If you ever wondered when’s the best time to start gardening as a hobby, the answer is always now. The best thing about gardening is that it is for everyone. You’ll get to experience the comfort and roots of success no matter what your gender, your race, and most especially, your age is.
To make it sound more convincing, starting a garden actually results in a more practical and healthier lifestyle. For years, experts have proven its benefits for the body and mind.
Before you embark on your journey, knowing the core basics of gardening is crucial to achieving the best results. With that, books for beginners are available to guide you through this life-changing skill.
People new to gardening may easily get lost due to the overwhelming information you see on different platforms. Guides from reputable authors or experts contribute tremendously to keeping you on track and ensure you absorb the correct set of information suitable for your needs.
But with several books and authors, which one should you purchase and read? We reviewed five of the best gardening books for beginners you could find in the market today to help narrow down your choices.
Best Gardening Books for Beginners
1. The Rooted Life: Cultivating Health and Wholeness Through Growing Your Own Food
Released in March of 2022, this book offers the freshest home gardening perspective on this list. Justin Rhodes, the author, is a famous YouTube Homesteader with almost a million followers, a permaculturist, and a film producer.
Review
What we liked most about the The Rooted Life is Rhodes highlighted the importance of growing your own food for the survival of your own family. It is the perfect story for you as a beginning gardener.
That is especially if you ever brought up questions about whether you can produce your own food sustainably, even if you have limited time, space, and resources.
The most adoring part of this book is that Rhodes and his family started just like anyone else. With a single packet of store-bought seeds, his life changed. He started leaning toward an extremely practical lifestyle he called the “rooted life.”
Rhodes made the The Rooted Life: Cultivating Health and Wholeness Through Growing Your Own Food deeply personal. He shared his self-taught journey to grow home produce successfully.
This 208-paged book mainly feeds aspirations and inspirations to his audience. We feel that these sincere and heart-warming stories can jumpstart your morale as a beginner. They encourage pure positive thinking, hoping for the best possible outcomes.
As a book that persuades individuals to try out home gardening, this book did not disappoint with many tips on planning your garden and even raising chickens. Focusing on food products, you’ll also get recipe ideas. You can cook them using the fresh ingredients you harvested from your own garden.
Pros
Cons
2. The Complete Gardener’s Guide: The One-Stop Shop Guide to Plan, Sow, Plant, and Grow Your Garden
The fact that DK published it lets you know that this book is loaded with information and discoveries. With its title, it automatically suggests you will be able to gain knowledge in all the gardening basics.
Author Simon Akeroyd has published thirty gardening books, and the The Complete Gardener’s Guide is one of his bestsellers. With it, you’ll get the right information you need to start a garden.
Review
The author did not lie when he promised it was the one-stop-shop for beginners looking for basic but beneficial gardening information. With 448 pages, this book boasts extensive step-by-step information on starting your garden from scratch.
Guided by experts throughout the book, you’ll learn how to sow, plant, and grow your garden effectively. It also includes guides on avoiding common diseases in your plants.
If do-it-yourself landscaping strongly interests you, this book offers fool-proof tips for creating a pond, crafting raised beds for producing fruits and vegetables, and laying your own patio.
The Complete Gardener’s Guide also encourages having a well-designed garden by utilizing visual elements such as color and different textures.
The author also vastly considered different climates for you to know which plant would yield and thrive depending on your location’s weather conditions. With these, we can say that the book practically covered everything fundamental when starting a garden.
Pros
Cons
3. Floret Farm’s Cut Flower Garden: Grow, Harvest, and Arrange Stunning Seasonal Blooms
Written by a florist farmer, Erin Benzakein, this book is a reputable source of information if you want blooming flowers as the focal point of your gardening journey. To add, this book won the American Horticultural Society Book Award.
Review
Flower enthusiasts would really love to get a copy of this book as it tackles almost everything about how to have gorgeous blooms in your gardens. Floret Farm’s Cut Flower Garden exhibits the author’s hard work by showing her own magnificent flower garden through photos taken by Michele M. Waite.
Aside from teaching you different techniques for properly growing and harvesting flowers, this book also demonstrates how to do flower arrangement and styling. Not only does this book urges you to have an eye-pleasing garden, but you’ll also have another skill to unlock as a bonus.
The Floret Farm’s Cut Flower Garden also highlights step-by-step guides on yielding various flower species in different climates and seasons. We find this very helpful as some flowers are sensitive to time and temperatures. It goes without saying that this book guides you better on what flower to focus on.
We also agree with the promise that this book is a perfect gift for beginners, stylists, wedding planners, and devotees of indoor decors. In this way, you can also encourage more beginning gardeners.
If you are the type of person who is patient enough and loves to see diverse, vibrant colors, then the is perfect for you. Individuals who value mood-setting areas in the garden or indoors would also greatly appreciate the content of this 308-page masterpiece.
Pros
Cons
4. Mini Farming: Self-Sufficiency on 1/4 Acre
The author Brett L. Markham is a proud mini-farmer in New Hampshire, where he achieved self-sufficiency by growing his own food.
His book, Mini Farming: Self-Sufficiency on 1/4 Acre, tackles vegetable and fruit gardening, with money-saving as its main side lesson. It covered what beginners should learn first: selecting and starting seeds, managing soil compost quality, and rotating crops.
Review
Aside from those stated above, the Mini Farming is well-equipped with information about different organic methods you can do in your garden. This knowledge is very important for beginners as we want our gardens away from chemically-induced substances.
With a print length of 204 pages, this book also focused on how to produce food in small areas. That is why we recommend it to beginners because your garden is considered a mini-farm.
The Mini Farming: Self-Sufficiency on 1/4 Acre also tackled pest and disease management fundamentals. This way, you’ll always have a fruitful harvest and not waste any money, time, and effort invested in taking care of your garden. It will also ensure you can anticipate potential problems in advance and prepare solutions right away.
The book has also provided elaborate explanations on methods you didn’t know you needed or may not have heard of yet. One feature of this paperwork is its showcase on how you can save money through efficient food production at home.
As this book promotes “self-sufficiency,” you will surely learn the basics of mini-farm gardening. It discussed bonus practicality topics such as raising chickens in the backyard and home canning.
Believing this helps achieve the objective, the author also included recommended tools and materials for each method. Thus, he included plenty of photographs, tabular graphs, drawings, and diagrams.
Pros
Cons
5. Essential Succulents: The Beginner’s Guide
Essential Succulents was written by Ken Shelf, a master in decorating succulent centerpieces and other designing projects. He also conducted several succulents and vertical gardening workshops, making this book a credible source for beginners and succulent enthusiasts.
With this, you’ll know he’s extremely engaged with everything succulent, making his book a reliable source for succulent gardening.
Review
If you want to start gardening in the most basic and minimal approach, you can never go wrong with taking care of succulents. Since succulents are low-maintenance, the Essential Succulents is a great choice to acquire the simple know-how in gardening.
Although the thinnest book on this list with 184 pages, it still surely gives adequate knowledge. In fact, it contains 50 succulent species to choose from, with a detailed profile and care guide for each.
The Essential Succulents book tries to spark your interest in succulents by presenting beautiful photographs. It includes eight do-it-yourself project ideas, such as decorating terrariums and developing indoor gardens, to unearth your creative juices further.
Like almost all gardening books for beginners, the Essential Succulents tackles irrigation, maintenance, light exposure requirements, and soil management. That means this book is a great source of gardening basics.
Pros
Cons
Which Among the Books Should You Pick?
All five presented books offer ample expertise on gardening tips and guides for first-time gardeners. However, each has its charm and unique highlights depending on what you want to focus on.
We find The Complete Gardener’s Guide: The One-Stop Shop Guide to Plan, Sow, Plant, and Grow Your Garden as the top pick. Compared to the other choices, it has covered the greatest amount of gardening fundamentals and the subjects you’ll most likely need when you start.
Aside from that, it’s a plus that it provided in-depth yet easy-to-follow directions on each of its guides.
The hearty content of The Rooted Life: Cultivating Health and Wholeness Through Growing Your Own Food comes to a close second as it creates an emotional impact on its readers. This holds true through its substantial relevance to how important it is for an individual or a family to practice a sustainable lifestyle.
The remaining best gardening books for beginners are still competent options for readers who favor a specific type of plant to grow. These books will surely prove to you that gardening is worthwhile as a healthy hobby.