Have you planted your summer vegetable garden yet? It’s not too late! We have many resources here at the Miller Library to help you plan your edible garden, whether you have a tiny balcony or an expansive back yard plot.
Food Grown Right, In Your Backyard is a handy beginner’s guide from the co-founders of the Seattle Urban Farm Co. It covers how to plan and build a garden and gives detailed plant profiles to help you know when and how to plant, fertilize and harvest your edibles. It also includes some useful reference tables for succession planting, crop spacing, planting dates, and when to fertilize.
If you want to maximize your yield (and who doesn’t), check out How to grow more vegetables : (and fruits, nuts, berries, grains, and other crops) than you ever thought possible on less land than you can imagine. This book, now in it’s 8th edition, describes the “GROW BIOINTENSIVE” method of horticulture. It provides detailed information on building healthy soil and using companion planting to create a “mini-ecosystem.” Resources include planning charts, sample garden plans, and simple instructions for building your own tools.
If all you have is a balcony, you can still grow your own vegetables this summer. The Edible Balcony: Growing Fresh Produce in Small Spaces is chock-full of ideas for how to grow edible plants in small spaces and includes many fun projects for using recycled materials to create pots and plant supports.
In addition to our many reference books at the Miller Library, we have an extensive Gardening Answers Database of responses compiled from questions to our Plant Answer Line. You can browse the database or ask your own question! We were just browsing the database and found this question about gardening in limited sun, a problem that many of us have here in the Pacific Northwest. The response includes a list of suggested plants to grown, even if your sunlight is limited to just a few months out of the year.
Artist Suze Woolf meditates on climate change and forest fires with her series of paintings known as 
There is always something interesting on the new book shelf at the Miller Library. This month we’ve got everything from children’s books to backyard goat keeping books to gardening memoirs. Today we wanted to highlight a couple of the more unusual books on the new book shelf.
Do you marvel at the magnificent bloom on a rhododendron, the fanciful petals of a fuchsia flower, or the stark beauty of rose hips in winter? If so, stop by the Miller Library to enjoy an exhibit by the Pacific Northwest Botanical Artists.