Grow Great Vegetables Minnesota and Wisconsin

Grow Great Vegetables in Minnesota & Wisconsin 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 212 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 MN & WI 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 MN & WI, 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 here.

Four stars. Very well done.

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

Thank you so much to NetGalley and Timber Press Publishing for an ARC of this book in exchange for an honest review.

I requested this book to review because I am an avid gardener living in Minnesota. As someone who has read many books on gardening, I am always looking for new ones to devour. The best part of this book for me was that it was specifically for gardening in the part of the country that I live in. I appreciated that there was information for the zone that I garden in and tips for growing in our challenging climate that not all gardening books address (short growing season and winter planning for instance).

I highly recommend this book to both beginning and experienced gardeners living in Minnesota and Wisconsin for a month-to-month guide for growing and maintenance as well as beautiful photos and informative charts and graphs.