There are enumerable how-to-garden resources on the web, in your local library, and throughout your community (just ask your gardening neighbor!). This page is intended to help you whittle down that list by featuring our go-to resources at VGN for growing in the garden. There are additional resources below on how to enjoy your harvest as well. Let us know if there are any must-have resources missing!

General Gardening

Online resources:

• VGN’s Community Teaching Garden blog provides a snapshot of the season along with tips, recipes and the latest links
• Short, informative video how-to’s: www.growveg.com
• Charlie Nardozzi offers short, easy to digest articles and videos at www.gardeningwithcharlie.com
• Community Garden Connections, an initiative of Antioch University New England, has a thorough Garden Resource Hub–from garden planning to weed prevention to food preservation
• Beyond a great source for seeds, High Mowing Seeds offers a blog that is highly relevant and useful for Vermont growers
• Gardener’s Supply Company also posts great articles on all things gardening online
• This Gardening on a Budget post will give you ideas for how to stretch your gardening dollars as you prepare for the garden season
• New to this growing climate? The Association of Africans Living in Vermont (AALV) has a series of videos for New Vermonters in French, Mai Mai, Nepali, Burmese and Kirundi
• Learn about growing and enjoying specialized crops in this Global Food Local Food: Guide to Growing, Harvesting & Preserving African and Asian Crops in the Northeast
• How-to gardening videos on the Schoolyard Gardens YouTube channel, particularly suited for school gardens, but great tips for all!
• This article is particularly useful for people who are just getting started gardening–see the top several sections on garden terminology, a tools list, and understanding hardiness zones. Thanks to students from Mrs. C’s High School Club for finding this resource!

Tip sheets:

• Work Smarter, Not Harder, in the Garden, by Charlie Nardozzi, provides tips for keeping things manageable all season
• You can find loads of downloadable how-to gardening tip sheets on Cat Buxton’s Grow More, Waste Less website — excellent resources for posting in your garden or sharing with volunteers!

Our favorite books:

• any Eliot Coleman book
• The Market Gardener: A Successful Grower’s Handbook for Small-Scale Organic Farming, by Jean-Martin Fortier
• Gaia’s Garden: A Guide to Home-Scale Permaculture, by Toby Hemenway
• The Week-by-Week Vegetable Gardener’s Handbook: Make the Most of Your Growing Season, by Jennifer and John Kujawski
• The Complete Guide to No-Dig Gardening, by Charlie Nardozzi
• The City People’s Book of Raising Food, by Helga Olkowski
• The Holistic Orchard: Fruit Trees and Berries the Biological Way, by Michael Phillips
• Weedless Gardening, by Lee Reich
• The Vegetable Gardener’s Bible, by Edward C. Smith

Call support:

• Call a Master Gardener or submit your garden questions online!
• For more complex pest and disease questions, submit a plant or insect for identification by UVM’s Plant Pathology lab

Soil

• Managing Vegetable Garden Soil Fertility in Vermont, by Vern Grubinger, provides local insight on soil health
• Here are some DIY soil test instructions from Charlie Nardozzi

Planning & Planting

• VGN’s Seed Starting Tips
• An excellent article with links from Gardener’s Supply addressing answers to frequently asked questions about seed starting indoors
• Here’s a Mother Earth News article on “How to Make Your Own Potting Soil” from low-tech/backyard ingredients
• This High Mowing Seeds planting chart VGN staff use for all of our garden planning workshops and classes
• Before planting, compare your seed packet dates with this High Mowing Seeds seed viability chart
• Johnny Seeds has loads of planning tools that allow you to enter your area code for more precise planting dates, etc.
• Kids Gardening has this helpful lesson plan on how to Create a School Garden Planting Calendar, accompanied by their own easily downloadable Interactive Spring Planting Calendar
• The Old Farmer’s Almanac allows you to create a printable planting calendar specific to your area
• The Gardener’s Supply Company Kitchen Garden Planner uses square foot gardening technique to plan for plant spacing and their Soil Calculator will help you determine how much soil/compost to order for your raised beds

Growing Techniques

• Learn more about Companion Planting in this resource from Cornell University Cooperative Extension
• Get the basics on Succession Planting for continuous harvest all season long, from Cedar Circle Farm; here’s a vegetable list for Planting vegetables in midsummer for fall harvest, from University of Minnesota Extension; and gather tips on Fall Vegetable Gardening, from Dr. Leonard Perry, University of Vermont Extension
• Burlington Permaculture has excellent info sheets and a reference library on their website with much emphasis on permaculture-related gardening techniques, but also loads of general gardening tips.
• See our October 2019 Garden Spotlight to learn more about no-till gardening.
• Straw Bale Gardening one way to set up a garden quickly and on the cheap. For more info on this technique go to strawbalegardens.com or listen to this podcast from Charlie Nardozzi.
• Learn about the curious method called Hugelkultur in this lesson from KidsGardening.

Fruit Tree Planting & Care

• Fruit Tree Planting Foundation has great resources on fruit tree planting and care.

Growing in Small Spaces

• Abundant Harvests: A Guide for Gardening in Small Spaces, by Julie Rubaud, offers advice for getting the most out of a small garden
• Learn about the basics of container gardening on The Spruce
• One of our Network members sent us this link with lots of resources  on “microgardening” for condo and apartment living

Herb Gardens

• The Herbal Academy is a good reference for all things herbs
• Hear from VT garden educators about growing, harvesting and teaching with herbs: Growing Wellness: Plants for medicinal use in garden education programs

Pollinator Gardens

• A website established created to share information about her research on improving plant selection for pollinator habitat restoration in the Northeast: www.pollinatorgardens.org
• Here are some of our favorite planting guides for pollinator gardens:
  • Ecoregional Planting Guides from the Pollinator Partnership
  • Pollinator-Friendly Native Plant Lists from Xerces Society
• Learn about bee houses, bumblekulture, and other creative ideas for attracting pollinators from The Farm Bewteen and this video with John Hayden.
• Sign up to be a Wild for Pollinators growing site!

Pest & Disease Management

• ATTRA’s Organic Integrated Pest Management guide provides great visuals and tips for dealing with insect pests and encouraging beneficial insects
• Post these visuals in your garden to help gardeners i.d. common beneficial and pest insects
• Diagnose your diseased vegetable at Cornell’s Vegetable MD Online
• Not sure what you’re dealing with? Contact the UVM Extension Master Gardener Helpline
• Here are some Best Practices for Community Gardens: Manage Pests, Weeds, & Diseases & 10 Easy Steps to Prevent Common Garden Diseases
• Are larger critters (not just bugs) your issue? There are great tips found in The National Gardening Association’s Pest Control Library. You can search my specific critter or you can find a summary with the basics in this article on “Keeping Animals Out of the Garden.”

Season Extension

• Extending the Season Webinar Resources, including: webinar recording with tips from Charlie Nardozzi and VT community garden leaders, featuring hoophouse and root cellar development and management; video by Charlie Nardozzi on basic season extension techniques; favorite resources and tools from webinar presenters

Seed Saving

• The Community Seed Network connects and supports community seed initiatives by providing resources, information,
  and a platform for networking
• The Organic Seed Alliance created A Seed Saving Guide for Gardeners and Farmers, including information on best varieties, cultivation, harvest, process and storing

Garden Infrastructure

• Plans & guidance for building raised beds: How to Build a Raised Bed & Raised Bed Guidance
• A comprehensive guide to ensure your gardens are designed for universal accessibility: Building Accessible Community Gardens Guide, from Grassroots Gardens of Buffalo
• Compost:
  • VCGN’s Community Composting and Composting Association of Vermont’s Community Food Scrap Composting Resources pages cover an in-depth array of resources and links to support food scrap composting on-site
  • All things Community Composting can be found on the Institute for Local Self-Reliance’s website (including toolkits, forums, workshops, webinars, a map, and lots more!)
  • If you’re looking for something more basic, here’s a how-to for a 3-bin used pallet compost system
  • The NYC Department of Sanitation’s NYC Master Composter Manual covers everything from the science of composting, bin management, design, volunteer engagement and more
• Building a rain barrel for your garden: Tips and DIY how-to
• Check out this article from The American Gardener on Drip Irrigation
• From Center for an Agricultural Economy check out these Tips for Researching How to Build a Hoophouse and Hoophouse Company Analysis
• Creative ideas for using wooden pallets in your garden from The Spruce.

How-to Enjoy Your Harvest

This list is here to inspire you with websites, activity ideas, tips and tools for enjoying your season’s harvest.  The following list features our go-to resources at VGN for making food, medicines and dyes from the garden. Let us know if there are any must-have resources missing!

Food Preservation

• Did you know that 1 medium head of cabbage is a perfect quantity to make 1 quart of sauerkraut? Here’s a video of our staff making kraut for a hands on look.
• Quick pickles require minimal equipment and, as this recipe implies, you can pickle just about anything growing in your garden! Here are two favorite guides: How to Pickle Any Vegetable and How to Pickle (Almost) Anything
• Freeze vegetables to maintain flavor and nutritional value for long term storage with the help of two simple guides: Getty’s Blanching & Freezing Guide and University of Georgia Cooperative Extension Service guide for Freezing Vegetables  
• Kids Gardening shares tips and recipes for simple drying techniques you can do try with any age.
• More guides and recipes at the National Center for Home Food Preservation.

Herbalism

• We have referenced this herbalism book during our work with gardeners of all ages – young children, teenagers, adults, and seniors – it truly does have something to offer everyone! A Kid’s Herb Book for Children of All Ages, by Rosemary Gladstar
• A monthly herbalism publication for kids–with ideas for the classroom and home: Herbal Roots Zine for Kids
• Find beginner-friendly recipes for making herbal remedies in this book by Vermont native Rosemary Gladstar: Medicinal Herbs: A Beginner’s Guide: 33 Healing Herbs to Know, Grow, and Use
• Excellent online herbal education, courses, a blog, and an online shop can be found on the Herbal Academy’s website.
• Make an herbal salve!  Many plants growing in and around gardens can be used to make a healing salve – check out Mountain Rose Herb’s blog for recipes and further inspiration.

Natural Dyes

• Harvesting Color: How to Find Plants and Make Natural Dyes, Rebecca Burgess
• If you are looking for new ideas on plants to grow in your garden, consider growing dye plants to produce a rainbow of colors: A Garden to Dye For: How to Use Plants from the Garden to Create Natural Colors for Fabrics & Fibers, Chris McLaughlin
• Natural dye workshops and materials for sale, located in Montpelier, VT: Honey Hill Studios 

Garden-Inspired Cookbooks

• In Salad People and More Real Recipes: A New Cookbook for Preschoolers and Up, author Molly Katzen shares recipes through step-by-step illustrations that young children can easily follow.  Katzen has two other cookbooks in this series that are worth checking out too.

Harvest, Preservation & Culinary Tools

• Our favorite harvesting tool.  Although they are marketed as “floral snips” for flower farmers, these are the only clippers that Carolina (our Garden Education Manager) keeps in her garden apron and cannot live without!
• Consider acquiring a “molcajete”, a mortar and pestle traditionally used in Mexico, to make fresh salsa and all sorts of pestos in the garden.
• If you are new to fermentation as a way of preserving your harvest, we recommend using these pickle pebbles and glass weights.
• Place this hanging herb drying rack in a well ventilated room, out of direct sunlight, for drying kitchen and medicinal herbs from your garden.

Curriculum

For lesson and activity ideas for using the harvest with students, visit our Education page. A few of our favorites for “enjoying the harvest”: 

• Vermont Harvest of the Month
• Harvest Lessons
• Hunger Free Vermont’s Nutrition Education Hub
• Community GroundWorks, Got Veggies?, Got Dirt? & Seed to Table
• Lesson plans from Kids Gardening

Also, for activity ideas on preserving the harvest check out this Toolshed Tip.