Central West Coast, and Northwest.

Planting for Pollinators is an easy-to-use gardening guide to help you encourage different types of insect pollinators into your garden.

Insect pollinators not only bring joy to our gardens, they also provide an essential service for our planet. Without bees, flies, hoverflies, butterflies, moths and beetles, some of our favourite foods, flowers and plants would cease to exist.

Whether you have a large garden, an urban balcony or just a window box, planting to encourage pollinators is a fantastic and surprisingly easy first step in creating a wildlife-friendly space. Planting for Pollinators features a wide range of plants, with guidance on the best ways to nurture lawns and verges, pollinator predation and tips on watching and photographing wildlife. Beautifully illustrated throughout with images from award-winning wildlife photographer Heather Angel, this essential guide will show you how plants communicate with insects, and why it's so important to protect our pollinators.

Organised by season and featuring more than 100 plant species – including bulbs, annuals, perennials, shrubs and climbers – this practical guide will help you to discover the short- and long-term benefits of having a variety of pollinators visit your garden.

If you’re horticulturally challenged, then this book’s for you. Learn to be the best plant parent you can be with How to Keep Your Plants Alive, featuring over 50 houseplants that are exceptionally hard to kill.

We’ve all been there: your beloved plant is looking a little too droopy, but are you supposed to water it or have you overwatered it? Or maybe you meant to take care of it, but life got away from you and suddenly it’s been a week without any plant nurturement. When your houseplants continue to suffer no matter how much TLC you show them, it’s time to up your game with this beginner’s guide to plant parenting. With houseplant profiles detailing individual plant needs and vital tips, you’ll have all the knowledge you need to successfully care for your greenery. If you’d like to strike “Plant Assassin” from your résumé, then read on.

Inside you’ll find:
- 50+ low-maintenance houseplants with care and keeping instructions
- Tips for selecting the best houseplants for your home
- Warning signs for spotting a dying plant, plus the best rescue plans
- Beautiful illustrations of succulents, air plants, cacti, and more

Don’t have a green thumb? No problem. With How to Keep Your Plants Alive, your indoor plants will be flourishing in no time at all, no matter what you throw at them.

Design a garden for the future—because what we grow matters.

"Matt Rees-Warren explains why every square inch of Earth, including our gardens, has ecological significance... Excellent, timely, essential!" —Douglas W. Tallamy, author of Nature’s Best Hope

Transform your garden into a self-sustaining haven for nature and wildlife. Ecological garden designer Matt Rees-Warren shares inspirational design ideas and practical projects to help you create a garden that is both beautiful today and sustainable tomorrow.

The Ecological Gardener will give you the tools to create an abundant, healthy garden from the soil up—a garden that welcomes birds and bees and allows native planting and wild flowers to flourish, with minimal carbon impact or need for fresh water. This book can guide both novice and experienced gardeners alike in their journey to a more ecological approach, and is full of practical projects and information, including:                     

Finding the right design for your space

Creating a wildflower meadow

Building rainwater catchments and other tips for water conservation

Making compost from kitchen waste, leaf mold, compost tea and more

Creating a space for wildlife such as hedgehogs, bees and other pollinators

Finding beauty in your garden during the winter

Matt will show you how to re-imagine how you garden, working with nature instead of controlling it, to create a space that promotes both wildlife and beauty. 

"An intimate, lesson-filled story of what happens when one of America’s best-known garden writers transplants herself, rooting in to a deeper partnership with nature than ever before." —Margaret Roach, author of A Way to Garden

When Page Dickey moved away from her celebrated garden at Duck Hill, she left a landscape she had spent thirty-four years making, nurturing, and loving. She found her next chapter in northwestern Connecticut, on 17 acres of rolling fields and woodland around a former Methodist church. In Uprooted, Dickey reflects on this transition and on what it means for a gardener to start again.

In these pages, fol­low her journey: searching for a new home, discovering the ins and outs of the landscape surround­ing her new garden, establishing the garden, and learning how to be a different kind of gardener. The sur­prise at the heart of the book? Although Dickey was sad to leave her beloved garden, she found herself thrilled to begin a new garden in a wilder, larger landscape.
 
Written with humor and elegance, Uprooted is an endearing story about transitions—and the satisfaction and joy that new horizons can bring.
 

This book aims to cover the most commonly asked questions by new plant owners and will help people who want to have more greenery in their lives but don't know where to start. It will advise on the best plant for a variety of home conditions so that everyone should be able to find plants that suit their space.

Having and maintaining an indoor garden can be possible for anyone, the book will give you step-by-step guides to creating and designing your own terrariums, cacti & succulent gardens and even kokedamas (Japanese for Moss Ball). It includes descriptions of the equipment needed, and how to find this inexpensively so that the hobby is accessible to everyone. Readers of the book will discover a newfound joy of plants and nature as well as learn a brand-new skill.

The book goes into detail about what may be causing damage to a plant, and how to look after plants so that they last. It also focuses on how plants can improve physical and mental health, to encourage readers to fill their homes with greenery for practical and aesthetic reasons.

The innate human need to be around nature is called Biophilia, and this book will tap into that need without over complicating things, with the focus on low maintenance, good-looking greenery.

New England has a rich gardening heritage. In The Garden Tourist's New England, garden designer Jana Milbocker takes you on a fantastic tour of 140 gardens and nurseries and provides all the information you need to make the most of your visit. From the breathtaking flower gardens of Mount Desert Island in Maine, to Colonial Revival gardens in Connecticut and New Hampshire, topiary gardens in Rhode Island, and botanical gardens in Vermont and Massachusetts, there is something for every gardener to enjoy in a tour of the region. A companion to the Northeast edition of The Garden Tourist, this guide features notable private gardens, specialty nurseries, and off-the-beaten-path destinations for the passionate gardener.?Preview 140 outstanding gardens including 34 specialty nurseries in 264 pages richly illustrated with 700 photos.?Enjoy the best botanical, historic, and private gardens in Vermont, New Hampshire, Maine, Massachusetts, Rhode Island, and Connecticut.?Plan your trips with regional maps, contact information, sample itineraries, and garden amenities.

Bring your garden to life—and life to your garden
 
Do you want a garden that makes a real difference? Choose plants native to our Northeast region. The rewards will benefit you, your yard, and the environment—from reducing maintenance tasks to attracting earth-friendly pollinators such as native birds, butterflies, and bees. Native plant expert Uli Lorimer of the Native Plant Trust makes adding these superstar plants easier than ever before, with proven advice that every home gardener can follow. This incomparable sourcebook includes 235 recommended native trees, shrubs, vines, ferns, wildflowers, grasses, sedges, and annuals. It’s everything you need to know to create a beautiful and beneficial garden.
 
This must-have handbook is for gardeners in Connecticut, Delaware, Maine, Massachusetts, New Hampshire, New Jersey, New York, eastern Ohio, Pennsylvania, Rhode Island, and Vermont.

One of Garden & Gun’s Favorite Books of 2020

A distinguished psychiatrist and avid gardener offers an inspiring and consoling work about the healing effects of gardening and its ability to decrease stress and foster mental well-being in our everyday lives.

The garden is often seen as a refuge, a place to forget worldly cares, removed from the “real” life that lies outside. But when we get our hands in the earth we connect with the cycle of life in nature through which destruction and decay are followed by regrowth and renewal. Gardening is one of the quintessential nurturing activities and yet we understand so little about it. The Well-Gardened Mind provides a new perspective on the power of gardening to change people’s lives. Here, Sue Stuart-Smith investigates the many ways in which mind and garden can interact and explores how the process of tending a plot can be a way of sustaining an innermost self.

Stuart-Smith’s own love of gardening developed as she studied to become a psychoanalytic psychotherapist. From her grandfather’s return from World War I to Freud’s obsession with flowers to case histories with her own patients to progressive gardening programs in such places as Rikers Island prison in New York City, Stuart-Smith weaves thoughtful yet powerful examples to argue that gardening is much more important to our cognition than we think. Recent research is showing how green nature has direct antidepressant effects on humans. Essential and pragmatic, The Well-Gardened Mind is a book for gardeners and the perfect read for people seeking healthier mental lives.

Increasingly unpredictable weather patterns and pest infestations are challenging today’s vegetable gardeners. But best-selling author Niki Jabbour has a solution: Growing Under Cover. In this in-depth guide, Jabbour shows how to use small solutions like cloches, row covers, shade cloth, cold frames, and hoophouses, as well as larger protective structures like greenhouses and polytunnels, to create controlled growing spaces for vegetables to thrive. Photographed in her own super-productive garden, Jabbour highlights the many benefits of using protective covers to plant earlier, eliminate pests, and harvest a healthier, heartier bounty year round. With enthusiasm, inventive techniques, and proven, firsthand knowledge, this book provides invaluable advice from a popular and widely respected gardening authority.

Just how productive can one small vegetable garden be? More productive than one might think! Colin McCrate and Brad Halm, former CSA growers and current owners of the Seattle Urban Farm Company, help readers boost their garden productivity by teaching them how to plan carefully, maximize production in every bed, get the most out of every plant, scale up systems to maximize efficiency, and expand the harvest season with succession planting, intercropping, and season extension.
 
Along with chapters devoted to the Five Tenets of a Productive Gardener (Plan Well to Get the Most from Your Garden; Maximize Production in Each Bed; Get the Most out of Every Plant; Scale up Tools and Systems for Efficiency; and Expand and Extend the Harvest), the book contains interactive tools that home gardeners can use to assist them in determining how, when, and what to plant; evaluating crop health; and planning and storing the harvest. For today’s vegetable gardeners who want to grow as much of their own food as possible, this guide offers expert advice and strategies for cultivating a garden that supplies what they need.

50 DIY crafts, cooking, decorating, and gardening projects from the experts at the Smithsonian Institution

The Smithsonian Institution presents a uniquely curated collection of lively how-to projects and historical narratives of four realms of American domestic arts: cooking, crafts, decorating, and gardening. Perfect for hobbyists interested in the historical context of what they create for their homes, this beautifully illustrated book contains fifty DIY projects--from a uniquely American quilt pattern to on-trend crafts like terrarium making and pickling--that all offer satisfying ways to bring history and culture to life. For those craving more, features provide rare insights from Smithsonian experts on prominent figures, events, and trends. Readers can learn about influential Americans who've had an impact on each realm; look at visual timelines of significant events that pushed development forward; or stay in the present and see how American arts in contemporary life is being redefined, all while enjoying satisfying and unique projects.

A guide to creating and growing a backyard garden simply and sustainably--from planning to planting to harvest, with profiles of essential vegetables and herbs, ecological tips, and fun and creative projects



Growing food in your backyard (or even on a porch or windowsill!) is one of the simplest and most rewarding ways to nourish yourself, be self-sufficient, and connect with nature in a hands-on way. Here sustainability expert Julia Watkins shares everything you need to know to grow your own vegetables, fruits, and herbs (as well as wildflowers and other beneficial companion plants). The book covers all the nuts and bolts of creating and caring for your garden--planning, building, planting, tending, and harvesting--followed by a deeper dive into the plants themselves: demystifying annuals vs. perennials, cold-weather vs. warm-weather veggies, and profiles of favorite crops. Throughout, Julia offers tips for creating an eco-friendly and sustainable garden (such as vermicomposting, no-till "lasagna" gardening, and attracting pollinators), plus some fun and unexpected hands-on projects like how to build a bean teepee, make wildflower seed paper, and enjoy refreshing herbal lemonade ice pops.