How good is your vegetable garden? Can you depend on it to keep your table supplied year-round? If you lived a hundred years ago, you'd have a good kitchen garden or you'd go without.

Now, you can plan a new garden or improve an old one and enjoy a bountiful, dependable, healthful home-grown harvest while preparing for even better results next year. This free downloadable book, filled with techniques and advice from yesterday's best gardeners, will show you how.

"A charming and excellent selection of advice...will make nostalgia as well as gardens grow"

The Asheville Citizen

Foreword

About the Book

Part 1 - How to Plan and Prepare Your Garden

From where to locate your vegetable garden, to how to draw a garden plan, to how to improve your soil, to how to build hot beds and cold frames, to how to select seeds, you'll learn all of the steps necessary to get a great start on this year's kitchen garden.

Part 2 - The Garden Vegetables

Have you ever tried Salsify or Jerusalem Artichoke? You might like them but you'll probably never know unless you grow them yourself. Although you might not find vegetables like Martynia and Skirret on your grocer's shelves, seeds are readily available so that you can start enjoying the amazing variety of vegetables that yesterday's kitchen gardeners grew. This section includes detailed descriptions of the vegetables with old-time engraved illustrations, and hints on growing, harvesting and cooking them.

Part 3 - How to Plant, Protect and Grow Your Garden

Get great advice on how to start seedlings, how to prepare garden beds, how to sow and cover your seeds and how to protect your plants from weeds, pests and the weather. You'll also learn the best methods of companion planting and planting for a succession of greens and vegetables throughout your growing season.

Part 4 - How to Harvest Your Vegetables and Prepare for Next Year

Learn how to save seed, how to winter root crops, how to blanch celery and other crops and how to prepare your soil for a great start next season. You've heard of crop rotation on farms, but it works for gardens too. Learn how to use it to improve your results.

Part 5 - Useful Rules, Tables and Hints

Do you know the best time for sowing and planting each type of vegetable in your area? Do you know exactly how far apart to plant them? How about how long they will take to mature? You'll learn that, how to predict the weather using nature's signs and much more.

Seed Sources

This online list of seed catalogs and websites presents sources for hard-to-find traditional vegetables, heirloom varieties and open-pollinated, non-hybrid vegetables.

"It all makes for fascinating reading"

American Library Association

How to Download Your Free Book

The 152 page Kitchen Garden Guide is free, and you can download it right now to read online or to print on your computer's printer. Just read any of the sample articles from the book using the link below. If you like what you see, you can download the whole book from the bottom of any of the sample article pages.

Sample Articles