Customer Reviews

Desert Gardening

5 star:		(16)
4 star:		(3)
3 star:		(1)
2 star:		(2)
1 star:		(1)

 

 

This book fooled me at first glance. I browsed the bookstore and purchased several other books on gardening for hot, arid climates and passed on this book. The lack of color and the obviously amateur photographs in this book led me to believe that the text would be amateur too. This assumption was complete in error! After reading the other books I still didn't feel satisfied that I had received the knowledge I was seeking so I took a chance on this book. This book is very detailed and is really the only book I should have purchased. The author is conversational in his writing style which makes it easy to understand and to the point.

If you have tried gardening in Phoenix or other hot places you know that, with our very short growing seasons, the timing and preperation is critical. This book addresses both these issues and more. It tells you exactly how to prepare our basically "crappy" soil and goes week by week on the gardening activities such as planting, fertilizing, pruning, etc... Buy this book and you will soon realize that it is all you need to get started. The only other thing you need is your own practical experience.

If you thought that only cactus grew in the desert, then this book will show you how to overcome that myth. This book goes over the fruits and vegetables that can be grown in the desert and will help you use the four seasons so as to make the most of your garden. The book goes into great detail of the makeup of the desert soil and how to improve it for your use. It explains how to make a compost pile, how to use the compost, and detailed information on the types of fertilizer to aid you in your quest of fresh and vegetables. The author gives advice on when to plant crops so you can grow vegetables and herbs year round. He explains why and how to take care of your fruit and citrus trees. This book is well worth the money to buy it, the time to read it, and the avoidance of frustration when gardening in the desert.

This complete desert gardening guide is the finest I have ever encountered. After trying to grow veggies and fruit in this dry high-desert for over 40 years, I have confidence that it will happen now. I highly recommend this for desert dwellers and as a much appreciated gift.

I am so glad I found Desert Gardening. I have tried for years to grow vegetables organically here in Decatur, Texas (about eighty miles northwest of Dallas, Texas). Firstly let me tell you that Desert Gardening is not an organic gardening book, but it has helped me anyway--I'll explain more on that later. I began trying to garden here by looking at the "standard gardening advice" in books I found at the local public library and bookstores, asking for help at the local gardening centers, and reading the backs of seed packages for instructions on how to plant them. At the gardening centers, I found that they wanted to load me up with chemicals, and if I didn't want chemicals they would offer me some weird, expensive organic soil amendments but they couldn't tell me the first thing about what they were for or how to use them. They also never seemed to have seeds, seedlings and trees for sale at the time of year I needed them. The books at my public library and bookstores were completely inappropriate for Texas. They had tips on gardening that were supposed to work anywhere in the U.S.--what a laugh that is! There seems to be a consensus among "U.S. gardening experts" that the Southwest doesn't even exist. It was when I tested my soil pH that I found out I couldn't trust these books at all: they all said to add lime to the soil to raise the pH, and my soil already had a pH of 8.5! I realized that if I wasn't careful what kind of soil improvement advice I followed, I could permanently ruin my soil.
Next, I tried looking for books on gardening specifically for Texas. There weren't many of them out there, but I found two. I bought Neil Sperry's "Texas Gardening" and Howard Garrett's "Basic Organic Program". Sperry's "Texas Gardening" is great for selecting the right varieties to plant in Texas--in fact, for Texas it's an even better source for selecting varieties than Desert Gardening is; but it gives inadequate information on all the other aspects of gardening. Howard Garrett is into using expensive organic soil amendments, the few of which I tried didn't work, and his bug-zapping recipies don't seem to work either.
So, for a couple of years I stopped reading gardening books and didn't add anything to my soil at all except compost. I was able to grow squash, green onions, peaches, and banana peppers, but everything else either didn't grow or else it grew but didn't fruit very well.
Then, last year, I got the idea of searching Amazon for a gardening book for Texas. I was surprised when my search pulled up books on desert gardening. I never thought of myself as being in the desert here. We've got grass, scattered clumps of trees, black dirt, temperatures that stay between 90 and 110F in the summertime, occasionally-adequate rainfalls, and a few streams and lakes. Still, when I read the reviews for Desert Gardening it sounded like a great book, so I decided to give it a try.
When I opened up the book I went straight to the section on soil and how to improve it. I was amazed when I saw that they were describing my soil to a T! Alkaline, white caliche rocks, heavy clay or sand, solid layer of caliche which makes it hard for trees to grow. Some of the photos looked exactly like the soil at my house, with grass growing on the surface. I was still leery of adding soil amendments so I decided to test the soil improvement advice in a few small areas first. In those areas, I planted about six kinds of vegetables which had never grown before. The results were great! Everything grew and produced.
I looked through the book more and more and I realized that this is about the best gardening book I've ever seen. Everytime I have a gardening question, I look in the book and the answer is right there. The advice is all just perfect for my area; I think it would work anywhere in Texas. Soil preparation, fertilizing, watering, water conservation, insects and diseases, pest barriers, variety selection, planting times, seasonal changes, frost and heat protection, growing seedlings, care and harvest of vegetables and fruits (many fruits and vegetables have their own chapters), planting and pruning fruit trees and grapevines, and fall and winter gardening are all discussed in great detail. There's also a chapters on hydroponics and container gardening, for places where there's not enough soil to grow anything in. And unlike other sources, it not only tells you what to do but how you're supposed to go about doing it. For instance, Neil Sperry's book tells you you need to keep strawberries alive and growing all summer and winter--but it doesn't say how to do it. Desert Gardening tells you how! What I like best is this book tells you how to do things in the most practical, affordable, and easy way possible--unlike some people/books who want you to spend to the max and knock yourself out with unnecessary work.
The only problem I can see myself having with Desert Gardening is that sometimes the winters here in north Texas are a bit too cold to carry plants through the wintertime like the book recommends. We have an advantage though, in that the summers here are not quite as hot as they are in Arizona (where Desert Gardening was written), so I'm able to use heavy shade from the west and create a longer summer growing season than the what the book says is possible--some plants can even grow all summer. Another thing is that, since I'm trying to grow organically, I've had to manipulate the soil improvement advice. In the book, chemicals are recommended along with compost, manure, and other organic soil amendments as an overall soil-improvement and fertilizing program. What I do is, I take the chemical soil amendment recommendations and convert them to something organic. For instance, if they say to use ammonium phosphate, I look for an organic fertilizer which contains lots of nitrogen and phosphorus. The bug-killing advice in the book is already mostly organic or poison-free.
If you're not sure that where you live would be a good place to use Desert Gardening, ask yourself these questions: 1) Do you live in Nevada, California, Arizona, New Mexico, or Texas? 2) Do you live below 3500 feet elevation? 3) Is your soil alkaline? Is it either sand or heavy clay? In some areas, you may not have any soil at all, just rocks. If you have soil, you may hit a solid layer of white, crumbly rocks called caliche rocks when you dig, anywhere from 6" to 5' deep. 4) Do daytime high temperatures usually stay above 95F in the summertime? 5) Do you have frequent droughts? Is soil being saturated by excessive rainfall usually not a problem? If you answered "yes" to all of these questions, then you're in the low desert and Desert Gardening is a good book for you to get.





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Why does everyone who uses this book live near me?

I bought this book for my father, a very experienced gardener and landscaper who recently moved to the desert. Although he is not a big book reader I see him using this book repeatedly.

The book is easy to follow, gives a number of great tips, and presents ideas that even a seasoned professional like my father hasn't thought of.

This book was well worth the money I paid for it, but I was disappointed that there weren't any charts to tell me specifically which varieties of tomatoes, peppers, etc, to buy for my desert garden. Also, there was a planting chart, to tell me when to plant, which was very useful, but they had no guidelines on when I could expect a harvest. (Perhaps this was because they didn't give any specific varieties, or maybe just a few, so they couldn't determine days to harvest.)

I did learn a lot about the various problems with soil, etc (although that didn't really affect me, since I'm planting in tall raised beds in garden soil bought at Home Depot.) They spent a great deal of time on caliche, when I would have rather they spent the time on actual harvesting and varieties, which is what I thought I was buying. Also, more space was devoted to fruit trees, when I'm more interested in vegetables.

Overall, the writer is very competent and I did learn some things that made the book well worth the price. It just wasn't exactly what I was looking for....I guess I need another book! :)

At a recent class for Master Gardening in Arizona, my instructor recommended this book. I've been looking for a book that is specific to the Phoenix AZ area as our gardening needs are so different than everywhere else. I was very impressed with the simplicity and tons of info this book provided.

This book is my bible to gardening here in Tucson Arizona. It provides all the necessary information to be successful. I use it so much that I wore out my first copy. If you are growing vegetables or fruit trees in the hotter climates of Arizona, I highly recommend this publication.

live in a desert? want to grow your own garden?
get this book :)

I've gardened here in Phoenix for five years. Brookbank's book was my only guide, initially. It's informative and offers good advice for the most part on gardening in the Sonoran Desert. However, it is fairly dated, particularly in terms of the varieties one should plan for fruit and nut trees. There are many more choices today than there were in the 80s and in several cases, Brookbank is dead wrong on how some of those varieties will act in the low desert (Sunset Zone 23). I also have an issue on how he plants trees. Digging a 5-foot deep and 5-foot wide hole to bust through the caliche level and then mixing in bags upon bags of composted manure, sulphur, and ammonium sulphate in the backfill is massive overkill unless you plan on growing trees on rootstocks not adapted for calcaneous soils, which may have been Brookbank's only option in 1984. Yeah, it'll work, you'll be able to grow anything in that situation, but for most home gardeners, you'd never be able to plant more than one or two trees unless you have machinery or a crew of laborers. Digging a hole twice as deep and twice as wide as the rootball and then heavily amending the backfill with compost will work just as well with 80% of fruit trees here (especially the ones that aren't as salt sensitive) and save you the blisters and the backache.