Growing Nutrient-Dense Vegetables: A Cool-Climate Guide (Paperback or Softback)

The more organic veggies you eat, the healthier you are... right? Steve Solomon found out the hard way that it's not so simple.

Growing truly nutrient-dense vegetables - the kind that keep your bones strong, energy soaring and neighbours asking: why do your carrots taste so sweet? - takes knowledge and intention, not to mention breaking a few golden rules of organic gardening.

This beloved guide is the result of 50 years of research and experimentation by master gardener Steve Solomon, written for cool-climate growers. From soil science to plant spacing, pest management to the fine art of hoe leaning, Steve will show you how to grow and harvest nutritional abundance year round.

• Learn why nutrient dense food matters, and why even local organic veggies probably aren't delivering the nutrition your body needs.
• Dig into smart gardening techniques to maximise yields while minimising time spent weeding, thinning and shovelling.
• Learn how to defeat, evade or avoid insect pests altogether without poisons.
• Discover the best vegetable varieties for cool-temperate conditions, and how to save and store seeds at home.
• Understand the ins and outs of soil remineralisation and how to make a Complete Organic Fertiliser tailored to cool-temperate soils.
• Start growing food year round without a polytunnel, including winter harvests and heat-lovers like melon and eggplant.
• Increase drought resilience with tried-and-tested methods of raising vegetables with little or no irrigation.
• Includes a comprehensive how-to-grow-it guide with over 60 vegetables which thrive in cool-climate gardens.

Written for the world's great cool-temperate growing regions - Cascadia and Tasmania - with advice and principles that apply equally to gardeners in New England, the UK and Ireland, New Zealand, and southern Australia.

Steve Solomon has been growing most of his own food for over fifty years - first in Oregon, where he founded Territorial Seed Company and wrote Growing Vegetables West of the Cascades, the classic food gardening manual for western Oregon and Washington. Then in Tasmania, moving to the island in 1998. This book sprang from that second chapter, with roughly half his growing life spent in each place, across two of the world's finest cool-temperate growing regions.To found Territorial Seed Company and conduct its extensive variety trials, Steve reached far beyond what organic gardeners typically need to know - coming to understand agriculture as spoken by qualified plant breeders and agronomists. His most recent book, The Intelligent Gardener, shows how to create balanced, fully remineralised soil using laboratory soil test results.Steve is also the founder of the Soil and Health Library (soilandhealth.org), a free online archive of rare and out-of-print books on organic farming, nutrition and self-sufficiency - a resource used by researchers and growers around the world.Steve believes that growing nutrient-dense food is one of the most powerful things a person can do for their own health - and that most people, with the right knowledge, can do it. This book is that knowledge.