Creative Container Garden Ideas:

• Chalkboard Pots – I especially love the pot with the scalloped chalkboard. Super cute ideas from We Heart This.
• Tomatoes in Containers – Kerry shares a video she made about growing tomatoes in containers.
• Braided Avocado Trees – Sue shares her idea for creating an avocado tree with a braided trunk. I don’t recommend growing avocados from seed if you want fruit (could take decades, and the fruit may not taste like that of the parent tree), but if you’re looking for a fun, cheap project, with what will surely be beautiful results, why not?!
• Five Ways to a Beautiful Balcony – Great collection of photos and advice

Beetnik Media

I just realized I never really said much about Beetnik Media here. Basically, fellow blogger Adriana Martinez (Anarchy in the Garden) and I are joining forces to help the gardening and eco-friendly businesses we love connect with their customers through social media. Our first major project is throwing a party at the Garden Writers Symposium in Dallas on September 9, 2010. Even if you’re not going to the GWA symposium, I want to invite you to come to the party. It will be a great opportunity to mingle with passionate gardeners. I look forward to meeting you in person!

Life on the Balcony Flickr Group

It’s been awhile since I had the chance to really look at all the photos being uploaded to the LOTB Flickr group. If it’s been awhile for you too, I suggest checking it out. Lots of great inspiration there.

Best of August on LOTB

In case you missed these posts the first time around, here are the three most popular posts on LOTB from August, 2010.

• How Your Balcony Can Get in My Book, Called My Balcony, My Garden
• The Ark of Taste – 11 Slow Food Approved Plants to Grow On Your Balcony
• How to Convert a BBQ into an Herb Garden

Great Container Gardening Info & Ideas:

• Beautiful photos and great tips on creating a beautiful balcony container garden from Isabelle Palmer on Fennel and Fern
• aHa Modern Living is having a seed sale. There’s still time to sow plenty of fall and winter veggies, check it out!
• Andrea has a great list of and info about winter vegetables, all of them are suitable for containers.
• Renee shares some really cool photos of her recent trip to the DC Botanical Gardens. There are some great ideas for vertical gardening among her pics.
• I loved looking at the progression of Marie’s watermelon from flower to fruit. All grown on her rooftop.

Win a Beautiful Pot from Sunset

Would you like to win this neat pot from the Home by Sunset collection from Bauer Pottery? Sunset Magazine is giving one away to the person who comes up with the best idea for what to plant in the pot. More details here.

Roasted Ratatouille Pizza

Doesn’t this recipe from Vegetarian Times look awesome?! Great way to use up late summer veggies…

• 1 recipe Chewy Pizza Dough (click here for recipe)
• 1 28-oz. can peeled whole tomatoes
• 1 small eggplant, quartered and cut into 1/2-inch-thick slices (2 cups)
• 2 small yellow squash or zucchini, sliced into rounds (2 cups)
• 1/2 large red onion, thinly sliced (1 cup)
• 2 Tbs. olive oil
• 3 cloves garlic, minced (1 Tbs.)
• 1 Tbs. herbes de Provence
• 1/2 cup prepared marinara sauce or 1 recipe Quick Pizza Sauce (click here for recipe)
• 1/4 cup black olives or capers, optional

Directions

1. Preheat oven to 450°F. Prepare Chewy Pizza Dough.

2. Drain tomatoes, and discard liquid. Halve each tomato lengthwise. Toss together tomatoes, eggplant, squash, red onion, oil, garlic, and herbes de Provence on baking sheet.

3. Roast vegetables 25 minutes, or until beginning to brown, tossing every 5 to 10 minutes. Cool 5 to 10 minutes, or store in refrigerator up to 3 days.

4. Meanwhile, shape Chewy Pizza Dough into 12-inch disk on baking sheet coated with cooking spray. Spread with sauce, and top with vegetables. Sprinkle with olives or capers, if using.

5. Place on middle rack in oven, and preheat oven to 350°F with pizza in oven. Once oven reaches 350°F, bake 25 to 30 minutes, or until bottom is crisp.

Container Gardening in the Blogosphere

• Build a Container Water Garden to Cure Your Pond Cravings – Who says you need a yard to have fish in your garden?!
• Review of Earth Box – Kerry really loves her Earth Boxes!
• Zucchini Pickles – I love how adventurous people are with pickling. If you’ve ever grown zucchini before, you surely have a few extra that you can use in this recipe!
• Sweet Cherry Trees in Containers – I love growing fruit trees on my balcony. Here’s a video demonstration of planting bare root trees in a container.

Garden Q & A – Squash Flowers

A question I’ve gotten a couple of times in the past few weeks involve squash plants that seem to be producing a lot of flowers but no fruit. Rest assured that this is normal. Squash have both male and female flowers (as opposed to most flowers, that have both male and female parts in each flower). Squash produce male flowers first and then female flowers. It is not uncommon for the first few male flowers to show up before there are any female flowers to pollinate. Don’t worry if you see several flowers appear and then fall off, without any fruit. Eventually, female flowers will appear.

Container Gardening Ideas on Instructibles

• Bottle Herb Garden – A creative way to grow vertically, using upcycled materials. Also, check out this post on the LOTB Facebook page. Readers shared ideas for how to tweak the setup to make it more attractive.
• Bentwood Bird House – I love how modern this bird house looks, and while it seems like it would be pretty hard, the instructions don’t seem “out of reach.”
• Easy, Cheap Plant Tags – Don’t throw out your spoon the next time you get takeout. Upcycle it into a reusable plant tag!
• Planter from Pallets – I’m going to be trying this one. I’ve been rescuing pallets from my local grocery store’s trash bin. Stay tuned!
• Drip Aid – This gardener repurposed an back-of-the-door shoe organizer into a vertical planter.

I recently received a review copy of a book called Juicy Tasty Tomatoes by Annette Welsford & Lucia Grimmer that contains a lot of very useful information from experienced tomato growing experts. Unfortunately, while I think the book itself is a good comprehensive tomato growing guide, I don’t think the $45.95 price is justified, and I’m suspicious of the infomercial-esque website being used to sell the book.

Tomato Growing Guide

Juicy Tasty Tomatoes really is comprehensive. The substantive part of the book begins with a quick start guide that serves as a cheat sheet for the information found in the rest of the book. The authors then discuss different varieties of tomatoes, explain the difference between heirlooms and hybrids, and provide useful lists of both “cool season” (i.e. short season) and “warm season” (long season) varieties. This is followed with step-by-step info on site preparation, cultivation, watering, fertilizing, pests, harvesting, seed collecting, organic growing, hydroponics and greenhouse growing. All covered in more than adequate detail.

What’s nice about this book is that a complete novice could pick it up, and if he or she followed the authors’ advice, would have all the knowledge needed to be successful. The information isn’t dumbed down though. A seasoned tomato grower would certainly learn some new things and find the pest and disease sections very helpful. I doubt anyone–novice or experienced gardener alike–could come up with a question or scenario not covered in the book.

My primary complaint about the book is that the photos are small (all of them are in the 2-3 inch range) and many aren’t high quality. If you believe the (ridiculous) website being used to sell the book, the book’s real value is $49.95. I don’t know about you all, but I can’t remember the last time I bought a book for $50, and if I ever did, I would expect professionally taken, large, nicely printed photos. Gardening books must have top quality photos in my opinion. It’s non-negotiable.

A quick note about the website. At present time, it is a one page, really long, infomercial-type sales pitch. Typical of such websites, it claims that the products bundled together are worth way more than any home gardener would pay for them, and then acts like it is such a great deal to get them at a much lower, but still absurd (in my opinion) price. I find it a HUGE turn off.

Our Family Tomato Cookbook

Bundled with every purchase of Juicy Tasty Tomatoes is Our Family’s Tomato Cookbook. I’ll be blunt, I would never purchase this cookbook, and wouldn’t have any use for it even if it was a gift. The recipes are not very interesting, and at least one is reprinted directly from the internet. You’d think that a cookbook solely covering recipes for tomatoes would have innovative ideas for using specific varieties of tomatoes. But you’d be wrong. I didn’t see any recipes that called for a tomato by variety name. And similar to Juicy Tasty Tomatoes, the photos are snapshot quality, and small. If you’re looking for a tomato recipe book, I recommend you check out The Tomato Festival Cookbook.

Tomato Varieties Database

Supposedly the tomato varieties database on an included CD is worth $72.95 and grants access to a database describing 1300 different varieties and provides information on where seeds can be purchased. However, I couldn’t view the database at all. I clicked on the appropriate file as instructed, but when I entered the username and password listed on the CD, all I got were error messages. Honestly, maybe I am spoiled by how easily things normally work on a Mac, but with a product whose package sells $45.95, I shouldn’t have to search through a list of folders and files to hunt down the right file and then fiddle with usernames and passwords. And it should actually work.

Journaling and Information Sheets

These basically contain information in the book reorganized into a “cheat sheet” format. Included are Common Problems Ready Reckoner, Growth Stage Cultivation Guide, Conversion Guide, and Tomato Growing Diary. They’re handy, but I personally wouldn’t pay extra for them. And certainly not the $39.95 value attributed to them.

Recently I discovered Slow Food USA’s “Ark of Taste” list. Like many wonderful things on the internet, I got there through a rather circuitous route. Adriana tweeted a Sunset Magazine article about a chef growing his produce in old bourbon barrels. Always on the lookout for interesting container gardening stories, I had to read that. That article mentioned that the chef Mark Williams prefers to grow vegetables on Slow Food USA’s list. Something I’ve never heard before called The Ark of Taste. Intrigued, I clicked over and found a list of the creme de la creme of heirloom products. Everything from wines to fruits and vegetables.

I immediately started culling through the list of fruits and vegetables for things that are easy to grow in containers, and thus, this list was born. I’ve linked each variety to a source selling their seed and quoted from the entry in The Ark of Taste. When they listed more than one variety of the same plant, I picked my favorite among their selections, so it’s definitely worth clicking over to see the full Ark of Taste list. Please leave your own tasting or growing notes in the comments!

Without further ado, here is a list for fine-food-loving container gardeners everywhere:

• Early Blood Turnip Beet – “The dark red flesh remains flavorful, tender and juicy even when the beets attain large size. It has a slight clove-like aroma and a wonderful sweetness, light like a carrot but without the intense sweetness of a carrot.”
• Speckled Lettuce – “The lettuce is a loose-leaf variety that has juicy, thick, light green leaves that are speckled with maroon quarter-inch dots.  The speckled leaves have a pleasant, muddy flavor, which is similar to watercress.”
• Inchelium Red Garlic – “The flavor of the Inchelium Red is softly robust but not so strong as to be overwhelming; the flavor often sharpens in storage.”
• Fish Pepper – “This pepper is an African-American heirloom that predates the 1870s; the Fish Pepper is bright in color and crunchy, with a hot and bold flavor.”
• Aunt Ruby’s German Green Tomato – “The Aunt’s Ruby’s German Green is a sweet juicy tomato with a piquant bite.  The heirloom is a large beefsteak type tomato that is a pale green color with a hint of yellow striping.”
• Christmas Lima Bean - The bean…is a large—quarter sized—white, flat seed with maroon spots and swirls.  These intricate burgundy designs remain on the bean once it is cooked. The Christmas Lima has a full-bodied, nutty, chestnut taste and the texture of baked potatoes.
• Aunt Molly’s Ground Cherry - “This outstanding Polish variety is prized for its clean flavor.  This tomato has pineapple and vanilla flavor.”
• Meyer Lemon – “The lemon is a medium sized, round fruit that has a beautiful golden yellow color.  The edible skin is shiny, and smooth with small pores.  The rind of the Meyer is thin, and the fruit very juicy, and less acidic than that of true lemons.”
• Washington Navel Orange – “The Washington Navel orange is small in size and bright orange in color, both rind and flesh, with a thin, fine-textured skin. It has a sweet, citrus and blossomy fragrance and is close to a standard navel orange in aroma. With a fine and firm texture, the orange is dense and juicy, not watery, and has few seeds.”
• Baby Crawford Peach – “The Baby Crawford peach has an intensely rich, classically peach flavor that is reminiscent to the heirloom variety, the Crawford Peach.”
• Pixie Tangerines – “Small, firm, seedless fruits grow on vigorous trees. The rind is thick and pale orange to yellowish orange and it is very easy to peel.  The fruit’s juicy flesh has a floral aroma and its flavor is pleasantly sweet and full.”

• Jim McCausland over at Sunset Magazine’s Fresh Dirt blog has discovered that Asiatic lillies grow great in containers without any special treatment.
• Mike has been brewing manure tea. I know it sounds weird, but your plants will love it, I promise.
• Check out these unusual–I’m not sure what to call them?–plant orbs featured on Planet Green. What do you think?
• I have to say, I am a bit jealous of the Dahlia garden that Matti at Far Out Flora featured. My Dahlias (1) were not the variety on the tag, (2) were a blah baby pink, and (3) immediately inundated with aphids.

Today is the last day to enter the handmade card giveaway!

If you’d like the win this set of handmade cards and enough extra page pebbles to keep you in crafting bliss for quite some time, tell me how gardening weaves its way into your other hobbies by:

Option #1 – Leaving a comment about garden inspired hobbies on the Life on the Balcony Facebook page.

Option #2 – Tweeting about garden inspired hobbies using the #LOTB tag.

Option #3 – Blogging about how gardening inspires your other hobbies and leaving a link to your blog post in the comment section of this post.

This contest is open to anyone in North America over the age of 18. You have until August 1st at 11:59pm PST to enter.

Best of LOTB in July

In case you missed these posts the first time around, here are some of the most popular posts from this past month

• Make Your Own Bird Bath – A compact bird bath is easy to make, let me show you how!
• Learning From Others Container Gardening Mistakes – I hate to say something not nice, but if these two containers can save you from making the same mistakes, it’ll be worth it.
• How to Grow Currants and Gooseberries in a Container – If you dream of canning your own home grown fruit preserves, but have a part-shade balcony or patio look into growing Currants or Gooseberries.
• Five Fall Vegetables for Your Balcony Garden – Here are five vegetables that you may not have tried growing before. And yes, you can grow in a container garden.

Gardening is both very “here and now” and also forward focused. Yes, most flowers are fleeting and must be enjoyed in the moment. But at the same time, if you want vegetables in the fall, you have to start planting in summer. Here are five vegetables that you may not have tried growing before. And yes, you can grow in a container garden.

Bunching Onions /  Scallions

Believe it or not, true bunching onions are actually perennials. If you leave a few behind when you harvest, they will divide and make new plants for you to harvest. So, what’s the difference between true bunching onions and others that are just posing as such? The real thing will never turn in to a large bulbous onion, they just keep on dividing to form a large clump of bunching onions. Sometimes regular onions are harvested when they are immature and called scallions.

To grow your own bunching onions, sow your seeds in a pot that is not completely full of soil (i.e. leave several inches between the top of the soil and the edge of the pot). As the seedlings grow, slowly and carefully mound more soil into the pot. The more of the plant that is below the soil, the more “white part” you’ll have. Check out a variety called ‘Deep Purple‘ or ‘Red Robin,’ for scallions with a unique red cast to them.

Kale

Kale is such a lovely looking plant, you might have a hard time actually harvesting. But if you’re like me, the desire to try making your own kale chips will force your hand. I’m planning planning on trying Heather’s recipe, it looks simple and tasty!

Kale likes rich, fertile soil that is kept evenly moist. An easy way to kill two birds with one stone is to add a little sea weed extract to your watering can once a week. Stop watering after the first frost. Keeping with the red vegetable theme, why not try ‘Red Bor‘ or ‘Red Russian.’

Bok Choy

I like planting bok choy in staggered rows in windowboxes. Sow the seeds over a couple of weeks so that you’ll have a few plants ready to be harvested at a time. They like moist but not soggy soil. And give them a mild, evenly balanced fertilizer every two weeks, or use fertilizer in time released pellets.

You should have plants large enough to eat in less than 60 days. Sautee bok choy in a hot pan with scallions and ginger and you’ll have a super tasty source of vitamin C and vitamin A.

Radishes

If you’re looking for something that won’t require much effort or know-how to grow, look to radishes. But that doesn’t mean you have to grow boring supermarket-varieties. As long as you can keep potting soil as moist as a wrung out sponge, you can grow beautiful, tasty radishes. Check out ‘French Breakfast,’ ‘Watermelon,’ or ‘Easter Egg Blend‘ for some neat looking and better tasting radishes.

Brussels Sprouts

You may have horrible memories of overcooked vegetable side dishes when you think of brussels sprouts, but don’t let bad cooking scare you off. Browned in garlic butter on the stove top, and then squirted with lemon juice and tossed with walnuts and dried cranberries, brussels sprouts are truly heavenly. And if that wasn’t enough to convince you, check out brussels sprouts nutritional info. They are a great source of Vitamins K, C, A, and folate.

Plant brussels sprouts in full sun, in a deep pot. A single plant can produce 50-100 sprouts, more than enough to have several dinners’ worth. Give plants a full dose of a complete fertilizer before sprouts form. Harvest the sprouts when they’re a little smaller than a golf ball. The sprouts on the bottom of the stalk will mature before the top, so harvest only the sprouts that are ready and leave the rest to continue growing.

One of the most fun things for me is to grow things on my balcony that people wouldn’t believe possible to grow in such a limited space with no “real” dirt. It’s not nearly as difficult as people think, though I have a full sun balcony. What if you dream of canning your own home grown fruit preserves, but have a part-shade balcony or patio? No worries! Look into growing Currants or Gooseberries. And the good news is, according to the Sunset Western Garden Book of Edibles, Fall is the time to plant these berry bushes. You can even wait until winter if you live in a mild winter climate where your containers stay outdoors year round.

Currants and Gooseberries are closely related, attractive shrubs that grow 3-5 feet tall. Currants are thornless and produce either white, black, or red marble-sized fruits. Black currants are sweet while red and white fruiting varieties are more tart. Gooseberries can be thorny, but there are thornless varieties. The fruit can range from dark red to pink to yellow-green and is sweet, perfect for pies and canning.

How Many Plants Should You Buy?

A mature Currant or Gooseberry bush can produce 6-10 pounds of fruit, so unless you plan on feeding a small army solely with berries, you don’t need to line your entire balcony with these berry bushes. That being said, some varieties of Currants are self-fertile, while others need a different variety of Currant (that blooms at the same time) nearby to cross-pollinate with. Read the plant tag or catalog description carefully to determine if the Currant you are considering needs a cross-pollinator. If it does, grow the plants side-by-side, or even better, in the same pot. All Gooseberries are self-fertile, so you’re fine with only one plant, if that’s all you want.

Photo by storebukkebruse

Cold Hardiness

If grown in the ground, Currants and Gooseberries can withstand temperatures as low as -25F or even -40F. But plants in grown in containers have less natural protection from the elements, and for that reason The Bountiful Container recommends keeping them in temperatures above 20F. Don’t rush them indoors though. The deciduous bushes need 600-700 hours of time spent in temperatures below 45F to produce the best fruit (many areas in the southern half of the U.S. will not get cold enough to grow either berry). Only move your plants indoors or provide other extra winter protection when you expect temperatures to stay below 20F for an extended period of time.

Container & Potting Soil

Currants and Gooseberries are shallow rooted bushes, so you only need a pot that is 15 inches deep. One that is wider rather than taller would be best. Choose a good quality potting soil that drains well. When potting up your plant, make sure that the crown of the plant (the main stem of the plant just above the roots) is about an inch below the rim of the pot.

Caring For Currant & Gooseberry Plants

Water your plants deeply (to the point that water flows out the bottom of the pot), about once a week. Water them more frequently in very hot weather or when you see signs of wilting. It is important to water deeply each time to flush out salts that can build up in containers, neither currants nor gooseberries perform very well in soil with high amounts of sodium.

When you plant your Currant or Gooseberry, mix in a fertilizer high in phosphorus (the second number in the sequence of a given fertilizer, i.e. 10-15-15). I like to add liquid kelp at half-strength to my watering can and water all of my plants with it every other week. Reapply the fertilizer you used when you first planted your bushes according to the package instructions (although sometimes with container plants, you need to reapply more frequently, but do so at a diluted strength).

Photo by JIGGS IMAGES

Pruning – When and How

Currants and Gooseberries produce fruit on branches that are two and three years old. This means that a branch that forms in year one will not produce fruit. During year two and three it will produce fruit, and then in year four, the amount of fruit production will drop drastically. This means that you need to leave a branch on the plant for three years and then prune it off.

1. (Year 1) During the first season, plant your Currant or Gooseberry and then allow it to grow freely and get established.
2. (Year 2) In late winter or early spring–before new growth appears–of the following season, select five or six healthy stems evenly spaced around the bush and mentally or literally mark them as “A.” Prune all other branches off at the base. The branches that you left on the plant are two years old and should bear fruit this season. New branches will also appear during the growing season, these are “B” branches.
3. (Year 3) In late winter or early spring, prune off two or three of the “A” branches. Select five or six of the “B” branches that are healthy and evenly spaced around the plant. Prune off all other “B” branches. You should now have three or four “A” branches and five or six “B” branches on the bush. All of the “A” and “B” branches will bear fruit this season. New growth that appears this year should be marked (in your mind or literally) as “C.”
4. (Year 4) In late winter or early spring, prune off all “A” branches, and two or three “B” branches. Select five or six evenly spaced “C” branches and prune the rest of the “C” growth off. “B” and “C” will produce fruit this year, mark any new growth this season as “A.”
5. (Year 5) Repeat the process of cutting off all of the three year old growth, half of the two year old growth, and selecting five or six of the healthiest one year old branches.

Harvesting

Harvest currants when the entire string of berries in a particular cluster has turned the color of the particular variety you have (black, red, or white/translucent). They will keep for one to two days on the counter, a week in the fridge, or many months if they are properly frozen or dried.

Gooseberries are ready to be picked when they ripen to the appropriate color for the particular variety, and soften slightly. Pick them individually. They will last a little longer than currants, and can also be frozen or dried to prolong their shelf life.

Photo by Fluoride’s memories

Good Varieties for Container Growing

Select a Currant or Gooseberry plant for it’s flavor and disease resistance. Here are some varieties suitable for containers, though this is not an exhaustive list:

• ‘Ben Lomond’ – A variety of black Currant that produces shiny, jet black berries that are sweet-tart and excellent for making preserves.
• ‘Red Jade’ – A red Currant that is very productive. The berries look gorgeous in a bowl on the table and are great for making jam.
• ‘Sweedish White’ – This white Currant variety bears huge crops of attractively translucent berries. You can see the seeds through the fruit when ripe.
• ‘Invicta’ – Produces greenish-yellow Gooseberries in a very disease resistant, but thorny plant.
• ‘Friend’ – A thornless variety of Gooseberry that produces sweet pink fruit to be eaten fresh or used in pies and jams.

Resources

Cornell University has a listing of nurseries selling Currants and Gooseberries. They also have a good growing guide. The University of California, Small Farm Program also has some good info on growing Currants and Gooseberries. And the UC IPM website has some info on pests and diseases common to Currants and Gooseberries.

* * * * *

Photo credit for main photo: Gooseberry by foxypar4; Currants by Kat…

I recently purchased Pat Welsh’s Southern California Organic Gardening and Sunset Western Garden Book of Edibles and can’t believe it took me so long to add these books to my library! I first heard of Pat Welsh’s book when she was the keynote speaker at my Master Gardener graduation. She came across as warm and charming, both of which come through in the book. The Western Garden Book of Edibles is the companion (I think) to Sunset’s Western Garden Book, which includes edibles, but seems more focused on the ornamental garden. This book is much more thorough when it comes to edibles.

Pat Welsh’s Southern California Organic Gardening

Pat’s book focuses on what grows well in Southern California, and pays special attention to things like drought tolerance and fire-resistance (for those Southern Californians living in forest-fire-prone areas). She also provides Southern California specific advice on when to plant, prune, fertilize, and divide those plants.

What I really love about this book is that it is organized in a month-by-month format. What we grow in Southern California and when we can grow it is pretty different from the majority of the country. For example, cruciferous vegetables and leafy greens are what we grow late Fall to early Spring. Usually we get too many random days of hot temperatures in late Spring and early Fall to try and grow those edibles then.

Each chapter is dedicated to what should be done in the garden during that month. The chapter begins with an easy to reference table of contents so that you can zoom right over to the task you were looking for. The chapter ends with handy checklists so you can get a quick reminder of things to do that month. In between is wonderful advice, written in a friendly tone of voice, about how to manage your garden from a practical, organic perspective.

If you’re new to California, or are frustrated that the advice you’ve been following doesn’t seem to work, this is a great book to have on hand.

Sunset’s Western Garden Book of Edibles

The Western Garden Book of Edibles, put out by the inimitable folks behind Sunset Magazine, is not just for Southern Californians, but it contains tried-and-true advice for growing edible plants in the West. A lot of edible gardening books can be kind of generic in their advice, probably because the authors are trying to write for too large of an audience. This book avoids that mistake by focusing only on those of us living in the Western United States.

The book is organized by vegetables, fruit trees, and herbs. Each edible plant is discussed on it’s own page, with at least one full color photograph. Many of the plants warranted multiple page spreads with lots of wonderful photos. For example, the entry for tomatoes contains advice about growing tomatoes but also a multi-page chart with growing tips on all sorts of varieties of tomato. Live in the high desert and need a variety that can tolerate extreme heat? They’ve got you covered. Live in a windy coastal city that doesn’t get hot enough for most tomato varieties? Rest assured, the folks at Sunset have tracked down a few varieties that will do great in your climate.

What really impressed me about the book was the herbs section. So often herb growing advice is absurdly unhelpful. How many times have you seen, “Keep soil evenly moist and provide full-sun” as advice on how to grow herbs? This book doesn’t make that mistake. Sunset provides specific varieties to grow in different climates, tasting notes (i.e. avoid Russian Tarragon, French Tarragon is best), and growing information specific to that particular herb. Not all herbs like constant moist soil. And some can grow in part shade.

If you’re considering buying or borrowing the Sunset Western Garden Book of Edibles, check out this blog post by one of the editors involved in the project. You’ll get a great glimpse of the sort of detail and seriousness with which they attacked their subject.