The vegetable gardening book Your complete guide to growing an edible organic garden from seed to harvest

Lamp'l (Green Gardener's Guide), host of the TV show Growing a Greener World, offers a master class on growing veggies with these savvy tips for beginners. He walks readers through the basics--choosing a site (go for the "sunniest spot you have to work with"), drawing out a master plan, maintaining soil health--and digs into plant nutrients, compost, and how to deal with pests and diseases (a layer of mulch, for example, halts the spread of soilborne pathogens). Elsewhere, Lamp'l offers a recipe for raised bed soil, explains how to start seeds, and describes the benefits of using a planting board--made from a scrap piece of lumber, it's "the handiest tool you'll ever want to have in the garden"--to space out seeds. Especially helpful is the encyclopedic growing guide to 40 vegetable varieties, with notes on planting, care, harvesting, and storage for each. Lamp'l covers a lot of ground, his advice is practical, and his tone genial: "A backyard vegetable garden may be a simple thing, but it can have a genuinely profound impact." Gardeners ready to grow their own produce will find this worth returning to. (Sept.)