An excellent and informative book, very useful for both beginner and experienced gardeners.
It was a useful read and I strongly recommend it.
Many thanks to the publisher and Netgalley for this ARC, all opinions are mine.

I was only in the 1st chapter, Creating Your Garden Ecosystem, and was thinking, “Oh, no! Another boring technical book.” But, OMG, it is not a bit boring; it is absolutely fantastic, just in 3 pages I realized that!!!! It’s talking about toads, and bats, and easy to understand bees. I’m wanting to run out right now, in the rain and the cold, and see if I can get these 3 things started! (I want to immediately go out and start, but I manage to gather up a little bit of sanity, and decide to just take notes instead. But, wow! I’m really excited about the bees. Who knew that all flowers were different and that some actually lure pests away from your veggie garden?! Gardening for Geeks takes you from the point where your garden is just a thought to what to do with your finished products. Lots of colorful pictures and easy to understand suggestions for getting the most from your gardening experiences. A good book to keep in your gardening reference library.

Gardening for Geeks is a reformat and re-release of a tutorial and tips guide aimed at organic gardeners. Originally published in 2013, this edition from Fox Chapel Publishing, due out 11th Feb 2020 is 248 pages and will be available in paperback and ebook formats. A quick comparison with the first edition shows a profound reformatting along with updated photos and new content in the form of new plant profiles and project photos. This edition is significantly more polished and graphically appealing. I own the original edition and I am planning on buying this one as well.

The layout is logical and accessible and builds from the ground up (pun intended, sorry): garden ecosystems, beds, soil, planning the season, urban gardening, more planning, irrigation, plant support and training (trellises, cages, etc), pest control, harvest and uses for produce. These are supported and expanded with a solid section of appendices for composting, seeds, a tomato planting crib, and mount (freeform raised bed) planting. Packed into the back of the book is also a concise bibliography and resource list (with links), a glossary, and a cross referenced index, along with a short author bio/mission statement. The resource list is solid and will give readers a lot of additional info sources. The index is also well made and I didn't find any mistakes or omissions during my testing. I always test out indices when I'm reviewing nonfiction because I know the frustration of *knowing* that I read something in the book and not being able to find it again later.

Well made, a huge upgrade to the first edition (which is a good book in its own rights), accessible and fun language, graphically appealing, and scientifically accurate. This one's a winner.

Five stars. Well done.

If you are a geek, this is not the book you are looking for. You can go about your business. Move along. That adapted Star Wars reference may be geekier than this entire book.

I'm not sure I would have titled this book "Gardening for Geeks". I am a geek and I'm an avid gardener and nothing in this book was above the level of a beginner and not very much of it appealed to me as a geek other than a really fun Batman bat house and a few references. The gardening knowledge is lacking and barely covers beginning gardening, much less gardening that could be considered advanced or geeky. The book doesn't even make a great reference as it's filled with pretty stock photos of perfect crops, no photos of what diseases look like, and the gaps in knowledge are staggering. Aside from basic pest control, there's not a lot about what can go wrong in gardening. In order to learn about diseases that plants may get, you have to look at the rather short profile list of garden plants. This book doesn't tell you how to grow berries but does put berries on the example planting charts. Berries are not mentioned in the plant profiles. Only six herbs are mentioned in the herb profile and everything that is grown in this book is common and not very advanced, and many plants are recommended to be grown but not profiled. It's just all over the place.

What else is in this book? There are some recipes as well. And brief information on setting the right aesthetic for your garden, bats, and bee hives, getting wildlife to your yard, etc. A lot of space is wasted by those aforementioned vegetable and herb profiles, by the way. Most of that information is available on the back of the package of seeds and the rest of the information in the plant profile isn't really useful for gardening geeks, and isn't detailed enough for beginners. Either way, the gaps in information will send you looking for a better book. I'm really not sure for whom this book is meant. It never finds its audience. I'm quite disappointed and hope that the author will do a revised or advanced edition.

Fantastic book for beginner gardeners and even those who have been gardening for years and want a refresh on some things they may have forgotten. This book starts from the beginning of planning and goes all the way to using the crops by canning or recipes to try. I would love to own this book!

I'm new to gardening and this book was the perfect tool to get going and give me the confidence to finally try gardening. It focuses on organic vegetable gardening. From step one this book has all the information you will need to get your garden up and running. Including beautiful illustrations and photos. You will also love the appendixes which is chalk full of DIY tips.

Great book for beginners like me. At times the information seemed a bit excessive and I found myself skipping ahead. Also the photos on the page where often unrelated to the writings which left me scratching my head a little. Over all a great starter book that ill be sure to reference in the spring.

This is a great book for garden reference. As a Master Gardener and garden educator, I would recommended this book for anyone who is interested in vegetable gardening. It covers all of the information that I share with our teen and school gardeners and is well organized and illustrated. I will be using it as a reference in our garden this summer!

Thank you to Fox Chapel Publishing/CompanionHouse Books and NetGalley for an ARC in exchange for an honest review.

This is good, basic information. attractively put together, for beginning gardeners who want to use organic methods. I consider myself a balcony enthusiast, and my knowledge until now has come more through trial and error, so parts of this book were extremely helpful. I also enjoyed the appendixes with DIY tips.

However, it did feel as though the author was trying to cover too much ground for one book, by addressing any size of garden from balcony through to largish plots of land. One other small niggle was with the photos - they were beautiful, but I would have liked pictures more specific to the text, rather than stock photos.

This book sounds great and the cover is beautiful; the download document wouldn't open and there was no widget to send it to my kindle.
It's a shame! I was looking forward to reading it.

Pretty good basic information for new gardeners who want to use organic methods to grow the usual American crops. I consider myself a seasoned gardener and a geek, and didn't find this particularly geeky or helpful in terms of new material, but there were some very cool elements to it. I didn't feel that it gives all you need to be successful. There were a lot of plants profiled where the instructions for growing and troubleshooting didn't include anything about my common problems with them (for instance, carrots get temperamental if the soil isn't very loose and I always have problems with my potatoes even though they're supposed to be so easy and I do hilling and all that jazz). I also grow a ton of stuff that's not covered, so do consider it a very basic intro in terms of crops. It goes into a few things like square foot gardening and some French gardening techniques, but not a lot into permaculture.

It's geeky I suppose in terms of providing detailed information, but I thought it would be geeky in terms of fun science kind of stuff (for that kind of garden geekery, I highly recommend the new book Garden Alchemy). All in all though, a great, thorough guide.

One more small complaint is that it could use photos for specific instructions. There are a lot of color photos but it's the classic book where they sometimes use stock photos so when you actually need photos of all the kinds of ways to make trellises, for instance, there aren't any. I'm always frustrated with books that use stock photos for this reason, because sometimes things just don't come through well in text and a random picture of one kind of something doesn't really help (this is similar to the new cookbook trend of filling a book with artistic color stock photos of raw vegetables instead of the finished actual recipes). There are times in the book where the author uses relevant pictures for some plans, but I wish other areas had more pertinent photos. That said, there are a lot of color photos and they add to the book.

I read a temporary digital ARC of this book for the purpose of review.

I love my vegetable garden so to get a book that focuses on that, was awesome. If you love your garden too, this is a great book for you. I loved all the tips in this book from testing my soil to how to make a worm bed. They even talked about popular vegetables and their needs. They also included DIY things to make for your garden.