permaculture

Atlantic Canada can be tough on gardeners, but you have to admire our resolve. As soon as the frost melts, hardy Atlantic Canadians are our digging, weeding and planting with dreams of summer vegetables in their heads. To help your results match your imagination, here are five gardening books written just for gardeners fighting, er, working with a tough climate:

Atlantic Coastal Gardening, Denise Adams. Adams has been working in gardens on the Atlantic coast for pretty much her entire adult life. Readers will surely benefit from her multitude of experience with gathering and growing seeds, composting creatively and even her recipes for harvest time. She engages her readers with a personal and practical writing style that will inspire the first-time gardener and the grizzled veteran alike.

Plants for Atlantic Gardens, Jodi DeLong. Popular gardening columnist Jodi DeLong understands the unique challenges of gardening in this region and delves deep, providing growing requirements, hardiness, height and bloom period for perennials, shrubs and trees. Moreover, readers will learn about each plant’s natural history on the East Coast, find anecdotes of DeLong’s own growing experiences and get a glimpse, through 200 colour photos, of how the plants will look in full bloom.

Permaculture for the Rest of Us: Abundant Living on Less Than an Acre, Jenni Blackmore.In readable, humourous prose, Blackmore tells shares her 20-year adventure creating her own East Coast permaculture homestead and bolstering her family’s self-sufficiency and food security. “If we can do it, you can do,” she writes. Like other great books on growing, she mixes straightforward lessons with her own experiences in soil-building, natural pest control, basic greenhouse building, and even managing small livestock.

Grow Organic: A Simple Guide to Nova Scotia Vegetable Gardening, Elizabeth Peirce. Peirce hones in on wet and foggy Nova Scotia with practical advice for the relatively short growing season and the vegetables that grow best in this climate. She goes beyond the usual provision of hot tips and interviews experienced gardeners and farmers from around the province. Grow Organic is filled with photos and recipes and is a useful guide for gardeners of all experience and skill levels.

Summer Vegetables: 40 Recipes for Fine Dining at Home, Elaine Elliot (Photos by Justin Beveridge). OK, once you grow your fantastical Eden of delectable delights, what pray tell is the best way to use all that fresh from your plot produce? Elliot provides a wide variety of recipes – from butternut squash rissoto to snow pea and potato salad with mint-pesto dressing – for your summer vegetables from master chefs but adapted for your kitchen.