(Part 2) Best holticulture techniques books according to redditors
We found 373 Reddit comments discussing the best holticulture techniques books. We ranked the 95 resulting products by number of redditors who mentioned them. Here are the products ranked 21-40. You can also go back to the previous section.
A skill to add to that is to understand how to get these seeds from plants and how to process them (some seeds require dormant periods). This Book is one of the best books out there to teach you.
If you want the holy bible of plant propagation get this one. Any edition will work as each update is very minor and the older ones are cheaper.
Source: I have a degree in Horticulture and have done seed collection, breeding, rooting, grafting, in vitro plant tissue propagation. Propagation IMO is one of the most interesting area in Horticulture.
You could plant trees there especially where you see other plants growing like around dry creekbeds which often hold moisture underground longer than one might expect. You could also try propagating plants that are there or that look like they ought to be there - the more habitat, shade, and surfaces for dew to form on, the better. The more terraced, divoted, and vegetated the land the more water and organic matter will accumulate on it rather than simply blowing away. You could start some shrubby plants around areas as windbreaks. You could also start shrubby plants as barriers against the pollution and gusts from the offroad vehicles and try to plant things intended for eating at a higher elevation than the road. Also think about starting some deep-rooted plants whether trees or herbs or whatever that will be suited to your area since they are usually plants that are good at seeking out water and nutrients from far down and bringing them up to the surface. If you want to get a good start it would help to water regularly and use deep layers of mulch. Stuff like beans, curcurbits, peppers, sunflowers, garlic, and corn can generally do well in dry, hot environments but will need some attention and watering.
I really dislike compost guides that say you can't compost meat, bones, and dairy products. You absolutely can compost those and they add lots of nutrients that your garden can use. This guide says twice that you can't compost meat and gives no reasons why. What a good compost guide should say is you can compost meat- here is why it is good and here is how it might be bad.
When I started composting I never put meat or dairy into my piles because I thought it would ruin it. I put that stuff in the garbage. What a huge waste to put great meat and bones into the garbage.
Everything I read said that I couldn't put meat in and I read several books, and untold articles about composting. So far I have only read one book that says meat is OK (Compost Everything). It wasn't until I read a book called the Omnivore's Dilemma where the author talks about how a farmer composts all the feathers, blood, and innards of the chickens he processes that I started to think about composting all the organic matter we have as waste in our household.
I would highly recommend buying one of these Audubon Society guides. They have a variety of them - for wildflowers, birds, trees, and even mushrooms.
Audubon Society book for Wildflowers - Eastern Region
Also, the purple flowers you see might be larkspur.
Here are all the local Amazon links I could find:
amazon.co.uk
amazon.ca
amazon.com.au
amazon.in
amazon.com.mx
amazon.de
amazon.it
amazon.es
amazon.com.br
amazon.nl
Beep bloop. I'm a bot to convert Amazon ebook links to local Amazon sites.
I currently look here: amazon.com, amazon.co.uk, amazon.ca, amazon.com.au, amazon.in, amazon.com.mx, amazon.de, amazon.it, amazon.es, amazon.com.br, amazon.nl, if you would like your local version of Amazon adding please contact my creator.
Great book but my wife crushed my composting toilet idea after I read it. Farmers of Forty Centuries talks a lot of using Night Soil. Farmers would haul the Night Soil from the cities to their farm for free.
Second to MIGradener, especially if you're in zone 6 or thereabouts.
I also really like Epic Gardening. He does a daily podcast and has a great website with short posts that are specific and easy to digest.
The book "How to Grow More Vegetables" is an awesome resource that outlines an entire system for maximizing small growing spaces. It can feel like a lot if you think about implementing the whole system, but if you read it with the idea of just understanding some basic gardening principles, it is a great book to have.
I love reading this stuff too. I’m a very outdoorsy person. So, if you want a nice non portable book about trees, there’s the david allen Sisley guide to trees. For portable, there are a lot more. The Audubon book is good, it just hasn’t been updated in a longtime. The Peterson guide is more recent and is good also. I’ll try to think of the books we have. My mom has a lot and has ones from her parents too. One that’s good is the national wildlife federation book on wildflowers. A new book that cool is one called wildflowers of the Appalachian trail. On trees, I really like an old edition of the golden guide to trees that we have. The Audubon guide to eastern us trees is good. I think Peterson is better than Audubon though. There is also a forestry department book on trees of around here that I have from middle school. Don’t worry, I’ll provide links to these books.
https://www.amazon.com/Sibley-Guide-Trees-David-Allen/dp/037541519X/ref=sr_1_1?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1524481660&sr=1-1&keywords=Sibley+trees
https://www.amazon.com/GOLDEN-GUIDE-Herbert-Alexander-Martin/dp/B000KIITZK/ref=sr_1_3?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1524481704&sr=1-3&keywords=Golden+guide+trees
https://www.amazon.com/Field-Guide-Eastern-Trees-Including/dp/0395904552/ref=sr_1_1?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1524481730&sr=1-1&keywords=Peterson+trees
https://www.amazon.com/Audubon-Society-Field-Guide-American/dp/0394507606/ref=sr_1_1?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1524481747&sr=1-1&keywords=Audubon+trees
https://www.amazon.com/Wildflowers-Shenandoah-Valley-Ridge-Mountains/dp/0813908140/ref=sr_1_3?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1524481845&sr=1-3&keywords=Blue+ridge+wildflowers
https://www.amazon.com/National-Audubon-Society-American-Wildflowers/dp/0375402322/ref=sr_1_10?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1524481845&sr=1-10&keywords=Blue+ridge+wildflowers
https://www.amazon.com/National-Wildlife-Federation-Wildflowers-America/dp/1402741545/ref=sr_1_2?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1524481922&sr=1-2&keywords=national+wildlife+federation+field+guide
https://www.amazon.com/Peterson-Field-Guide-Wildflowers-North-central/dp/0395911729/ref=sr_1_1?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1524481968&sr=1-1&keywords=Peterson+wildflowers
https://www.amazon.com/Wildflowers-Appalachian-Trail-Leonard-Adkins/dp/1634040902/ref=sr_1_1?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1524481991&sr=1-1&keywords=Wildflowers+of+the+Appalachian+trail
http://www.shopdgif.com/product.cfm?uid=2051408&context=&showInactive=N
I’m going to post again once I go look at our bookshelf. This was just off the top of my head. Oh and it’s not a field guide, but you should read a walk in the woods by bill bryson.
Yes, but you'll have to do some homework, you wouldn't be able to get all the info you need from a reddit comment. Check out this book to get started. There's also https://www.reddit.com/r/MushroomGrowers. Good luck!
I am asthmatic so bad air days can be really bad for me. I have a special filter on my furnace which, was recommended by my allergist. And houseplants, lots of house plants. I have a variety of plants from philodendron, airplane plants to ficus and even an avocado tree. There are plants in most of the rooms in my home and it does make a difference.
You can add plants to your house by doing kitchen gardening. By that I mean you can plant seeds from avocados, oranges, lemons all kind of plants. This book is a great guide to growing plants for you house from the foods you eat: https://www.amazon.com/After-Dinner-Gardening-Book-Richard-Langer/dp/0898154502
I have had this book for years. I think I got it in 1974 and it is fun to read and give great guidance for growing plants.
this is the book you want to read.
The book Farmers of Forty Centuries describes how the Chinese managed to grow food for their population in an era that predated modern fertilizer.
The short answer is that no one will have a toilet that flushes anymore - all poop and urine will be collected for putting on crop land. And there will be "honey wagons" travelling through the streets of towns and cities hauling crap to the fields.
Recycling "nightsoil" directly will be needed to avoid crashing the population down to what it was in 1900 before the Haber-Bosch process was invented. Basically, the global population will be around 1,500,000,000 -which means that a lot of people will have to drop dead.
Wikipedia summary
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Haber_process
I don't think there's a consensus on the "best" book. I'm reading The Beekeeper's Handbook at the moment, and it's very good.
Natural Beekeeping is also quite good, if you want to try a more natural approach.
Mother Earth News has a reader question that mentioned 3 years for dog mushers in Alaska to compost it completely, due to the cold climate, but an Ag extension test got it down to 4-8 weeks. They couldn't say for certain whether it would kill roundworm because they couldn't find any infected stool to work with, but theoretically if the pile gets to 140F it will be clean. The six months I read in this book Holy Shit, I believe, but it has been awhile!
All of the posts so far are great. I would also suggest to anyone with less space, look into miniature or smaller breeds of certain livestock, possibly. There are quite a few books on working to get more out of small plots when it comes to gardening and farming. Rotational grazing and other wise pasture management can help you get the most out of your space without turning it into a manure-coated moonscape! There are many more, but here are a few of my favorites to homesteaders starting out. Others have already mentioned some I really like as well.
Desert or Paradise - Sepp Holzer
*Sepp usually works with larger tracts of land, but his methods and ideas often still apply to smaller scale.
The Self Sufficient Life and How to Live It - John Seymour This one talks about a variety of DIY homesteading things. It also gives some basic layout and space allocation ideas for different sizes of homesteads. They're a suggestion, not an absolute template. Customize to your needs as with everything.
The Resilient Gardener - Carole Deppe Carole discusses growing the majority of food for her and her flock of dual-purpose (meat and egg) ducks. She's also a scientist and shows ways to work more efficiently. She has a couple other great books and sells seeds when she has extra. Her method of growing certain types of garbanzo beans to pop into a nutty treat is something I'd like to try. http://www.caroldeppe.com/
Also check out this site. They grow quite a bit on a well-tended suburban-size lot. It's about 1/5 an acre.
http://urbanhomestead.org/
Start with bubble buckets. There are a lot of guides online. I can't post any here at work since the majority of them are posted to MJ growing forums. Speaking of, they're going to be a your go-to reference if you're getting into hydroponics. I like ICMag's forum.
You're going to need nutrient solution (many options here), a 5 gallon plastic bucket, an aquarium pump, an air stone, tubing for the pump and air stone, some kind of growing media (hydroton for example), some way to check pH and a net pot that can snap onto the top where the lid used to be. Your net pot can be improvised; IIRC the bucket top is 10" in diameter. Check your dimensions!
I'm assuming indoor growing here... Do not cheap out on your lights. It will frustrate you and you won't get near the results you would if you use good old soil and sun. If you're planning on doing lettuce or spinach you can get away with a lower wattage light source (say, 75W CFL). Tomatoes are going to need good light penetration power that you'd get from HID lighting. LEDs are cool but are a few years off from being a reasonable solution.
Make sure you have good airflow and a way to vent the hot air produced from your lights. You should be able to cool CFLs with box /oscillating fans but that won't work with HID. You will absolutely have to vent them. People neglect airflow more than anything in hydroponics. It's a big mistake.
Pythium root rot is going to be one of your main concerns. You can add hydrogen peroxide to your nutrient solution to combat this. If you ever see your roots turn brown then you can pretty much throw that plant out or cut the roots off and try to re-root it using whichever applicable propagation technique. Try to keep your setup as clean as possible. Wipe down everything with 10% bleach solution and rinse often. Treat your growing area like a lab.
If you get serious about it and/or have a notion to scale up your production please read Hydroponic Food Production. It is not a cheap hobby and anyone that claims otherwise is blowing smoke up your ass. Good luck.
One of the handiest texts I had to get for my horticulture classes was Plant Propagation: Principles and Practices. The 2017 version only costs 13 USD new and is pretty much the same textbook as the 2019 version. If she really wants to go into horticulture propagation, I really recommend this to supplement a program. It has great info on the hows and whys of cuttings, root stocks, and most common species of herbaceous and woody plants.
Vermicompost is compost made using worms. It's worm poo, basically. It's excellent fertilizer for house plants. There's a ton of info online if you're interested, or this is pretty much the standard reference.
If you just put apples and stuff in your plant pots they're just going to rot in there and possibly attract fruit flies and other pests. Indoor plant soil doesn't have enough life in it (worms, sowbugs, etc) to break down stuff like that.
Were are you located? I think most states in the US have agricultural extensions that offer outreach programs, classes, etc. It was originally geared towards commercial growers/foresters, but they're very friendly to the hobbyist in my experience.
A book i've seen recommended everywhere (which i've yet to buy myself) is the Grafters Handbook.
Hydroponic Food Production 7^th Edition by Howard Resh
This is my go-to reccomendation, if you want to go beyond what's taught here, simply study chemistry and or biology
This book should tell you everything you need to knowhttp://www.amazon.com/gp/aw/d/0932551718/ref=mp_s_a_1_1?qid=1370405421&sr=8-1&pi=SL75
Sorry about the formatting, im on mobile. There are also many videos online that will show you what you need. Having done this only once before, I can tell you its extremely gratifying. I will post a link tomorrow for the videos I used.
/r/permaculture and /r/forestgardening are ones I've looked at, How to Make a Forest Garden and Forest Gardening are the two books most people seem to talk about, I haven't gotten around to reading them yet :(
I am just getting started into grafting myself. I'll tell you how it turns out in several years. I did get this book, and it is very informative.
Very nice book. Gave you a 5 star review just now. If you get the chance to check out my new book I would greatly appreciate it! I'm looking for reviews. Thanks
http://www.amazon.com/The-Urban-Gardener-gardening-vegetables-ebook/dp/B01AQBDRWA/ref=zg_bs_8624209011_f_15
Second the "Square Foot Gardening" book. Also check out "Earthly Delights", "Lasagna Gardening for Small Spaces", and "Vertical Gardening".
Hey there!
I live in Ontario, so I'm a little North of you. I'm a hobbyist beekeeper with five hives. I help my mentor out (who has ten hives) too. We make some honey, but we do it more for the hobby.
> Is it possible to let the bees survive the winter on their own supply?
Absolutely. This is how my bees do it. I don't feed sugar or anything like that to them. They live off entirely their own supply. I take a little bit from them throughout the summer, but stop after Labour Day. In fact I've read that feeding sugar is detrimental to the hive's health.
> Which hive box is the best option to use for a beginner?
I suppose this depends on what is available in your area. I recommend the style of hive other keepers use in your area. I've only had experienced with pine wood boxes ranging in thickness from 7/8 to 1 & 1/8. My mentor is trying those foam hive boxes this winter. I can't report on how they perform just yet.
> Is early March or early April a good time to get started on placing my queen inside the hive?
You usually don't buy a queen to get started. You purchase a nuc or a package of bees. I started by buying a couple nucs. My mentor gave me a couple splits too. See what is available in your area. The local keepers won't sell you a nuc if they're not ready / it's too early.
> Really any points or tips would be greatly appreciated as I'm excited to get started.
I strongly recommend reading a few books on the topic. I've read a few over the summer/fall/winter prior to me getting my first hives and they really pumped me up for the hobby. I recommend to start:
Natural Beekeeping by Conrad Ross
The Practical Beekeeper by Michael Bush
These books go against the traditional line of thought of considering feeding sugar and pre-emptively striking with antibiotics and other medicines to be normal practice. I am still a new keeper, but so far with the three years I've had my hives I haven't had a problem going natural. Also means you don't have to play with nasty things you don't want to play with as a hobbyist.
The Michael Bush book's content can be found on the Michael Bush website for free. I prefer reading paper, and bought the book, but you can still learn plenty from his site: Bush Farms.
Good luck!
> http://www.amazon.com/gp/aw/d/1590282418?cache=ce3142468b03545c10a957e22cf7266d&pi=SY200_QL40&qid=1407729669&sr=8-1#ref=mp_s_a_1_1
And if that wasn't enough, you could still try http://www.amazon.com/Modern-Rustic-Homesteading-Greenhouses-Self-Sufficiency-ebook/dp/B00M8UFFT6/ref=sr_1_2?ie=UTF8&qid=1407821257&sr=8-2&keywords=gardening
This should do you.
https://www.mushrooms.com/
https://www.thehawkseye.com/
http://shrooms-to-go.com/
https://www.amazon.com/Psilocybin-Mushroom-Growers-Handbook-Enthusiasts/dp/0932551068/ref=sr_1_4?ie=UTF8&qid=1466619391&sr=8-4&keywords=psilocybin+spores
https://www.amazon.com/Psilocybin-Mushroom-Handbook-Outdoor-Cultivation/dp/0932551718/ref=pd_sim_14_2?ie=UTF8&dpID=51ayZwCt4zL&dpSrc=sims&preST=_AC_UL160_SR105%2C160_&refRID=5DF57AENFAR3N3834QG0
I can't agree more with u/SherrifOfNothingtown's questions. I would only add a couple more:
- For most farmers, farming requires community. Will you be able to rent a tractor at both sites? Will you be able to trade some of your product for something else? True self-sufficiency is difficult, especially up north. I tend to think more about the community I'd be relying on.
- I don't want to rush your relationship with your girlfriend, but are kids are in the picture? That could change the whole calculation. My wife and I were looking at larger plots of land, but the best schools are closer to cities.
One final thought: I'm personally toying with John Jeavons' Grow Biointensive Method and will start a plot in the 2020 growing season. The whole design of that farming technique is to grow food for a family on very, very small plots. Could be worth checking out. "How to Grow More Vegetables"
Same book on Amazon UK
get a copy of Richard Langer's After Dinner Gardening Book
http://www.amazon.com/After-Dinner-Gardening-Book-Richard-Langer/dp/0898154502
When he wrote it, he too was living in an apartment in NYC and started growing things from the seeds and stems of this kitchen. It is a great read and was pretty amazing what you can get to grow.
HOWEVER
this video shows you why you need to start with unaltered food products. Langer didnt have to worry about what people were doing to his tubers back in 1969.
Pick up a copy of Worms Eat My Garbage by Mary Appelhof.
http://www.amazon.com/Worms-Eat-Garbage-Mary-Appelhof/dp/0942256107
Make sure you are using the right species of worm. Keep in shade! Make sure your container is well drained. Don't put a truckload of new material in all at once. When trying a new scrap for the first time, add a little at a time to see if it's okay for your worms. Water when dry, drain when wet. When there is too much worm compost in your bin, take half of it out and replace with new breeding. Repeat.
I read the book Lasagna Gardening for Small Spaces, and it has some really handy tables for what size containers are best suited for your vegetables. Check to see if your local library has it. Or, head to B&N and just skim the tables in the book.
Holy shit!
Funny you ask this. Just today I got out my copies of Forest Gardening: Cultivating an Edible Landscape and How to Make a Forest Garden.
I bought these a few years ago, read through them and kept the thought in the back of my head. Just today I began a much needed book organization and these came out on top of the 'read again' pile.
The concept is solid and if you will be on land long term this is a great way to go. I would keep a traditional vegetable garden in tandem though.
Sorry to not have any real experience.