Vegetable Gardening for beginners

Browsing through a bookstore is a joy. I loved libraries as child; we had no bookstores in our rural Arkansas town. As soon as I became an adult, I started haunting both new and used bookstores, though my budget leaned more to the latter. Novels, poems, short stories, non-fiction - I loved it all.

During the past two decades, I've started spending a lot of time in gardening sections. A week or so ago, I was in a Beaumont bookstore looking for books to teach me how to be a vegetable gardener. I've planted the occasional tomato or onion, but never a "real" vegetable garden. That will change this fall. At the bookstore, I found two I liked: "The Complete Idiot's Guide to Vegetable Gardening" (by daughter/father team Darla Price Bowman and Carl A. Price, Alpha, $16.95) and "The Veggie Gardener's Answer Book" by Barbara W. Ellis (Storey, $14.95)

The Idiot's Guide is an easy-to-read book on everything from planning to planting to pest control. The Veggie Gardener's Answer book is just what the sub-title says: solutions to every problem you'll ever face and answers to every question you'll ever ask. I'm betting I can come up with at least one problem not in the book, knowing a thing or two about problems (being a woman who once weedeated her calf). I also am known for asking questions, so it will be interesting to see if I run across some weird ones (also knowing a thing or two about weirdness).

I like both books and recommend them.