Thank you to NetGalley and Storey Publishing for sending me a free ARC copy in exchange for an honest review. 

 

Grow More Food: A Vegetable Gardener's Guide to Getting the Biggest Harvest Possible from a Space of Any Size is an in-depth guide to evaluating your current garden with the goal of improving efficiency and maximizing your harvests going forward (whether that’s through extending your growing season, implementing succession planting, or fixing mistakes you didn’t know you were making). 

 

Basically, getting the most out of your garden comes down to improving your knowledge, planning beforehand, adapting as you go, and keeping organized records. Whether your goal is to be more efficient with your time and resources, expand your harvest size, supplement your income, or something else entirely, this book will help you with exactly that. 

 

I’ve gardened consistently throughout my life, but this is my third year of a maintaining a large home garden. Every year’s garden is a process of trial-and-error and trying new things, and gardening resources such as Grow More Food definitely help minimize the ‘error’ side of ‘trial-and-error’. I found a lot of helpful information within these pages and enjoyed the walk-throughs of the authors’ experiences (like how to interpret a soil test and make soil amendments based on it). 

 

I also appreciated how the authors didn’t assume the reader knows everything and still covered the basics. Some information was new to me, and other information was a good reminder. For instance, I found the “duration of irrigation” section extremely helpful! I currently have to hand water my garden (something the book mentions several times as really not a good use of time or resources with a garden of my size), but a permanent irrigation system is on our list soon. 

 

Like every gardening resource this book can’t cover everything, but there are a lot of other resources and further reading included. And, you can always use a topic as a starting point for further research. My only complaint with this book is the lack of information on hobby greenhouses: many of the examples are set in urban settings that don’t have space for the large high tunnels and nursery-size greenhouses that are discussed in some of the sections. 

 

Overall, this is an incredible resource: there’s an absolute wealth of information within these pages and so many helpful charts and worksheets (after publication the worksheets and charts included in this book will also be available in a digital format on their website, which is fantastic). I keep a pretty detailed garden spreadsheet, but even I found quite a bit of new information to add and new ways to organize the information I track. 

 

Thank you again to NetGalley and Storey Publishing for the privilege of reviewing an ARC.