Burpee the Complete Vegetable & Herb Gardener: A Guide to Growing Your Garden Organically

Very similar in content and structure to Ortho's Complete Guide to Vegtables. The difference comes in the experience the writer has growing and maitaining the various plants. I find using both books gives different perspectives for growing and caretaking of plants but conatins the same basic information. For instance the Ortho book has better Garden Setup and maintenance data, and raw data on the various gardening aspects like fertilizer and pest eradiction. The Burpee book focuses on plant and cultivar details a little better. The book is filled with plenty high quality pictures of plants and their fruits using multiple pictures of various cultivars within plant families.The book is geared for both beginners in gardening and the handy do it yourselfer types. Chapters progress you through the steps from site selection and plant selection to harvesting, crop rotating and soil conditioning over winter and indoor greenhouse seed starting. The book also contains references to various cultivars within vegtable species, so a beginner gardener could not only successfully select and grow well know vegtables, but could also grow and use the odd often hard to find fresh herbs. I consistently flip between both this book and Ortho's book. I find using them in this manner makes the information extracted complimentary and thorough.

I've dabbled with vegetable gardening all my life. Now that I'm retired, I wanted to get serious about it and expand my postage stamp garden. It doesn't take a lot of skill to grow tomatoes this close to California's central valleys and I wanted to go beyond the slam dunk crops and grow a variety of things that I enjoy eating. The Burpee book is perfect for my purposes. It has two major parts; the first section deals with gardening in general and provides a broad base of information on how to prepare for and raise your own vegetables. The second part is an alphabetical tour of more than 100 of the most commonly grown vegetables with a general description of each vegetable or herb and its varieties, and some specifics on how to grow and harvest that particular plant. I was looking for a single reference book that would get me into some serious vegetable gardening, and I hit the jackpot with this book. It is definitely a keeper. I won't say that I'll never need another book on vegetable gardening, but I should be so lucky as to live long enough to outgrow this one!

This book could easily be worth $50 and it would be worth the investment. I've been a gardener for a number of years, and out of the entire bookshelf of gardening books that i own, this book, hands down, is far more comprehensive than all of them put together. The first section of the book, a complete book in intself, will teach you just about everything you ever wanted to know about almost every aspect of gardening, and is comprehensive enough that if you learned it all you would be well on your way to becoming a master gardener. The second section, the plant portraits, gives you more information about each vegatable and herb in your garden than you could ever dream of knowing about, and more information than you would even be able to find. Like tomatoes? there are almost eight pages dedicated to them alone. The entire book is filled with beautiful color photographs, and it is packed with tons of hard-core information. Not like the "fluff" and tons of meaningless words without any content that practically all the other books are filled with. Recently i have moved to all hydroponics, and most of the rest of my gardening books are now about worthless to me, however this book is still prooving to be an invaluable source of information. The only thing this book does not cover very well is insects and plant diseases, although it still does quite a bit better than most gardening books do. Of course, if it did, this book would probably be over 700 pages long, "complete vegatable and herb gardener" style. The book "The organic gardeners handbook of natural insect and disease control" is a very good book on this subject. Spend the money and get both of these books. You wont need anything else.

"Complete"is not an overstatement. This volume on organic gardening says it all, is written in a readable and entertaining style, and is beautifully illustrated. As a reference it is as essential to the gardener as a dictionary is to a reader. it's the best gift I've had in years!

Burpee, had taken the style of their seed catalog and mixed in practical advice for your garden. One who is a beginner or an advanced gardener can learn from this guide. It is inspiring to look at and makes you want to get your fingers, green!