Stephanie Rose - Garden Alchemy

Packed with an abundance of fun ideas, simple recipes, and easy DIYs, Garden Alchemy shows you how to grow a great garden from the ground up. From nourishing the soil with organic amendments to crafting custom fertilizers, foliar sprays, and teas, Stephanies recipes are inspired by the bounty of natural ingredients provided by Mother Nature. There are also plenty of fun projects for all levels of gardeners with ideas for crafting handy items like seed tapes and seed bombs to creating habitats for bees and butterflies. This book is ideal for food and flower gardeners, or anyone who wants to grow a greener garden.

Niki Jabbour, 2019 American Horticultural Society Awardwinning author and longtime radio host of The Weekend Gardener

In her new colorful book, Stephanie Rose nails the simplicity and magic of soil sciencemaking it easy for gardeners to use whats on handfrom common plants to other biomass to grow in ideal conditions. Readers will now have the wisdom they need to create healthy and fertile soil for their gardens!

Jessi Bloom, best-selling author, CPH, ECP, ISA arborist, and owner of NW Bloom Ecological Services

Garden Alchemy is full of crafty, thrifty, and fun DIY projects that will keep your garden thumb green all year long. I especially appreciate her nod to organics and sustainability throughout the book. Buy this book and get growing!

Mark Highland, President, Organic Mechanics Soil Company, and author of Practical Organic Gardening

Stephanie has nailed it with her recipes for growing a healthier garden. The steps for making teas to compost to pest controls are perfect for both the beginner and seasoned gardeners. I cant wait to cook some up to use on my flower farm!

Lisa Mason Ziegler, commercial farmer at The Gardeners Workshop, and renowned author, instructor, and expert on cut-flower farming

As someone whos made a career out of growing in small urban spaces, Stephanies Garden Alchemy is a treasure trove of creative, DIY recipes to grow healthier, stronger plants, beautify your garden, and cultivate more biodiversity in your yard.

Kevin Espiritu, founder of Epic Gardening and author of Field Guide to Urban Gardening

This book needs to be on every gardeners shelf! In it Stephanie Rose shares recipes for natural soil amendments and fertilizers that will help transform backyards into thriving oases. Using readily available materialsoften those that would end up in the landfillto improve our gardens allows us to close the loop and eliminate the packaging waste that comes with retail solutions. Her recipes for nontoxic solutions to common garden problems take it a step further by replacing harsh pesticides with eco-friendly, healthier alternatives.

Kris Bordessa, author of Attainable Sustainable: The Lost Art of Self-Reliant Living (National Geographic Books, 2020)

80 RECIPES AND CONCOCTIONS for Organic Fertilizers, Plant Elixirs, Potting Mixes, Pest Deterrents, and More

STEPHANIE ROSE of Garden Therapy

In my early gardening days, I met a man who had a lot of plants, but not a lot of land. He was running a backyard nursery as part of a charitable organization that helped people dealing with addiction gain valuable skills through nursery and landscape work. They tended to local gardens and asked permission to pot up any perennial divisions, which they could then propagate and sell. When we met, he was overrun with perennials in 1-gallon (3.8 L) pots and an impending move to a new location. I offered my sunny front yard as a space to host the plants, and I got to work at digging up the lawn to make fresh, new beds.

Then the plants arrived.

Three hundred 1-gallon (3.8 L) pots with green leaves popping out of the soil. No labels. No flowers. No information whatsoever on what these plants would become.

As you can imagine, that year I got a crash course in herbaceous perennials. Without even the faintest idea of their light requirements, water needs, height, habit, or bloom times, I was left to design a garden blindfolded. I started by identifying any leaves that I could and placing them in the right spots in the garden. Hostas were easy to identify, and so I paired any other ornamental, broad-leaved plants together in the shade. I also knew what irises looked like, so I grouped these upright grasslike plants together in the sun. I made patterns and borders of plants with similar leaves and got all three hundred of them in the ground.

Miraculously, the majority survived. I had a few surprises, like when one of the plants kept growing taller and taller and bloomed into a striking eight-foot-tall Joe Pye Weed. Joe was deeply rooted in the soil and not going anywhere, but as I learned, I was able to move the other plants around the beds to find them the space, light, or nourishment they craved.

During my daily garden visits, I listened to what the plants were trying to teach me. Leaf color gave me tips on how they felt about nighttime temperatures and the quality of their soil. Drooping flowers were begging for a cool drink or a spot of shade. They made every effort to grow and only gave up when the conditions provided were too dire for survival. Mostly, they would bounce back after I heard the call and made a change.

It helped me greatly to observe the healthy plants as well, not just the ones who complained. Which ones were thriving, and what did that say about the soil? Weeds are so often admonished for their tenacity, and yet they persist to help us understand the health of the soil. Taproots reach down to break up compacted earth and gather the minerals from the deep, all the while letting us know the topsoil is too compacted and low in fertility for our garden plants.

While I had no idea what I was getting into when I offered up my urban yard, Im endlessly grateful for what that experience taught me about plants, the soil, and the interconnectedness of nature. My education as a gardener has come from a multitude of sources, from classrooms to field study, all the while bringing the words to life by experimenting in the soil. But by far, the most generous and patient teachers I have ever had have been plants.

Alchemys history is shrouded in controversy. Those practicing the art were admonished for tirelessly working on transmutation, famously failing to turn metals into gold. Yet as anyone who has experienced failure knows, alchemists learned a whole lot about the natural world through their experimentation. They hacked natural processes to get a better understanding of how things work, and while their research has been left to many interpretations, the investigational methods they used can be employed to give us a deeper understanding of the natural processes of our gardens.

Alchemists also searched for the universal cure for disease and for longevity, and it is again their inability to meet those lofty goals that teach us more about gardening. Many gardeners have a strong desire to know the exact formula for success for their garden, yet there are endless conflicting studies and opinions out there from PhDs to elders.