(StatePoint) Whether you’re a seasoned gardener or just getting started, it always helps to have a little guidance and inspiration.
These new books can help you perfect your gardening game:
How can you encourage your bunny ear cactus to flower and flourish? What’s the best method for propagating an Echeveria or Kalanchoe? What exactly are living stones, and where do they grow in the wild? “Practical Cactus and Succulent Book: How to Choose, Nurture & Display More than 200 Cacti and Succulents” is a great, exhaustive reference for cactus and succulent enthusiasts. An extensive illustrated plant directory profiles more than 200 succulent and cactus varieties, with instructions on how to grow each one, alongside facts and quirky stats about different plant families.
For those in need of some basics, “Beginner Gardening Step by Step: A Visual Guide to Yard Garden Basics,” details how to get your yard or green space under control and keep it that way. Do-it-yourself garden ideas and step-by-step photographs for everything from planting decorative climbers to growing fruits and vegetables, take the anxiety out of planting, potting, and pruning.
Take the uncertainty out of your harvest with a DK bestseller, “The Kitchen Garden: A Month-by-Month Guide to Growing Your Own Fruits and Vegetables.” In-depth crop planners show you when to plant and how to cultivate more than 60 herbs, fruits and vegetables, including kale, rhubarb, spinach, strawberries and apples. Month-by-month alerts help you guard against the season’s garden pests and diseases. Prioritize key garden tasks, learn crop rotation techniques and try step-by-step garden projects, such as preparing a seedbed and making your own compost bin.
Orchid care can be complex. Sort myth from fact with “Happy Orchid: Help it Flower, Watch it Flourish,” which offers a simple, step-by-step introduction to essential growing techniques, including how to plant orchids, what feed to give them and how to water and maintain humidity. Each profiled orchid lets you know exactly what’s needed for optimum growth, including where best to place them, how often they need repotting, how to prolong flowering and how to encourage reflowering.
With hundreds of step-by-step tutorials, the new edition of “Propagating Plants: How to Create New Plants for Free” can be your go-to guide for clear and instructive propagation advice. How long do your seedlings need to germinate? What makes a healthy stem cutting? How do you know what type of rootstock to use when grafting plants? With more than 1,800 detailed illustrations and photos to refer to, you can find the answer to these questions and discover the experts’ secrets to perfect plant propagation.
This season, grow your gardening library and get inspired to grow beautiful and delicious things.
