I grew up helping out in my parents’ large garden, and last year I finally attempted one of my own. Some things worked (delicious bush beans through September) and others didn’t (my poor eggplant and pepper starts never got above 4 inches tall). Reading The Organic Home Garden I now have some ideas as to why some of my plants failed, what I can do differently, and other great plants to try – I can hardly wait until July to start fennel! This book was written in a very accessible way by an author who, by trial and error, now has a magnificent looking and bountiful garden. The book is nicely broken down with similar plants forming their own chapter and takes you through seeding to harvest, with a few recipes at the end for your bounty. There were several pictures throughout the book; I wish these had been labeled better and been more plentiful. As a gardening novice I found this book to be very helpful, but a more experienced gardener might be looking for something more scientific or detailed. ( )

The Organic Home Garden : A Step-by-Step Guide To Growing Food / text by Patrick Lima, Illustrations and photography by John Scanlan. Neustadt, Ontario : Five Rivers Chapmanry, 2011.

Reviewed for the LibraryThing Early Reviewers Program from an electronic Advance Reader Copy.

This is a useful book, full of great info for the novice organic gardener, but even an experienced gardener like me will learn a few things, and it’s written in an engaging, chatty style. I enjoyed learning about the development of the author’s garden at their rural Ontario property. There are some tasty-looking recipes, too. It is not a 100% new book – it’s a revised and updated version of an older work.

There were deficiencies in the e-ARC that made it hard to review properly – notably that all the pictures were out of context at the very end of the book and all in black and white. It also lacked an index, and a lot of the punctuation appeared as gibberish characters and made reading a chore. I assume that in the proper for-sale version these problems are corrected but I haven’t checked to be sure.

I really, really want to read this book.

But it came in an EPUB form that I can't read on my Kindle. The email with the book suggested that I download and use a program called Calibre, which I did. Calibre appears to work beautifully: converting the file to MOBI and sending it to my device. The file even shows up when I search my F:Kindle drive from my laptop. BUT I can't find it on my Kindle.

I've spent hours (literally) trying to work this out and am totally frustrated I suppose I could read it on my laptop, but for several reasons, this is extremely awkward and also frustrating.

So sorry I can't give a review (which likely would have been stellar, given the authors' previous books), but there it is. Perhaps in future you could convert the file first and send it in 2 or 3 different formats in attachments. That worked with another ebook I won.

I’ve kept a small vegetable garden in my backyard for the past 20 years. Some years are better than others, but I feel I could do more to have a more consistently successful garden. That's why I was excited to receive this book from the Early Reviewers program. Also, the author Patrick Lima used to write for Harrowsmith Country Life magazine, which I often turned to for recipes and gardening tips before publication ceased in the 90's.

The first thing I noticed was that this book is not like the other gardening books I own which I use as reference books. This one reads more like a memoir with plenty of useful advice. Reading it is like having a cosy chat with an enthusiastic gardening guru brimming with knowledge that he wants to share.

At first I found the book disappointing because of the lack of diagrams, checklists and the like that I normally see in gardening reference books. Then, I just decided to accept it for what it is: an inspirational account of one person’s gardening experiences that, in the end, gave me a lot of information and ideas to ponder over when I start my vegetable garden next season.

Even though the author tries to give general time frames for gardening activities, the book seems best for the cooler parts of North America. A bonus is the collection of recipes that use the bounty from the garden. ( )

Like some other reviewers I had problems with certain characters such as apostrophes not displaying properly and coming out as a string of symbols, which made reading this ebook more difficult, though not impossible.

I thought that the first part of the book, which talked about some of the reasons to grow organic vegetables and the garden that the author and his partner had set up, though interesting, went on for rather too long. I would assume that anyone who wanted the kind of information the book gives would already be fairly ‘converted’ and others might well give up at this stage. There were nuggets of good advice, such as when starting out not to attempt to grow too much or too many different things, until you begin to discover what suited your garden and your way of life and gardening. The author also makes the common mistake of talking about organic materials as if they are not ‘chemicals’, which annoys the scientist in me as everything is made up of chemicals! (Having said that, he does at one point admit he is not a scientist so perhaps I can forgive him.)

Following the introductory chapters he then goes on to talk about vegetable gardening in general (planting, weeding, watering etc) - again there is useful info there such as advice to plant in ‘beds’ with trodden paths around them rather than rows - but again there is a tendency to be a bit long winded.

I must admit I did not read through all the remaining chapters that deal with an individual or group of vegetables in detail, but picked a few on things such as radishes, onions and herbs, which I already grow, to see what advice was offered. I certainly learnt a few new things, and would be encouraged to look at the advice given if trying out new vegetables.

So, in summary, I would say that it would probably be quite a useful book to someone setting up a vegetable garden (organic or otherwise), but I am not sure how useful it would be to more experienced gardeners (not being such myself!). One final thing to note is that the book is based on North America, so readers in other parts of the world may not be familiar with all the vegetable names (although I knew zucchini I had to look up rutabaga), and those in the southern hemisphere would also have to ‘translate’ the month names given into those of their own seasons. ( )