Vegetable Gardening (3 page)

Introduction

Everyone loves good food. Fresh, tasty, nutritious food is our birthright. And what better way to have great food than to grow it yourself? You don't have to be a farmer to do so either. Whether it be a plot of land in the yard that's tilled up to grow vegetables, a few vegetables planted amongst your flowers and shrubs, or containers loaded with attractive, edible choices, growing your own food is a satisfying and rewarding activity.

Vegetable gardening isn't rocket science either. Heck, people have been growing their own vegetables for thousands of years. Like any pursuit, you just need some direction, good advice, and inspiration to get started.
Vegetable Gardening For Dummies,
2nd Edition, is
for anyone who already grows vegetables or who has ever dreamed of growing some of their own food. All it takes is some resolve to get started. You're already halfway there just by picking up this book!

About This Book

In this book, you can find all the basic information you need to grow a vege-table garden. It's great to read the book from front cover to back cover, but each section and chapter is complete in itself. So feel free to browse the vegetables or topics that you want to focus on first. I've been vegetable gardening my whole life, so throughout the book I try to impart some practical wisdom that's easily accessible. I also include some special tips and tricks that I've learned over the years and information on hundreds of vegetable varieties, many of which are beautiful to look at as well as tasty to eat. Of course, none of this matters if you can't grow the vegetables successfully. That's why a large part of this book is devoted to building soil, starting seeds, maintaining the garden, controlling pests, growing through the seasons, and harvesting. I like to encourage happy, healthy, successful gardeners who are willing to experiment, make mistakes, and enjoy sharing their bounty with their friends, family, and neighbors.

Conventions Used in This Book

To help you navigate this book, I include the following conventions:

All references to temperature are in degrees Fahrenheit. As a reminder, I include the label with the first reference in each chapter. After that, I save space (and paper!) by leaving it out.

Variety names for each vegetable are indicated by single quotation marks. These are the common names you'll see when buying vegetable seeds and plants.

Italics
highlight new terms (which I define right away) and the Latin names of vegetables, which I use only when necessary.

Boldfaced
text highlights the keywords of bulleted lists and the action part of numbered steps.

Web addresses appear in
monofont
.

When this book was printed, some Web addresses may have needed to break across two lines of text. If that happened, rest assured that I haven't put in any extra characters to indicate the break. So, when using one of these Web addresses, just type in exactly what you see in this book, pretending as though the line break doesn't exist.

What You're Not to Read

I may think every word I've written on vegetable gardening in this book is intriguing, but I realize you have a life and may want to just get on with it. If you want only the basics, keep in mind that sidebars (in shaded gray boxes) and information tagged with the Technical Stuff icon aren't necessary to your basic understanding of vegetable growing and can be skipped, if you really have to.

Foolish Assumptions

Before I even put one word to the page, I was thinking about who may read this book. Here's what I assume about you, the reader:

You want to create a vegetable garden that's filled with healthy, nutritious, beautiful plants to eat.

You want to understand the basics of vegetable gardening and, for experienced gardeners, find new tricks to help you garden better.

You want to grow vegetables in an environmentally friendly manner.

You want to try vegetable gardening even if you only have a deck or patio to grow a few plants.

You want to share your love of gardening with friends, family members, and neighbors because you feel that if more people grew some of their own food, the world would be a better place.