Books like Container gardening for dummies by Bill Marken

Packed with 650 full-color photographs and illustrations, a wide-ranging and handy reference book for readers with limited space for a garden covers garden design and planning, window boxes and container gardens, and more than 150 specialty plants.

As grocery prices rise and people search for new sources of local food, the popularity of vegetable gardening is at a new high. At the same time, ongoing interest in Asian cuisine continues to fuel demand for fresh Chinese vegetables and herbs.Growing Chinese Vegetables in Your Own Backyard addresses both interests with plant-by-plant advice on planting, growing, and harvesting more than 40 Chinese vegetables and herbs, from the familiar snow pea to the still exotic Chinese pumpkin. For every plant, the reader will also find simple recipes and tips for culinary uses. An extensive seed source list directs readers to reliable retailers for the primary plants and many delicious varieties.Adding to their appeal, many Chinese herbs and vegetables are very easy to grow in containers as well as in traditional beds. Container gardeners will find a section dedicated to plants that thrive in containers and specific advice on how to keep plants healthy, happy, and productive in their small gardens.Home vegetable gardeners looking for a new challenge will love the chapter on water gardens. Water chestnuts, taro, arrowhead, and Chinese lotus can be grown successfully in tubs as small as 25 gallons. Best of all, water gardens never need to be watered, mulched, or weeded.In traditional beds, in containers, or in small pools, Chinese vegetables thrive in all sorts of backyard gardens. 

A practical guide to growing abundant, organic vegetables and herbs, the 10th Anniversary Edition expands the original with new crops, extended season tips, and fresh photography for home gardeners across North America.

A sweeping history of how a band of 18‑century naturalists turned Britain into the world’s garden hub, tracing their ties to America, new plant introductions and the rise of botanical science.

Barbara Pleasant and Deborah L. Martin turn the compost bin upside down with their liberating system of keeping compost heaps right in the garden, rather than in some dark corner behind the garage. The compost and the plants live together from the beginning in a nourishing, organic environment. The authors' bountiful, compost-rich gardens require less digging, weeding, mulching, and even less planting. And here's one of the best parts — no more backbreaking slogs from compost bin to garden. The authors even identify the plants that benefit most from compost and how the elements of a composted garden work together.A natural Six-Way Compost Gardening System provides the ruling principles for successfully improving every garden with healthy compost. Readers will learn how to:1. Choose labor-saving sites that keep gardens and compost piles as close to one another as possible.2. Work with the compostable riches produced at home. Every yard and kitchen produces plenty of material — easily identified with at-a-glance charts — for a great start.3. Help composting critters do their work by balancing ingredients, adding high-nitrogen meals when needed, and keeping the compost moist.4. Reuse recycling bin items, such as large plastic buckets and cardboard boxes, as composting equipment.5. Keep diversity in the mix. The magic is in the variety of the components and how they work together to create "gardener's gold."6. Customize composting to suit specific garden needs, always concentrating first on soil care.Adhering to these guidelines, Pleasant and Martin bring readers on a thorough, informative tour of materials and innovative techniques, leading the way to an efficient and rewarding home gardening system. Their methods are sure to help gardeners turn average vegetable plots into rich incubators of healthy produce, bursting with fresh flavor, and flower beds into rich tapestries of bountiful blooms all season long.

Making People-Friendly Towns explores the way our towns and cities, particularly their central areas, look and feel to all their users and discusses their design, maintenance and management. Francis Tibbalds provides a new philosophical approach to the problem, suggesting that places as a whole matter much more than the individual components that make up the urban environment such as buildings, roads and parks. This informative book suggests the way forward for professionals, decision-makers and all those who care about the future of our urban environment and points the reader in the direction of a wealth of living examples of successful town planning.