With tips covering everything from artemisia to vetiver grass, "What Can I Do with My Herbs?" offers a fun and lively look at forty common herbs and the creative and useful things people do with them. Each herb description includes the plant's history and a list of popular uses, as well as helpful information about how to successfully grow them, how to enjoy them in the garden (watch the swallowtail butterflies and caterpillars that love fennel), or how to use them in the kitchen (substitute the yellow flowers of calendula for saffron). Judy Barrett even shares some of her favorite recipes,...

"The wonderful diversity offered by heirloom plants can help you create a deeply satisfying garden that looks good, preserves historic plants, and provides you with color, shade, food, flowers, herbs, and an all-around happy place."

Garden writer Judy Barrett opens her second book with a conversation about the characteristics of heirloom plants and why their toughness, ease of propagation, and wide variety make them ideal to grow in any garden. Add their occasional oddities, complex flavors and scents, histories, and family stories, and these plants can become as valuable and...

Veteran gardener Judy Barrett offers readers more than a hundred simple recipes for using, enjoying, and enhancing the bounty of their gardens. These easy recipes--some old family favorites, others created by Barrett, and still others from cooks and gardeners she admires--encourage home gardening for everyone.In her familiar and relaxed style, Barrett shows readers how to use the plentiful harvests of common vegetables (such as beans, squashes, cucumbers, and peppers), how to experiment with more exotic plants (like ginger and jujubes), and what to prepare for the freezer or pantry once the...

"We hear roses are hard to grow. . . . We hear they require constant care and treatment. . . . Depending on where we live, we hear they can't stand the heat . . . the cold . . . the humidity . . . the arid air. The list of reasons not to grow roses is long, yet we persevere."--from the first chapter
Most gardeners have tried, with more or less success, to grow roses. For a plant that has been in cultivation all over the world for millennia, roses have an oddly persistent reputation for being finicky and disease-prone, difficult to establish, and in need of constant tending.
And then...

Veteran gardener and author Judy Barrett s book dispels the idea that growing plants we can eat is harder than growing plants we can t eat and introduces readers to the idea of placing plants that can produce in an ordinary landscape, a harvest of herbs, vegetables, fruits, and nuts.
Whether buying a few tomato plants for a patio container or exploring the idea of a frontyard or kitchen plot, incorporating plants that bear food into the landscape has real appeal, even to weekend gardeners.
For the more ambitious, Barrett offers a primer on the various kinds of garden beds that are...