THE NEW VEGETABLE AND FRUIT GARDEN BOOK

This inviting survey of home-gardening delights and problems combines obvious basics (onion-by-apple surveys of standard crops, with notes on sun, soil conditions, pollination) and less obvious needfuls like how to handle the crop once harvested. (Squash must be treated ""like eggs."") Carleton discusses the advantages of the most recent hybrid varieties; mulls over differing philosophies of sweet-corn flavor; tries to correct some prevalent ideas about pest control (home growers can get by with more minimal measures and less cosmetic results than commercial farmers); examines the uses or uselessness of various fertilizers (modern bone meal is a denatured vestige of the old ground bone fertilizers). As a bonus, there's a section on homesteading, 20th-century style.