Grow Great Vegetables Ohio

Beginning gardeners and even some long-time gardeners will find useful tips here for growing a healthy garden and maintaining it through the seasons. While this book features Ohio, a state with a long history of agriculture and an abundant diversity of crops, the series includes many other books tailored to individual states.

The book begins with information on understanding climate and microclimates, basics for gardening, and suggestions for garden planning before launching into a month-by-month look at your garden. Each month includes to-do lists for planning, preparing/maintaining, planting, and harvesting, as well as a more detailed information on topics ranging from seed starting to seed saving, from extending the growing season with a small hoop house to nurturing the soil with compost, mulch, and cover crops. The book also includes very useful planting/harvesting charts along with 1-2 page profiles of plants from Arugula to Zucchini. The resource section gives information on seed companies and web sites along with places for other garden supplies.

Overall, this book provides a handy quick reference guide that will meet the needs of most home gardeners, especially those just starting out.

Thank you, Timber Press and NetGalley, for providing an eARC of this book. Opinions expressed here are solely my own.

Well this was interesting! As a gardener in Ohio I wondered what I could learn from a book like this and there’s plenty packed in here I didn’t know!

Believe me, some of the plants in here I never even thought about growing on my own and I might have to start - I mean GARLIC fresh from the garden?! Yes. Please. This book also includes resources for additional reading, amazing photos, reputable seed companies, monthly checklists and so much more! The amount that I learned was honestly shocking to me and I can’t wait to implement what I’ve learned!

Thanks NetGalley for the ebook!

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Grow Great Vegetables Ohio 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 Ohio 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. This would make a good selection for public or school library acquisition, smallholders, home gardeners, community garden libraries, and similar.

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

In Grow Great Vegetables Ohio, the author assumes you are a total beginner which is great because it includes easy to follow advice. As a newcomer to Zone 6 gardening I found the monthly calendar of activities particularly useful. And I could see myself coming back to this book time and time again for inspiration and information. I'm so excited to get my hands in the dirt and start growing vegetables after reading this book.
Disclosure: I received an ARC at no cost from the author/publisher for review purposes, but all opinions are my own.

This book is super helpful and definitely one I was looking for. I like having an Ohio based book in my arsenal for when I start my veggie growing!

This one takes a different approach than what I've read in the past as it goes month by month. I actually found that unique AND super helpful! Like when you plan, gather what you need (and it tells you what you need), when to start doing things, and more!

I noticed that they had books like this for specific states and I would highly recommended checking out the book that is for your state. Whether you're a novice or expert, you won't be disappointed!

Thank you Netgalley and Timber Press for an ARC. All opinions are mine and mine alone. :)