Western Garden Book of Edibles: The Complete A-Z Guide to Growing Your Own Vegetables, Herbs, and Fruits [Paperback]

Editors of Sunset Books (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: February 9, 2010

Complete instructions for growing over 190 vegetables, herbs, berries, fruits, nuts, and tropical fruits in the ground and in containers.

Plans and design ideas for kitchen gardens of all sizes, as well as easy-to-follow guidelines for composting, building raised beds, and more.

Growing season details for all regions of the West, including Alaska and Hawaii.

Timely tips from edibles experts around the West-British Columbia to New Mexico.

More than 300 pages of color photographs, practical advice, and inspiration from the editors of Sunset magazine, the West's authority on gardening.

Editorial Reviews

About the Author

For more than half a century, Sunset has been helping readers remodel their homes and improve their lives. Sunset has a circulation of over 1.1 million and a readership of 5.325 million.

Product Details

• Paperback: 304 pages
• Publisher: Oxmoor House (February 9, 2010)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0376039183
• ISBN-13: 978-0376039187
• Product Dimensions: 8 x 0.8 x 10 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1.8 pounds (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 4.5 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (19 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #43,921 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

29 of 29 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars A fantastic update, February 25, 2010

By 

K. Tier (San Francisco Bay Area) - See all my reviews
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This review is from: Western Garden Book of Edibles: The Complete A-Z Guide to Growing Your Own Vegetables, Herbs, and Fruits (Paperback)

I love Sunset Magazine and was excited when I found out about this book. I own Sunset's "The Edible Garden" (2005), which is my favorite gardening book. As I suspected, Sunset's "Western Garden Book of Edibles" (2010) is an updated version of the prior book. It has 304 pages, as opposed to the 194 of the earlier book. Recent readers of Sunset Magazine will recognize some of the pictures in the new book.

I think this book is very useful. It is just beautiful to look at as well, which is important to me. I love their comprehensive climate zone information; all 32 zones! The book is also full of inspiration, especially for gardeners with challenges, like apartment dwellers. The majority of the book consists of individual listings of plants in six categories: vegetables, herbs, berries, fruits, nuts, and tropicals. Each individual listing tells you what zone the plant works in, how much sun and water it needs, information about how to eat it, information about different varieties of the plant, and specifics on how to grow it. The specifics on how to grow beets, for example, list sections on the best site, yield, soil, planting, spacing, water, fertilizer, harvest, and challenges (such as bugs).

The section on garden design discusses issues like color, texture, & form, balance & repetition, focal points, relating to architecture, arbors & trellises, paths, raised beds (including building instructions), containers, and space-saving garden plans. The practical guide section is a step-by-step guide to just about everything else a new or moderately experienced gardener would want to know. It is meant to be an overview covering the basics in a few pages for each topic.

Overall, this would be a great book for newbies. This is our family's third season gardening in a community plot and it is the perfect book for us.

39 of 44 people found the following review helpful:

2.0 out of 5 stars Disappointed in Lack of Useful Information, February 24, 2010

By 

Laura (Oakland, CA) - See all my reviews

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This review is from: Western Garden Book of Edibles: The Complete A-Z Guide to Growing Your Own Vegetables, Herbs, and Fruits (Paperback)

Sunset's Western Garden Book has such positive reviews, I assumed that their new book focusing on edible plants would be a good purchase. I wish I had flipped through this book in a store before I went ahead and ordered it. I am a novice gardener, about to start my first vegetable garden, and this book does not have enough useful information in it to help get me started. The information would be too general for an expert gardener as well. It is chock full of photographs, and while the photos of garden design provide some inspiration, most of them are mediocre and add nothing to the book. Most of the photographs filling the book are close-ups of ordinary fruits and vegetables and are neither inspirational nor informative. I was also disappointed with the amount of space devoted to fruits, nuts, berries, and tropicals, since I am interested primarily in growing vegetables. This book feels a bit like an issue of Sunset magazine - with lots of photographs and a little specific information - which is fine for a throwaway magazine but it's not something I want to sit on my bookshelf for years.

I highly recommend Pam Peirce's Golden Gate Gardening instead, if you live in the Bay Area or California coast.

11 of 12 people found the following review helpful:

3.0 out of 5 stars Less than I expected, June 21, 2010

By 

C. Dexter Moses (Madera, CA, US) - See all my reviews
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This review is from: Western Garden Book of Edibles: The Complete A-Z Guide to Growing Your Own Vegetables, Herbs, and Fruits (Paperback)

The Original Western Garden Book is an impressive product, especially useful for determining plant species, varieties or cultivars that will do well in defined climate zones of the west. I was hoping that this book would do the same, but in greater detail, for the fruit and vegetable gardener. Fruit trees and vines are reasonably well-covered, but the section on the vegetable garden did not list named varieties with areas in which they would be successful. Sadly, I bought the book based on the assumption that it would. I feel the book fails to live up to what it should have been.