If you are no longer a beginner gardener but you don’t quite feel like an expert yet, then these market gardening books are for you!
That’s right, they are not just for market gardeners specifically, as I have found them very helpful myself in my own backyard gardening. If you are trying to produce vegetables at a large scale, enough to feed your family for an entire year, or enough to sell some on the side, then these books will be great resources to have on your shelf!
While some of these books are specific to the market gardener and discuss selling the produce at the market, all of them are full of useful information for the home gardener that has an expanding garden.
Even if you do not plan to sell your produce or go to market, you will glean from each of these books! And if you do plan on going to market, then you will glean even more!
Whatever your desire to increase your food production is – more self-sufficiency, another income source, helping your community, etc. – it can be challenging to figure out the best steps to take. These market gardening books are a great place to start.
Let’s check them out…
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This is a huge book, and definitely pretty intimidating at first! But, that’s just because it is an amazing comprehensive guide full of useful information. You will find yourself turning to this book again and again.
It starts all the way at the beginning with planning your garden. Then it discusses the various plants, weeds, and tools you’ll find around a garden.
But, my favorite is the detail it has on each vegetable, fruit, herb, and even bulb, wildflower, ground cover, tree, shrub, and more! Plus, there is a section on house plants too.
Check it out on Amazon here!
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This book is certainly not for the beginning gardener. It might not even be for the intermediate, but certainly for the expert. It is packed full of information that I was starting to feel overwhelmed very quickly as I flipped through the pages.
But, I love the thought and vision behind this book. It is all about making your garden everything you could need and want, in a productive and beautiful way.
The chapters are divided into these categories: soil fertility, the seed, the crops, the garden in context, and using the harvest. I really loved the list of seed companies at the very end of the book as well!
While this book doesn’t touch on the selling and marketing side of things, it is certainly a market gardening book to keep on your shelf and turn back to over and over again.
Check it out on Amazon here!
This is one of the market gardening books that truly focuses on the organic side of things in detail. I love how he talks about the natural processes of soil and insects.
And, I love how these various practices are expanded on: crop rotation, green manures, compost making, mixed farming (animals and crops on the same farm), multispecies cover crops, ley farming, undersowing, rock minerals, and enhancing biodiversity.
This is one of the market gardening books that every gardener needs to read at least once in their life!
Check it out on Amazon here!
The three sections of this book are “disturb as little as possible,” “keep it covered as much as possible,” and “keep it planted as much as possible.” And how true that is.
As a no-till gardener myself, I wish I had known these three basic concepts from the beginning. It would have saved me lots of headaches pulling weeds and keeping the grass from intruding.
If you want to know the different levels of tilling your ground, what “living soil” actually means, how to compost and mulch correctly, and how to keep it all going year-round, then this is the book for you!
Check it out on Amazon here!
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Once you’re past the beginner gardener stage, then it’s time to move on to saving your own seeds. But, if you’re like me, it is extremely intimidating.
I love that this book is a really simple guidebook and talks to you as if you know nothing, making it clear to understand. But, it is also jam-packed with information at the same time.
It covers everything from pollination to storing to all the vegetable families. I feel much more confident about saving seeds now that I have this book to refer back to. It’s a legend that will never go out of style.
Check it out on Amazon here!
Related Post: How To Quickly Create A No-Till Lasagna Garden Without Cardboard
This was a really enjoyable read. It was so relatable because the pictures and examples all come from a market garden farm that is doing it all themselves. They are confident in their no-till practices, have great strategies in place, and also have a loyal customer base.
This book is one of my favorites of the market gardening books because it is so practical. I learned a great soil-blocking recipe, how to grow cover crops, and how to keep the beds mulched, to name a few things!
I feel confident in expanding my home garden quite a bit now that I’ve read this book!
Check it out on Amazon here!
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The Winter Harvest Handbook: Year Round Vegetable Production Using Deep-Organic Techniques and Unheated Greenhouses by Eliot Coleman
We live in the Keweenaw Peninsula, which is the very top of the Upper Peninsula of Michigan! It gets extremely snowy, and cold, and let’s just say that winter tends to stick around for a while.
It was so interesting, helpful, and inspiring to see in the pictures of this book how they use greenhouses, hoop houses, and covers to extend their growing season and even grow right in the middle of winter!
There is also a section at the end of the book all about the marketing and economics behind their operations, which may be of interest to you. I never knew growing and even selling in the winter was possible in our area until reading this book!
Check it out on Amazon here!
Which of these market gardening books for gardeners will you be reading first? Let me know in the comments below!
Kelsey at GoodPointGrandma
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