The Vegetable Gardener's Guide

This poster came out of our experience with Bountiful Gardens. Bountiful Gardens was a non-profit seed company dedicated to preserving heirloom vegetable seed, herb seed, grain seed, and tree seed. When we started Bountiful Gardens almost 40 years ago, there were very few places to find heirloom seeds. Over the years that number has shrunk and then grown, and we were one of the top seed companies in North America in terms of unique heirloom varieties. Because we had to grow out so many rare seeds, we were well-experienced in all phases of gardening from starting seeds to harvest.

Our parent non-profit, Ecology Action of the Midpeninsula, pioneered and developed the high-yield sustainable gardening method called biointensive, now standardized as Grow Biointensive. Biointensive gardens and mini-farms are now changing agriculture all over the world. Ecology Action runs one of the few research gardens that engages in long-range farming research. They investigate the sources of soil fertility, building soil, and natural farming methods. Ecology Action is constantly experimenting with new vegetative crops and varieties, and have trained numerous gardeners in biointensive gardening, both here and around the world. They are actively involved in several national programs to reform agriculture to organic methods. Bountiful Gardens benefitted greatly from this ongoing knowledge base.

At Bountiful Gardens, we daily answered numerous questions about gardening and farming. There are certain basic questions that come up again and again - they are good questions, important questions - but we would constantly be looking up these specific details for growing various plants, especially all the usual vegetable varieties. So finally Betsy and I developed this poster, so that anyone at Bountiful Gardens could just look at it on the wall, and authoritatively answer those basic questions. So we made copies for others, and soon were selling these posters to other gardeners. The biggest surprise was how popular it has been with Master Gardeners and nurseries - they constantly get these questions and also appreciate being able to just point to a poster for these answers.