Catch Up on Your Garden Reading

While you're waiting for your garden to reawaken from its winter slumber, consider setting some time aside to ease into a comfy chair and catch up on some great gardening reads. This roundup of books we've picked offers a bumper crop of ideas, suggestions, and tips on growing abundantly, while being a stalwart steward of the planet. Dig in!

Whether you're a gardening newbie or a consummate compost lover, The Complete Compost Gardening Guide by Barbara Pleasant and Deborah L. Martin (Storey Publishing, 2008) will turn your notions about composting upside down. Instead of squirreling away your compost heap in some dingy corner behind the garage, the authors propose you keep it right in your garden, so that plants and compost can live in perfect time- and labor-saving union.

Comprehensive and informative, Pleasant and Martin lay out composting solutions for every garden and every type of soil, from the "Pit-of Plenty," a permanent composting pit topped with a critter-proof door, to a do-it-yourself compost tumbler you can make from a regular garbage bin. In The Self Sufficiency Handbook (2007, Skyhorse Publshing), authors Alan and Gill Bridgewater impart the knowledge and wisdom they've gleaned from living self-sufficiently for the past four decades. The sizable section on organic gardening offers instructions on how to grow and harvest fruits, vegetables, and herbs, while conserving and using water to the best effect.

Back fields to backyard, the husband-and-wife duo will show you how to get the most out of your land in a responsible and economical manner.

Written by Joe Lamp'l, popularly known on television as "Joe Gardner," The Green Gardener's Guide (2008, Cool Springs Press) features simple yet significant actions gardeners can take to protect the environment. Packed with practical advice-such as mulching to reduce runoff, and using beneficial insects to control pests-as well as facts and statistics on how much of an impact gardening green can have, The Green Gardener's Guide is a trove of ways you can create a more sustainable garden.

Learn how you can reduce and eliminate pesky garden pests, without resorting to noxious chemical pesticides, with expert advice from Gardening with Good Bugs by Erin W. Hodgson (2008, Silverleaf Press). With detailed illustrations to help you identify dozens of common bugs, this guidebook will show you how to call in biological reinforcements to suppress pest insurgencies the au naturale way.

Difficulty level: Easy