The Week-by-Week Vegetable Gardener's Handbook: Make the Most of Your Growing Season [Spiral-bound]

Ron Kujawski (Author), Jennifer Kujawski (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: January 8, 2011

“Timing is everything,” they say, and vegetable gardening is no exception. Knowing exactly when to start seeds indoors,
what day to transplant them into the ground, when to pinch off the blossoms, and when to pick for peak flavor is the secret to enjoying bountiful harvests all through the gardening season.
In Week-by-Week Vegetable Gardener’s Handbook, authors Ron and Jennifer Kujawski take the guesswork out of gardening with weekly to-do lists that break gardening down into easily manageable tasks. Suitable for all gardening zones, the book offers easy instructions for setting up a personalized schedule based on your last frost date.
The Kujawskis are an inspiring father– daughter team who share their own triumphs, mistakes, and misadventures over many years spent together in the vegetable patch. Readers will enjoy the friendly direction and advice these veterans offer. Easy-to-read boxes, bulleted lists, charts, and detailed how-to illustrations make each week’s activities clear and doable. Spots for record-keeping encourage readers to track their own successes and fine-tune their weekly schedules from year to year.
Inch by inch, row by row, week by week, gardeners will move confidently through the gardening season. Whether it’s planting the strawberries, pinching off the pumpkin blossoms, checking for tomato hornworm, or harvesting the carrots, they will know exactly when and how to do it for the most bountiful harvests and the most enjoyable vegetable-growing experiences ever.

Editorial Reviews

From Publishers Weekly

Using the first and last frost as guideposts, father and daughter Kujawski guide would-be gardeners through the growing season and beyond, with plenty of tips and tricks to ensure a great harvest. Beginning with basics like site selection and soil preparation, the Kujawskis walk readers through the basics of seeding and planting, transplanting sensitive plants along with canny tips like using cover crops like clover or grasses as well as vinegar and clove oil to keep weeds at a minimum. Though the authors do offer suggestions on making the most of the harvest by freezing and canning, the book will be most useful during the growing season itself. Once readers have set the wheels for a small garden in motion, the book's weekly worksheets, with timely advice on which plants can be planted or harvested as well as maintenance tips for specific crops, are likely to be the most useful. Gardeners will appreciate the book's soft cover, though its pages are likely to get dirty from frequent consultations in the back yard, which is probably the intent. (Dec.)
(c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved.

From Booklist

The Kujawskis’ handbook supplies “breadth and brevity rather than depth of information” as it provides a week-by-week, yearlong gardening calendar suitable for all gardening zones and useful for all home growers, especially newcomers to the pursuit. The father-daughter authors note that getting started is “often a matter of overcoming inertia,” and begin by discussing the properties of soil and its testing, techniques for space saving, and location, location, location. Enhanced by many useful line drawings, this how-to covers the finding and using of last-frost dates for readers’ customized weekly planners, which accurately schedule indoor sowing (20-15 weeks before last frost); fertilizing; (trans)planting; pest control; harvesting; and more. Making each week’s to-do list clear and manageable are charts placed alongside easily read boxed information, such as “Garden Smart in Hot Weather” and “Weed Management 101,” that complement lined blank pages with ample room for personal notation. Instructions for “putting food by” for winter consumption, resource listings for growing tips, recipes, seeds, and suggested further readings complete this year-round gardener’s companion. --Whitney Scott

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Product Details

• Spiral-bound: 200 pages
• Publisher: Storey Publishing, LLC; Spi Org edition (January 8, 2011)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 1603426949
• ISBN-13: 978-1603426947
• Product Dimensions: 8.9 x 7.4 x 1 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1.2 pounds (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 4.2 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (20 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #3,429 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)
  • #31 in Books > Crafts, Hobbies & Home > Gardening & Horticulture

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Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

35 of 37 people found the following review helpful:

1.0 out of 5 stars Could be helpful, could be disastrous., July 1, 2011

By 

Sarah J. Dinges - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

This review is from: The Week-by-Week Vegetable Gardener's Handbook: Make the Most of Your Growing Season (Spiral-bound)

I liked this book, I really did. I read through it and thought it sounded like a neat idea and that its checklists would help me keep on top of my garden chores week by week. So I happily filled in my frost date and dates thereafter on the weekly schedules in the book, then flipped to the page for the current date to check on my garden progress. That's when I realized that the dates had no bearing on reality at all.

My average frost date is April 15. This book lists "Early fall" as 12-14 weeks after the average date of frost. That's in July. One of the hottest parts of my season. Huh? Fall doesn't even start until September. And this is where the book could be dangerous for beginners. It makes fertilizer recommendations based on dates that may be completely inappropriate for your area. If I had followed the instructions here, based on the weekly dates, I would have completely eradicated my harvest.

Clearly it needed to switch from "after frost" to "before frost" midway through the schedule.

The only saving grace is that the sections are marked as "early Summer" "mid Summer" etc, so you could use it as a loose schedule, but not a specific weekly schedule.

Maybe the book deserves slightly more than one star, because there is some good info, but I think any book that could totally destroy a new gardener's experience and lead them down the path of utter failure is undeserving of a high rating.

20 of 21 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars At last, December 30, 2010

By 

Kim Mullen (Pennsylvania) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

Amazon Verified Purchase

This review is from: The Week-by-Week Vegetable Gardener's Handbook: Make the Most of Your Growing Season (Spiral-bound)

At last a book which will help me remember what to plant when. Every year I forget something until it's too late to plant it. This handy guide will help keep me on track. It will be especially useful for planting for fall crops. Lots of helpful information stuck in here and there for beginners and experienced gardeners. The format allows anyone to use this book in any zone and I like the space for entering my own notes for the next 4 years. I'm sure I will be referring to it often.

13 of 13 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Informative...., January 23, 2011

By 

JOAN M DAVIS - See all my reviews

Amazon Verified Purchase

This review is from: The Week-by-Week Vegetable Gardener's Handbook: Make the Most of Your Growing Season (Spiral-bound)

A very affordable book for gardeners. I like the week by week format. I always start too late trying to grow seedlings missing out on some early crops. I made a bookmark with my area's frost dates and weekly dates corresponding to the book. I feel organized for the first time since I started veggie gardening. The book has reminders for maintenance such as when to start looking for certain insects and diseases like blight. It has timely information in each section!

I bought extras for my dad and friends.