Seed Library: Books & eBooks

America's best gardeners share their secrets for designing beautiful container gardens. Gardening in Containers is filled with clever and inspiring ideas for creating dynamic plant combinations, designing containers for year-round interest, selecting the best plants, and using containers throughout the garden.

The eighth title in the Fine Gardening Design series illustrates innumerable techniques to make a little garden space go a long way. It shows how to create a garden that feels much larger than it is, and demonstrates how small gardens can create privacy. A look at sample gardens reveals some of the tips and tricks of gardening in small spaces, such as using diagonal lines and breaking areas into individual sections. Sound advice on pruning and selecting appropriate plants helps readers transform a small lot into a place of beauty and comfort.

A guide to making the most of even the smallest site, this book provides advice on design and planning as well as projects for putting the ideas into practice in the garden.

With Grow Your Own Mini Fruit Garden, turn your backyard, deck, or balcony into a fruit-producing paradise with advice for growing small-space dwarf tree fruits, including apples, peaches, and citrus, along with fruiting bushes, brambles, berries, and vines.

Food, we can't live without it, yet its costs are rising and consuming more of the family budget. In addition, health concerns about the use of pesticides, gmo foods, and potential soil mineral depletion in the food supply inspire more people to want to grow their own vegetables. Many of these live in cities with only small yard spaces. This book presents new methods devised and tested by the author to maximize food production from a small yard. By tightly spacing plants in deep, fertile soil, training plants vertically, and harvesting year round -- with the help of the inexpensive, portable greenhouse one can build from this book -- a great proportion of a family

The Urban Garden features dozens of ways city dwellers can creatively grow food, flowers, and fun, no matter how much--or how little--space you have.

Gardening is now the favorite leisure pastime in America. Homeowners are realizing the health benefits derived from gardening and the increase in their home's property value. Book retailers are well aware that the trend in gardening books is to regional titles that provide credible information on the plants that perform well in specific regions. North Carolina Gardener's Guide, 2nd Edition is written by the highlypopular gardening expert Toby Bost. Contains easy to use advice on the top landscape plant choices (more than 160entries) for North Carolina. Recommends specific varieties and provides advice on how to plant, how to grow and how to care for North Carolina's best plants.

Get the inside dirt, North Carolina! This ultimate local guide to growing vegetables and other edibles provides you with insider advice on climate zones, average frost dates, and growing season details across North Carolina. Information includes details on sun, soil, fertilizer, mulch, water, and the best varieties for your region. A garden planning section helps with design and crop rotation, and monthly lists explain what to do from January through December. In-depth profiles of nearly 50 edibles round out the information and help ensure a can't-miss harvest.

Never garden alone! The Month-By-Month series is the perfect companion to take the guesswork out of gardening. With this book, you'll know what to do each month to have gardening success all year. Written by authors in your state, the information is tailored to the issues that affect your garden the most.

No matter where you live within North or South Carolina, you'll discover the best edible plants for your garden in this beautiful step-by-step how-to guide--and they'll be on your table before you know it.

Urban agriculture has the potential to change our food systems, enhance habitat in our cities, and to morph urban areas into regions that maximize rather than disrupt ecosystem services. The potential impacts of urban agriculture on a range of ecosystem services including soil and water conservation, waste recycling, climate change mitigation, habitat, and food production is only beginning to be recognized. Those impacts are the focus of this book. Growing food in cities can range from a tomato plant on a terrace to a commercial farm on an abandoned industrial site. Understanding the benefits of these activities across scales will help this movement flourish. Food can be grown in community gardens, on roofs, in abandoned industrial sites and next to sidewalks. The volume includes sections on where to grow food and how to integrate agriculture into municipal zoning and legal frameworks.

Grow your own fruits and vegetables from nothing but kitchen scraps!Rather than throwing away leftovers from food in your kitchen, you can use them to grow more. Learn how to turn a single sweet potato into a pot full of them. Grow a salad from the end bit of lettuce and a lemon tree from a single seed. Several of these projects require nothing more than a jar, a windowsill, and a few pieces of food that would otherwise end up in the trash or compost. Step-by-step drawings and photographs make it easy to follow along, and fun recipes will help you enjoy the fruits of your labor.

A majority of the world's population lives in cities. Urban areas have largely been disconnected from the processes associated with producing food. A broad range of community efforts have emerged to reconnect people in urban areas to fresh foods with expected benefits for public health.  These efforts can be found in cities across the country and cross both economic and ethnic lines. They have been led by the non- scientific community and are best characterized as social movements. Expansion of agriculture to non- traditional areas including community or kitchen gardens in urban or peri- urban environments has the potential to provide a range of ecosystem services as well as reduce stressors on non- urban environments. These services/benefits include improved public health, improved human nutrition and diet, large-scale production of renewable resources, increased food security with less resilience on traditional agricultural landscapes and seascapes, enhanced ecosystem function in urban areas, and increased public appreciation for and understanding of ecosystem services.  ​

Plants are grouped into colors and heights for easy reference, and each plant is photographed in close-up and in context. Gardening information includes Latin and common names, aspect, hardiness, height and spread, blooming period and soil type.--From publisher description.

Inside, a 400-page plant catalog describes and illustrates in full color 4,000 species and varieties of plants. Information on flower and leaf shape, growing requirements, and zone range is given.

Simon & Schuster's Guide to House Plants is the definitive guide to selecting the right plants for your indoor environment and making them flourish. The introductory chapter explains how plants grow; how and when to feed, repot, and prune them; how to protect them from pests and diseases; the best ways to arrange and support house plants; and how to engage in hydroculture. Each of the 243 entries, illustrated in lush full color, gives the plant's family, place of origin, description, propagation requirements, and complete instructions on temperature, lighting, and watering. Whether you are a novice or an expert indoor gardener, this indispensable guide is the most authoritative and useful handbook on house plants you can own.

he "Illustrated Plant Glossary" is a comprehensive glossary of over 4000 terms related to plant sciences, featuring superb colour illustrations to aid comprehension of many of the plant terms. The topics covered in this glossary include anatomy; angiosperms; bryophytes; chemistry; cytology; ferns and fern allies; family specific terms; flowers; fruit; genetics; grasses, rushes and sedges; gymnosperms; habit and growth; habitat and ecology; indumentum; inflorescence; leaves; orchids; reproduction; roots; seeds; and systematics. The "Illustrated Plant Glossary" is a must-have reference for plant scientists, plant science teachers and students, libraries, horticulturalists, ecologists, gardeners and naturalists

Kew's highly acclaimed plant dictionary clearly defines 4,905 entries used by botanists to describe plants in textbooks, scientific papers, floras and field guides. This second edition includes 400 new terms including a section of vegetation types, and more than 730 entries are illustrated with detailed line drawings as well as 32 plates of grouped terms. The Kew Plant Glossary provides an essential reference for students, teachers, researchers, conservationists, horticulturalists, agriculturalists and gardeners.

The author of The Skeptical Environmentalist and "one of the 50 people who could save the planet" (The Guardian) delivers a groundbreaking book that presents smarter, more cost-effective approaches to dealing with climate change, along with other pressing global concerns, such as malaria and HIV/AIDS. * NOW A MAJOR MOTION PICTURE. "Far more convincing than An Inconvenient Truth." --The Financial Post Bjorn Lomborg argues that many of the elaborate and staggeringly expensive actions now being considered to meet the challenges of global warming ultimately will have little impact on the world's temperature. He suggests that rather than focusing on ineffective solutions that will cost us trillions of dollars over the coming decades, we should be looking for smarter, more cost-effective approaches, such as massively increasing our commitment to green energy R&D. And he considers why and how this debate has fostered an atmosphere in which dissenters are immediately demonized.

"This book explores a sustainability lens through which operational and outreach decisions can be made, discusses why sustainability matters to libraries and their communities, shares real-life examples of sustainability programming, and provides recommendations from library workers who have been active in putting sustainability into practice"-- Provided by publisher.