How-to-Gardening Tips & Resources

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:

Tip sheets:

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:

Soil

Planning & Planting

Growing Techniques

Fruit Tree Planting & Care

Growing in Small Spaces

Herb Gardens

Pollinator Gardens

Pest & Disease Management

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

Garden Infrastructure

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

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

Garden-Inspired Cookbooks

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”: 

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

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