Homegrown Pantry: A Gardener’s Guide to Selecting the Best Varieties & Planting the Perfect Amounts for What You Want to Eat Year-Round

Useful information, not just for beginners.

A must have for any serious grower and preserver. Every reasonable vegetable and process is discussed. Fabulous layout and great pictures help to get one inspired and ready to "put up" the harvest from your garden. A lot of information for a good price.

I have been using this book for this years planting. I’ve started from seeds and have been learning what pests to watch for and how to deal with them. The harvest and various preserving methods don’t look to hard to do. There are good instructions and lots of information. Good book.

As stated in the book, this is more for experienced gardeners than for beginners, although some of the information provided will be helpful to beginners, too, especially those who think that they want to grow a dozen zucchini plants for a family of three! There is enough information on each of the 55 veggies, fruits and herbs to provide a good overview, without getting minutia. This would have been a 5 star review if there was a chart in the book for how many plants per person. Instead, that information has to be looked up plant by plant. A chart would have made it easier to plot out the garden.

The great thing about this book is that she helps you figure out how much food you want to preserve and then she has you backtrack to how much you need to grow based on vegetable type and production. It helps you make sense of your garden space, especially if you want to be able to can a certain amount of a product. The author has been with Mother Earth News for a bazillion years! She knows what she’s talking about!

Barbara Pleasant's writing is very accessible and engaging. This is a really excellent resource for beginning to journeyman gardeners and homesteaders. The pictures were incredibly helpful, showing various fresh, dried, and preserved fruits and vegetables, as well as showing the steps in preserving them. As a relatively inexperienced gardener, I especially appreciated the "how many to grow" suggestions, which gave me a great baseline for how much of each kind of plant to grow to enjoy fresh or to have enough to preserve as well. I'm going to combine her suggestions with those in Square Foot Gardening to make the most of my small yard and growing space.

I have a lot of gardening books and a lot of experience gardening. Frankly, I've been thinking I couldn't really learn much from gardening books at this point but this book proved me wrong. It is very interesting and has information in it that is hard to find in other books. I'm too lazy to write much other than to say that Barbara Pleasant deserves her good reputation among gardeners and she has done a great job with this book. It is packed with practical information on deciding how much to grow, how to grow, and how to preserve your produce.

Finally a book that is organized by vegetable and provides insight on every aspect from starting seeds to food preservation. I am constantly referencing this book, it also has recipes littered throughout and much more. Love it