annieb123
Written on May 12, 2019
The Field Guide to Urban Gardening is a new gardening and tutorial guide to maximizing yields and utilizing every space to produce food, flowers and greenery with diverse techniques like hydroponics, vertical gardens, balconies, rooftops, and indoors. Due out 14th May 2019 from Quarto on their Cool Springs imprint, it's 224 pages and will be available in paperback format.
In times of increasing food insecurity and distrust/boredom with the incredibly limited selections available to most people who live in urban areas, coupled with the psychological and health benefits of being in contact with growing plants and having more control over our food as well as the sense of accomplishment that comes from being more self sufficient, it's easy to see why more people are making a conscious choice to garden. People in urban areas face more challenges finding space to grow anything as well as challenges associated with water and light conditions. This book gives a lot of really creative solutions to those problems (and more).
This book is seriously packed with information. The chapters are formatted well and follow a logical progression. The introduction and background chapters cover what gardening problems are especially challenging for small spaces, getting started, a survey of equipment, possible regulations which must be taken into consideration, and more. The author listed several considerations which hadn't even occurred to me.
The following chapters cover specific types of gardening: Containers, Raised Beds, Vertical Surfaces, Indoors, Balconies, Hydroponics, as well as a good Troubleshooting chapter.
The author has also included a nice resource list (with links), aimed at the gardener in North America. There's also a sidebar with metric conversions and an index.
The book is well photographed (many are stock photos, but they are clear and illustrate the plants and techniques well).
Four stars. Full of information.
Disclosure: I received an ARC at no cost from the author/publisher for review purposes.