Frowine - Gardening Basics For Dummies

Gardening For Dummies Portable Edition

by Steven A. Frowine with the Editors of the National Gardening Association

Gardening For Dummies, Portable Edition

Published byWiley Publishing, Inc.111 River St.Hoboken, NJ 07030-5774 www.wiley.com

Copyright 2010 by Wiley Publishing, Inc., Indianapolis, Indiana

Published simultaneously in Canada

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ISBN: 978-0-470-59533-6

Manufactured in the United States of America

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Publishers Acknowledgments

Senior Project Editor: Georgette Beatty

Composition Services: Indianapolis Composition Services Department

Cover Photo: iStock

Introduction

A rent you lucky! Youre entering or are already part of the most popular and rewarding lifelong hobby that exists worldwide. Gardening is a common language that knows no national, socioeconomic, or age boundaries. Its a common thread that binds all of us together. Whether youre discussing your outrageous zucchini harvest of the previous year or sharing your secret tips for prizewinning roses, youve probably found that gardeners have an instant bond, no matter what their level of experience.

Because gardening is a huge topic that encompasses a wide field of cultivation interests and disciplines, its impossible for any one book to cover everything there is to know about gardening. However, when youre armed with the gardening basics, like those presented in this book, youre ready for just about anything that the art of gardening can throw at you.

About This Book

Following the classic For Dummies format, this book gives you the most basic gardening information you need, organized and presented in an easy-to-follow, modular manner. Although you can read from cover-to-cover, you dont have to. This book can function as a reference work, so you can jump in, find what you need, and get back to your stand of birch trees or the koi pond or the garden center or wherever else youd like to be.

After reading this book, you may not be an expert, but you should be well on your way to taking on most gardening tasks with new confidence. Gardening is part science and part art, and how you mix them up is a very personal thing. After getting a handle on the basics presented here, you can move on to develop your own style and techniques that work best for you.

Conventions Used in This Book

As you advance in gardening, you find that in certain branches of horticulture (like perennials), youre confronted with dreaded scientific names (usually Latin, sometimes Greek). People use such names in these plant categories for very legitimate reasons, and you can choose to follow the path to those reasons later. For now, I spare you that step by mostly using common names for the plants throughout this book. When I do provide the scientific name, I give common plant names first, followed by the botanical name.

As is typical of all For Dummies books, I also shy away from as much jargon as possible, and I explain any terms used right away (often in parentheses following the term). New, defined terms may also appear in italics. Horticulture and gardening can be as technical as any other science, but this is not a textbook for Horticulture 101!

The Internet is part of life now and can provide oodles of great gardening information, so I include various Web references. Web addresses appear in monofont . When this book was printed, some Web addresses may have needed to break across two lines of text. If that happened, rest assured that I havent put in any extra characters (such as hyphens) to indicate the break. When using one of these Web addresses, just type in exactly what you see in this book, pretending as though the line break werent there.

What Youre Not to Read

If youre short on time and just want to get down to the nitty-gritty, you can skip the stuff in the gray boxes. I include this sidebar information for those of you who want to know the whys of everything or who just want to dig deeper.

Foolish Assumptions

Because youre reading this book, I assume that, like me, you really love gardening. Here are some other things I assume regarding your possible background:

Youve seen other folks gardens that have inspired you, so now you want to bring your own gardening skill to the next level.

Youre concerned about a healthy diet and want to grow some of your own vegetables.