I've been gardening for a long time, and like many folks, have read a lot of gardening books. I bought an awful lot of them before I discovered that many of them are repetitive or useless, then began using my library until deciding which ones were really essential.
The following are the books I find really indispensable and have read again and again.
Square Foot Gardening: A New Way to Garden in Less Space with Less Work by Mel Bartholomew
- I recommend this book highly as being the best introduction to intensive gardening available. This book will teach you a simple method to get as much harvest from as little work in the smallest space possible.
Mel has added a few new ideas to the SFG method which he covers in an updated book, All New Square Foot Gardening, but I recommend you buy the first book instead. The reason is that with 8 4x4 SF gardens, I've use the appendices in his book again and again as a reference to remind myself when to start certain seeds or how closely to plant various vegetables. The appendices in the first book are much more useful, covering things like tomatoes and peppers, whereas the new book adds a lot of crops such as herbs, it drops the original appendices.
So overall, while I own both myself, I recommend the original Square Foot Gardening, you can always pick up the few new ideas from the second book via borrowing it from a library.
Four-Season Harvest: Organic Vegetables from Your Home Garden All Year Long by Eliot Coleman- This is the most useful book about extending the harvest out there, covering it from both perspectives, in terms of the hardiest crops that can be grown year-round as well as methods and structures for protecting crops to extend their normal growing season. Eliot lives in Maine, so he is not talking pie-in-the-sky when he teaches you how to eat fresh vegetables year round.
Gaia's Garden: A Guide to Home-Scale Permaculture by Toby Hemenway- One of the things everyone has heard about is the idea of permaculture, planting a garden once and enjoying the harvest repeatedly. The frustration with permaculture is that most of the books are scholarly textbooks, as the permaculture folks say you have to take a course to really learn the principles. Toby makes permaculture accessible to ordinary gardeners who'd like to explore and use the concepts.
I have a much larger gardening library than what I've listed here, but these are the three books I refer to again and again, both when planning my garden and throughout the year.
