Sustainable Gardening

Practical answers from nature-loving garden gurus

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Growing Food

Now I'm a big fan of kitchen gardening and the people who do it, especially when they cook up the harvest and serve it to me! But honestly, I've only grown a few tomatoes and lettuce and am thoroughly unqualified to write on the subject. SO, I called on my friends and fellow gardenwriters who ARE qualified for their recommendations, and that's primarily what you see here.

Articles/Videos on this Site

• Pint-Sized Planters Yield Bumper Crops by Kathy LaLiberte of Gardeners Supply Company. The top gardener at my favorite hippie Vermont gardener company has inspired me, and I'm trying these planters on my sunny deck this season — reviews coming soon!
• Create a Neat Edible Front-Yard Knot Garden by contributor Shirley Bovshow in Los Angeles.
• Patti Moreno's Garden. In video and text, Garden Girl Patti Moreno inspires us with her "urban sustainable garden" in the Roxbury neighborhood of Boston.
• Vegetables that MUST be Organic by Stuart Robinson
• Mission: Dining off the grid is about a family that's awfully close to total food self-sufficiency.

Great Kitchen Garden and Food Info on Line

• KitchenGardeners.org is a very cool blog.
• Eat-It.com is a good site about edible landscaping
• The 100 Mile Diet makes the case for local.
• So does the blog Eat Local Challenge,
• Epicurean.com is a favorite of my foodie friends.
• The Slow Cook is a great food and edible-gardening blog by fellow DC Urban Gardener Ed Bruske. His food blogroll is comprehensive.
• Ed Bruske's multi-part video about How to Grow Vegetables.
• Chow is a big, fun site about food and drink.
• Vegetable Gardens is a great British site on the subject.
• Mas Du Diable is a cool blog (in English) about growing edibles in Southern France.
• Can I Eat It is another fun site about growing food — in the UK.
• Review of Vegetables from Amaranth to Zucchini by Elizabeth Schneider.

Good Extension Service Info

• Cornell is doing terrific research (which you can contribute to) with its "Vegetable Varieties for Gardeners"
• Minnesota Extension Service has a good introduction to planting a vegetable garden.
• Ohio State's VegNet is chockful of great info.
• U. Connecticut

For Community Gardeners and Wannabees

• Community Garden is the site of the American Community Gardening Association, and a good one.

Books about Kitchen Gardening

• The New Organic Grower Coleman and others
• Four-Season Harvest by Coleman and Damrosch
• Common Ground: Four Seasons on an Organic Farm by Chaskey
• Edible Garden by White
• Animal, Vegetable, Miracle: A Year of Food LIfe by Barbara Kingsolver (one of my favorite writers of fiction or nonfiction)
• The Edible Rainbow Garden by Creasy
• The Complete Book of Edible Landscaping by Creasy
• Blithe Tomato by Madison is all about farmer's markets
• The $64 Tomato by Alexander
• The Kitchen Garden by Thompson
• The Vegetable Gardener's Bible by Smith
• Fields of Plenty by Ableman
• Heirloom Vegetable Gardening by William Weaver
• Vegetables from Amaranth to Zucchini by Elizabeth Schneider
• Garden Primer by Barbara Damrosch

Books about Food

• What to Eat by Marion Nestle
• Food Politics by Marion Nestle
• Safe Food by Marion Nestle
• Omnivore's Dilemma by Michael Pollan is one of my favorites (but I love everything he writes)
• In Defense of Food by Michael Pollan
• Fast Food Nation by Schlosser may change your fast-food eating forever. A favorite of my book group.
• Food Fight by Brownell covers the American obesity epidemic, while making it kinda funny.
• Plenty: One Man, One Woman, and a Raucous Year of Eating Locally by Smith and MacKinnon
• The 100-Mile Diet by Smith and MacKinnon
• So Easy to Preserve is an Extension Service publication that people actually recommend!
• On Food and Cooking: The Science and Lore of the Kitchen (the foodie bible) Harold McGee, 2004
• The Kitchen Garden Cookbook by Thompson
• The Fatal Harvest Reader by Andrew Kimbrell

Sources

• Edible Landscaping

Photos by Christa Carignan