How To Grow Just About Anything

Talk about comprehensive! When we bought this house a year ago, i was both delighted and petrified. There are flowerbeds and gardens all over the front, sides, and back of this quarter acre, and although I love gardening in theory, my thumb is pretty firmly brown when it comes to practice. It's not that I have some sort of mystical effect on plants or anything, it's just that I don't know how to take care of them correctly, since I've never had any practice.

Thus, the purchase of this book.

In it, Better Homes and Gardens has covered just about anything that could be green and growing in the average yard. From your lawn to the trees to the stuff you deliberately plant (annuals and perennials, which they explain the differences between, thankfully), to the stuff that comes up whether you want it to or not (fungi, bugs, and weeds). For each type, there's an extremely detailed and comprehensive glossary-type chart of what they are and how to care for them/destroy them, and what they do.

Even if you've never kept a garden before (like me), you can become relatively proficient in just a few minutes' worth of studying this book. The lawn care section, for instance, tells you not only what kind of grasses to plant for your zone (another bit on info they give you), but also how the grass propogates, how to cut it, and how to care for it. They even tell you how to scrap the whole lot of it and start from scratch, which is just far too impressive for me, but is nice to know, just in case.

They tell you how to prune trees, how to cut flowers in a way that won't damage the plants, and even how to landscape if you're a total dolt and can't figure out what to put where. There's a whole section on making a garden plan, and although that part still seems a little intimidating, it's much less so when they explain how the whole thing works. (Go for the big, unmovable objects first, then put in the high plants, medium plants, and fill in the ground covers last -- which seems like common sense, until you realize that before this, I didn't even know which plants GOT big. I usually killed them first.)

Another benefit of this particular format (the color pictures in the glossary/gallery of flowers and plants), is the fact that I don't sound like such an imbecile at the nursery. I used to go in looking at things without having a clue what was involved in their care, and now, with a quick flip of the page, I'm able to ask the -right- questions of the workers, and as a result, my plants aren't dying nearly as quickly.

If you're a newcomer to the gardening world, don't miss the section on fertilizing, too. It seems that if you mix too much chemical fertilizer with your soil, your plants get chemical burns and die -- something I was totally unaware of. After all, most things subscribe to the "if a little is good, then a lot is better, and a WHOLE lot is a WHOLE lot better!" theory. Fertilizing, at least with chemical fertilizers like Miracle Gro, is not one of those things.

The book is very well laid out, with, as I mentioned, full-color photos, and plenty of drawings, as well as very clear text that even a five-year-old could understand. There are charts and graphs for just about anything, as well as practical hints and tips for keeping things going, and to help you know when to give up and chuck something. It's easily the most useful of the books I've picked up on gardening, even if it's not as artsy or as inspirational as some of the others that I've found.

For Better Homes and Gardens, information is king over inspiration. And if you know the information, the inspiration comes along anyway. This book is worth any price, though many discount stores' garden centers are offering it this time of the year at significant discounts. If you're worried that your thumb is permanently brown, don't lose hope. Buy this book, read it through, and you should be able to watch it turn green.