How to Grow Anything: Your Best Garden and Landscape in 6 Lessons

Description

Gardening is one of life's great pleasures. It offers bountiful wonders—flowers, grasses, fruits, vegetables, trees—that bring you closer to the natural world. It allows you to design private and public displays of infinite variety and for numerous purposes. And the best part: Learning how to grow the garden of your dreams is a skill that anyone can learn with relative ease.

Believe it or not, you can create gardens and landscapes in almost any setting, from large rural backyards to tight urban spaces, and in almost any climate. All it takes is a little care, a little patience, and, above all, the knowledge and techniques that professional gardeners and horticulturalists use to cultivate garden spaces that are both beautiful and successful.

In just six engaging and accessible lessons, How to Grow Anything: Your Best Garden Landscape in 6 Lessons offers you the unique chance to learn alongside a master gardening educator with more than 30 years of experience as she reveals the essential skills of gardening. Melinda Myers—an award-winning horticulturist and ­certified arborist, and a nationally syndicated garden host—guides you step-by-step through the fundamentals, from design to preparation to planting, that any novice gardener needs to know in order to plant and maintain a thriving garden that looks as great as those seen on television and in books and magazines.

And even if you're someone who has been gardening for years, you'll find new ideas and tips as the instructor takes you to two test sites across the year—from spring to winter—transforming grassy areas, overgrown beds, and lackluster designs into spectacular gardens.

Get Solutions to Common Gardening Dilemmas

Escorting you from public gardens and garden centers to personal outdoor garden spaces to our in-studio garden, Ms. Myers reveals in a conversational and engaging way solutions to common gardening challenges.

• What plants and flowers are best for your particular space's light and soil conditions? 
• When is the best time to plant, and how can you maximize your harvest? What adjustments can you make as the seasons change? 
• How do you protect your garden against common insects and diseases? 
• How can you choose the right plants and flowers to make an eye-catching design?
• How do you optimize your vegetable garden or combine edibles and ornamentals in a single space? 

According to Ms. Myers, it's all about following what she calls the “four R's”: the right plant for the right purpose in the right place to give you the right look. Whether you're working with a suburban backyard or the window box of an apartment, you'll rely on this insight to discover just how simple it can be to overcome the most common gardening and landscaping challenges. In addition, you'll

• get a vibrant visual introduction to dozens of edible and ornamental plant varieties; 
• explore the basic science behind how soil, light, and water influence plant growth; 
• learn how best to plant, water, weed, prune, and harvest the fruits of your labor; and more.

Learn Tips and Tricks from an Expert Gardener

Your Best Garden Landscape in 6 Lessons is packed with the kind of insider tips and techniques that will not only help you avoid the pitfalls that prohibit many of us from keeping up with a garden, but will help you create and design personal gardens you'll enjoy maintaining and that are sure to impress your family, friends, and neighbors.

• A simple trick for moving in-ground plants to a new location: Wrap the roots in wet newspaper or place them in plastic grocery bags. This reduces stress on the plant, keeps the roots moist, and avoids prolonged exposure to air. 
• When using a total vegetation killer, take a small plastic soda bottle with the bottom removed, use it to cover your weeds, and spray into the neck of the bottle. That way, this spray will kill only the weeds and it won't get on nearby plants and be absorbed by the plants' leaves. 
• Reduce your workload by matching plants to their specific light, water, and soil requirements (which you can find on their labels). For example, plants that thrive in normal/natural rainfall in your area will need supplemental watering only during extended periods of drought. 
• Minimize pruning to a newly planted tree (except for broken, crossing, or damaged branches). The more top growth on your tree, the more energy is produced and the faster your tree will start to get established. 

An Unrivaled Introduction to the Essential Skills of Gardening

With more than 30 years of experience in the gardening and horticulture business—and as a twice-tenured professor, author, prolific columnist, and media expert—Ms. Myers knows how to break down the complexities of gardening and make it easier, more fun, and more personally rewarding than you ever imagined.

With How to Grow Anything: Your Best Garden and Landscape in 6 Lessons, you'll also find that there's more to be gained from learning alongside this consummate expert and teacher than from what you could get in a book on gardening. You'll get the unrivaled experience of watching Ms. Myers in action as she designs spaces, shops for plants, maintains the health of her garden spaces, and makes adjustments—just as you will at home. She also takes you through the seasons so you can see how plantings in spring turn out in late summer, or witness how solutions to common garden design challenges prove successful at the end of the planting season. It's an opportunity to see the entire growing season burst into life right before your eyes.

Above all, these lessons are ones you'll come back to again and again with each seasonal change. “One of the things I like about gardening is that it's never finished,” Ms. Myers notes. “You're always learning more. Best of all, there are always new plants to try. The opportunities are endless.”

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