"Growing Great Vegetables in the Heartland" is chock-full of extra information often not found in generic gardening books:
How to harvest, rather than plants spinach on St. Patricks Day; How to grow the same amount of plants using one-fourth less water, nutrients and time;
How to double your tomato harvest;
The unique Barrow Composting method allows the busy gardener to easily add several inches of compost to the garden in just a seasons time, with very little work;
How to decipher seed catalogs;
Compares various methods for garden layout, debunks common myths, and offers advice for selecting tools;
Explains seed-saving and how to figure potential harvests;
Offers a photo section for interpreting and coping with weather extremes;
Organic pest control chapter includes photos of the critters to help gardeners identify whats bugging them;
Frost date charts for different cities in the Heartland;
Addresses for state Extension Offices;
Regional hardiness maps provide readers with more intimate details on their particular region.
The book is horoughly illustrated with original photos (most in full color) that illustrate the concepts.
And since anyone growing vegetables also eats them, theres a chapter of tested recipes and herb-growing information.
An extensive Bibliography, and an entertaining Glossary helps novices understand terms used in the horticultural world;
Tables give equivalencies in both English and Metric lengths and volumes, plus handy formulas for those calculations you forgot after graduating school, such as finding circumference and area of circles [useful for building tomato cages], figuring the height of a tree without trigonometry, and more.