Product Description

Gardening is one of the most popular, least exclusive hobbies of all. Everybody can garden. Gardening is good for the body; an hour or two of daily yardwork provides just the right kind of light exercise we all need. Responsible gardening also does good things for the environment: materials get recycled, and empty lots become community gardens. Gardening also can boost your mental health; it delights the eye and fuels the soul with a connection to the earth.

Even if you've never repotted a plant, you have the heart of a gardener if you love the taste of garden tomatoes or close your eyes when you sniff a blossom. Gardening For Dummies, 2nd Edition, will help novices get off to a solid start and help seasoned gardeners broaden their breadth of knowledge.

This book is for you if you want to

• Create a garden for the first time
• Know how to mow your lawn the right way
• Find out which bugs are eating up your plants
• Determine when and how much to water your garden
• Attract birds, bees, and butterflies to your yard
• Grow your own herbs and vegetables

Find your way around the garden center by knowing which soil amendments to buy, which tools to use, which plants to choose, and how to use pest controls. You can turn that brown thumb into a green one by exploring these other topics:

• Creating a landscape design: Know what you have; define areas and flow
• Exploring annuals, perennials, bulbs, and vines: Choose healthy plants; water and feed for longevity
• Buying and planting roses: Understand classifications, pruning methods, and winterizing
• Putting in a new lawn: Buy seed; remove sod; explore mowers and trimmers
• Planting seedlings, trees, and shrubs: Transplant from cell packs and larger containers; get bare-root or balled-and-burlapped plants into the ground
• Pruning and propagating: Understand the purpose; look at tools, techniques
• Dealing with weeds and disease: Identify damage; control spread

Gardening For Dummies, 2nd Edition, offers a slew of lists, illustrations, and color photographs to guide you as you garden. No matter what size your planting area, from sunny windowsill to patio to yard, you can nurture and grow a glorious garden.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #567822 in Books
• Published on: 1999-02-01
• Original language: English
• Binding: Paperback
• 432 pages

From Amazon.com
Starting off with ultrabasics, like "how do I get my plants to live rather than die?" Gardening for Dummies is a terrific textbook for the novice gardener. Explanations are laid out simply, and all terms are defined as soon as they are first used--if you've never grown so much as a houseplant, this is the book to get you started. Emphasis is on choosing proper plants for your zone (it's OK--the color map will show you which zone you're in) that are fairly low-maintenance and high-success. Large sections on both seeds and bedding plants will give you lots of options and specific instructions for getting good results--seeds, especially, are treated as persnickety little critters that require some extra effort in exchange for low cost and large variety. The big downside to this book is its lack of pictures. There are lots of line drawings, but they tend to show particular stages of a process, rather than each step. Color photos are limited to two sections, and most of them are close-ups of various plants. While it's nice to see what the bark of a paperbark maple looks like, it doesn't particularly add to the value of the book. For folks who learn best with straightforward reading, the sections on mulching, pruning, soil preparation, and tool choices are all extremely helpful. With bullet-point lists, icons for highlighting categories like ecofriendly or time-saving, and simple tables and charts, how-to photos aren't essential, but if pictorial aids are what you need for learning, look elsewhere. --Jill Lightner

From Library Journal
This book has much to recommend it, in spite of the title. It is a simple, well-laid-out introduction to basic gardening by the editor-in-chief of National Gardening magazine and editors of the National Gardening Association. Its light tone is clearly aimed at novice gardeners. Snappy headings, the use of icons (as symbols are called nowadays), checklists, and diagrams make the book appealing for beginners. Gardeners with some experience might prefer a more substantial and better-illustrated introduction such as the one provided in Burpee Complete Gardener: A Comprehensive, Up-to-Date, Fully Illustrated Reference for Gardeners at All Levels (LJ 2/15/96). This volume is even more up to date, including good lists of mail-order suppliers and further readings and information about on-line resources. Recommended for public libraries.?Daniel Starr, Museum of Modern Art, New York
Copyright 1996 Reed Business Information, Inc.

Ingram
Organized into an easy-to-understand format, this book covers the basics of gardening, from the tools and gear needed and where to buy them to the kinds of plants, vegetables and flowers available to how to create, plant a full-fledged vegetable or flower garden. llustrations.

Customer Reviews

Just right...
I am a novice gardener who is trying to figure out how to maintain a well-landscaped property that I inherited. After the first couple of years of letting the place "rest on its laurels" (i.e., get by on its past grandeur and do nothing to maintain it except to water it every now and then, but otherwise neglecting it and letting it get weedy and rangy), I have finally tackled the project of educating myself about gardening and trying to restore some freshness and style to my garden. This book offers a very skillful overview of everything I need to know in order to take on this project. It gives an overview of pretty much every fundamental of gardening, giving enough explanation to help you understand the logic behind the "rules" of garden creation and maintenance, but without the kind of technical detail that would make it tedious or would glaze the eye of the beginner. I have found this an excellent "starter" book--gives the lay of the land, as it were, so that you can establish basic competence and understanding before you go onto more specialized knowledge. THANKS!

San Luis Obispo guy is a Snob and a Ja-k-ss.
Darn good Book for the intended audience: those new to gardening. I have a huge backyard and needed some simple, straightforward advice on gardening- this fine tome provided it. If you are a professional horticulturalist perhaps you don't need it, but for the other 99.9% of humanity, this book provides the essentials. If I were a physicist, I wouldn't bother reviewing books on elementary mathematics to illustrate my relative excellence. Sheesh!

I was one of those Dummies
I don't know how it happened but I thought I had not inherited the green thumb that my parents and Grandparents all had. That is until I found this wonderful guide to beginners gardening and it answered all the questions or told me simply how to find out the answers. I believe my local nursery was also happy that I took time out from trying to do it on my own and read the book.My mother said that she even learned a few new things while glancing through. It is also a good brush up guide before the spring thaw.