Grow Great Vegetables Indiana

This is a good, locally/regionally focused gardening book for folks who are either new to gardening, new to gardening in Indiana, or want to get serious about vegetable gardening in the fickle landscape of Indiana. As a lifelong native to the state, I have lived in all regions of the state and know from experience how gardening differs from the northern, to the central, to the southern regions of the state. It's straightforward and easy to understand. It answers a lot of the questions about soil composition, hardiness zones, etc. and how these change throughout the state. I will buy this for my library and expect that it will circulate well.

Grow Great Vegetables in Indiana is a regionally tailored home gardening guide for producing vegetables for taste and nutrition and to increase self-reliance and food security. This is one of a series of regionally/state specific guides released & reformatted by Timber Press. Edited by Bevin Cohen, it's due out in May 2023, runs 208 pages and will be available in paperback and ebook formats. It's based on an earlier release Vegetable Gardening in the Midwest by Michael VanderBrug, reformatted and edited for Indiana gardeners. All of the guides in this series follow the same format.

This guide is arranged by seasons with a chapter for each month. The introductory chapter (~13% of the page content) covers garden planning, climates and subzones in Indiana, as well as very general gardening advice. Worth noting that a majority of the content of the books in this series based on/edited from the same volume (in this case Vegetable Gardening in the Midwest) contain overlapping information and there are only slight differences in content and recommendations.

The monthly sections include tasks for each month, potential problems and troubleshooting, planning and placement of the garden plot, harvesting and more.

The third section of the book is a regional guide to choosing vegetables and specific varieties which will thrive in the area.

There's a resource list (slanted to readers in the Midwest), a bibliography and further reading list, USDA based hardiness zonal map, and an index. The photography is crisp, clear, and abundant. This is a well crafted book which will provide gardeners with hours of blissful dreaming as well as serving as a valuable troubleshooting guide. For readers who have the aforementioned Gardening in the Midwest, much of the content is verbatim here. For readers unfamiliar with the earlier title, there's a lot of worthwhile info.

Four stars. Very well done.

Disclosure: I received an ARC at no cost from the author/publisher for review purposes

“They imagine gardening as something only for those born with green thumbs - some mysterious ability given only to the luckiest people. I am here to state for the record this is false. Anyone can learn to be a gardener.”

Wow! This book certainly has it all. I’ve read several intro to gardening books and can attest that this one is complete with tidbits of information not present in other books. For example I found the soil composition test very interesting and will be trying on my own soil soon.

Grow Great Vegetables Indiana is thorough without being too wordy or advanced for someone starting out in gardening. This books has everything you need to know about soul, water, sun and shade, composting, growing seasons and temperatures, tools, pests and diseases, etc. The planning section of the book has everything from garden design to crop rotation to planting methods and more.

Perhaps what I enjoyed most from this book was the month by month overview. Each month lists tasks to complete or plan out and what can be harvested. Presenting the information in this way makes it feel more manageable to a new gardener and reduces the intimidation of starting a new garden.

The last part of the book is the Edibles A to Z chart section, which shows the planting and harvesting times for all the vegetables that can be grown in the state. This would be great to print off to use as a reference sheet. Following this chart is a collection of one to two page excerpts detailing more information about each fruit or vegetable.

If you live in Indiana and want to start gardening this book is an absolute must! I’m confident even the most experienced gardeners could glean some new insight from Bevin Cohen’s Grow Great Vegetables Indiana.