How to start a garden: "Beginner's Illustrated Guide to Gardening" can help

Container gardens should start with potting soil, and not garden soil, for best results, according to the "Beginner's Illustrated Guide to Gardening." An experienced gardener who has done lots of digging and deadheading will know the right tool for the job.

But for the garden novice, it might be difficult to sort out when to use a spade or a shovel, or to understand the various uses for all those snips and shears.

For such challenges, there’s lots of help in the new “Beginner’s Illustrated Guide to Gardening: Techniques to Help You Get Started” (Cool Springs Press, $21.99). Author Katie Elzer-Peters not only shows nearly every implement that can be useful in the garden, she has tips to navigate garden centers, explains how to read seed packets and plant tags, and defines gardening terms. A sign that reads “$12 per flat” means that’s the price for all the individual plants in the attached container, she explains.

The book addresses gardening challenges such as plant selection, pests, and gardening in narrow spaces, shade and wet areas. She covers vegetables and flowers, as well as lawns, landscape trees, container gardens and houseplants.

Even gardeners who have been growing for years might learn some things from Elzer-Peters, who studied horticult"Beginner's Illustrated Guide to Gardening" by Katie Elzer-Peters ure at Purdue and has a master’s in public garden management that included a stint at Pennsylvania’s Longwood Gardens. How many know that a tree’s dripline, the imaginary line down from the widest part of the tree’s top to the ground, gives clues on how it should be watered? The dripline indicates the width of the tree’s root system, so start watering from there and work in, Elzer-Peters advises.

A passionate grower who has been gardening since she could walk, Elzer-Peters writes that gardening is like breathing to her. “I realize that’s not the case for everyone.” So, she wrote the book to demystify
gardening for people who would grow vegetables for the first time, or plant to improve a new home’s front yard. She believes consulting a gardening book should be as natural as picking up a cookbook for
instruction when attempting an unfamiliar dish. She encourages new gardeners not to fear experimentation. “Plants are a lot tougher than you might think,” she writes. “And, if you find a plant that likes growing in your garden, buy more of it.”

Photographs courtesy of Cool Springs Press