Reddit reviews The New Self-Sufficient Gardener

These are some of my favorites:

• Crockett's Victory Garden - There are also versions for flowers and lawns as well as the main garden one. It's organized by month and has lots of special chapters on different skills or tools or general information.
  
  
• Square Foot Gardening - It's written as a persuasive piece, but it's got good information on all different kinds of vegetables and explains the square foot method. Even if you don't use the method itself, the ideas in general can be useful.
  
  
• Backyard Herb Garden - This is an older book, but it's got a lot of helpful specific information on different herbs and ideas for growing them.
  
  
• Kitchen Garden for Beginners - It's not a perfect book, but I think it did a great job giving an overview of different gardening methods, plants and issues you might face.
  
  
• Vertical Gardening - This one is more specific, but all the trellis designs were fun and very helpful.
  
  
• Storey Country Wisdom Bulletins - These are nice little pamphlets ($4 on Amazon) on different plants (ie. tomatoes, peppers, strawberries) or topics (ie. fixing your soil or building a fence) that are pretty useful for gardening. Also they had some ideas that were new to me.
  
  
• Garden Primer - This one is also a good overview. And seems to be popular it covers general garden topics and has information about specific vegetables.
  
  
• The New Self Sufficient Gardener - It's got a lot of good general information, awesome illustrations, background explanation and information on specific vegetables.
  
  In terms of location specific information, as someone who recently moved half way across the country, your best off looking up the Extension website for where your living to find information on suggested varieties, new pests you might encounter, soil types and things like that.

Ahh, I'm probably referring to the same notes then - I have the Self-Sufficient Gardener which is probably part of/an addition to of your book.

I have 4 beds, each 10x10ft, and do the rotation I described quite easily - the only thing that's difficult is that since I have raised beds (and no spare space) digging down and earthing up potatoes can be a pain. If you're limited on space, then an option is to skip the potato rotation altogether, and grow these in e.g. potato bags instead, and use the extra space for other crops (sweetcorn or jerusalem artichoke perhaps?) or for more rows of the other crops.

It's also worth looking into square-foot gardening - you don't need to work in actual squares, but the measurements they provide can give you better 'density' than what the seed packets say. In general I follow the spacing given for between plants, but ignore the row spacing.

For example I can easily grow in a 10ft row:

160 carrots, beetroots etc
90 leeks, onions, or spinach
40 broad bean or pea plants
10 cabbages, brussel sprouts, fennel

It really maximises your growing area, and the lack of space between plants keeps the weeds down!