Vegetable Gardening For Washington And Oregon, by Marianne Binetti & Laura Peters

One of the trickier matters of dealing with gardening is turning advice about gardening that is written for large and even international audiences into practical advice on how to grow desired plants where one happens to be.  This book manages to serve that task well, looking at the smaller area of Oregon and Washington (which is still large enough to have a large potential reading audience of gardeners and gardening enthusiasts while also being a narrow enough range that one can target advice for particular parts of the Pacific Northwest.  It should be noted though that even though this two-state region has a fair amount of climate zone complexity given the presence of the Cascades dividing the states into wet and dry areas with different climate regimes accordingly, the book mainly focuses on western and eastern Oregon and Washington themselves and does not get really granular into what plants would work in one’s own very narrow particular microclimate.  No book would be expected of such a thing, though, since a book like this is not going to be published unless it can sell enough copies and there aren’t enough gardeners in very small areas to make such a book worth writing or publishing for others.

This book is a bit more than 250 pages and is divided into various unnumbered sections.  The book begins with a lengthy introduction that includes how to choose one’s garden style and get started and prepare gardens and select and start vegetables as well as grow them and deal with pests and disease).  After that is done there is a brief section about this guide and then 200 pages of vegetables that can be grown in the Pacific Northwest.  Going in alphabetical order from artichokes to tomato and then including such bonus and more obscure vegetables and herbs like amaranth, asparagus peas, and Ceylon spinach, to name a few, this particular section includes advice on how long the plant would need to grow and what varieties would be best for different purposes.  There are also photos and an explanation of how to deal with pests and what kind of plants would work well as companion offerings.  These ideas allow for gardeners to practically look for specific seeds based on their own tastes and the veggies they desire to plant and eat, even if it is for a very limited geographical area.

Even so, this book is a worthwhile one to read.  As I am fond of eating, and tend to think of gardening as one of the more reliable ways in which propertyholders can help to create at least part of their own food supply, I tend to enjoy reading about edible gardening, since it strikes me as a particularly practical endeavor and may at some point in my life provide a source of domestic amusement, writing material, as well as victuals.  Given this, I have to say that the book was a success.  It accomplished its goal of showing how it is that Northwestern gardeners can grow notable food crops and deal with pests, and even choose the sorts of varieties that will work best given the soil and climate that a particular area has, at least to a tolerable degree of specificity based on what side of the Cascades one happens to be in.  This book is practical enough and detailed enough that it will probably have an appreciative audience among the gardeners of the area, and it includes a great deal of how one can locally grow the sort of food that one may in fact want to eat.  All of that is definitely something to appreciate, to be sure.