Month-By-Month Gardening in Minnesota

This book is great if you want to hit the ground running. It is comprehensive, covering lawn care, trees, gardening, houseplants, vegetables and more. Its clearly organized so it is easy to use. It tells you what you should be doing NOW, so you can get up to speed very quickly without getting overwhelmed by too much information. As a life-long apartment dweller, I was starting from complete ignorance when I bought a house and had to learn right away how to care for my lawn and existing landscape plants. This book was *indispensible* and my constant reference during my first two years of homeownership. I still refer to it regularly for timing issues and the helpful tips specific to our MN conditions. Thanks to this book I haven't killed a single one of the plants that came with my house. Suggestion for future editions: Currently the book is organized into sections according to plant type (annuals, bulbs, herbs, lawn, trees, etc), and then the months of the year are found within each plant section. I have found when using the book, I will read about April, for example, for each of the plant types, so I am skipping all over the book looking for all of the April listings. In future editions, I think it would be helpful if the editors reorganized the sections so that a reader could go to a given month, and then each plant type would be in successive pages within "April". The content has been GREAT and, despite my suggestion above, the book is easy to use in its current format.