Raised Bed Gardening: A Complete Beginner's Guide: Grow Everything from Herbs to Tomatoes in Your Own Custom Raised Beds (New Shoe Press)

Are you eager to step into vegetable gardening but don’t know where to start? With this guide to the nearly foolproof raised-bed technique, you’ll be growing your own organic food in no time.

Growing your own food is a satisfying experience as well as an investment that will pay you and the community back in a myriad of ways, including benefits for the earth, greater food security, and better health. But where do you start and what is the best way to approach creating a garden and growing food?

The raised bed gardening technique, used by successful food gardeners for centuries, is simple and can be done pretty much anywhere. Building beds allows you to bring in the right materials, which might not exist in your own environment, and grow your own food year-round, if you so choose—no matter where you live. So whether your outdoor space is big or small, raised beds are the best choice for your first vegetable garden. Some water and a little love and attention is all you need be successful. 

In Raised Bed Gardening: A Complete Beginner’s Guide, you will learn everything you need to know to prepare and execute your garden plan and grow and harvest your produce. The book includes: 
 

• Plans for building quick-and-simple beds that you can make yourself with a few common tools
• Details on how to build the right soil mix to fill your beds 
• List of the easiest plants to grow as a beginner
• Plant information, along with which plants work best with other plants
• Planting advice, including spacing instructions
• Advice on mulch, watering, and fertilizing
• Organic pest control 
• How to harvest and store your produce
• How to get the most out of your raised bed space

So get started on your path to becoming a gardener. No matter what your level of confidence, this book will give you the information and tools you need to succeed.

Tara Nolan, author of Raised Bed Revolution, is a garden writer and editor with a diverse background in publishing. Her work has appeared in the Toronto Star, as well as in magazines, including Reader’s Digest and Canadian Living, and on websites, like Design*Sponge. Tara is a co-founder, with three other garden writers, of Savvy Gardening (savvygardening.com) and was the award-winning web editor of Canadian Gardening magazine’s website (CanadianGardening.com) for six years. Tara does work for the Toronto Botanical Garden and the Canadian Garden Council, and volunteers for the Royal Botanical Garden. She is also a member of GWA: The Association for Garden Communicators. Tara is from the Toronto, Canada, area.