Entertainment - Whatcom in Bloom

POSTED: Thursday, May. 28, 2009

Book review: "Growing Vegetables" packed with useful information

"Growing Vegetables West of the Cascades"

By Steve Solomon, Sasquatch BooksI won't go so far as to say it's a bible of Pacific Northwest gardening, but Steve Solomon's "Growing Vegetables West of the Cascades" is a reference book definitely worth the shelf space. The book will be particularly beneficial to novice gardeners and those of us who have gardened for a long time in other regions and are still getting acquainted with the vagaries of the Pacific Northwest.

For example, Solomon refers to our "perverse pattern" of rainfall. "We get a lot of moisture in winter when our gardens don't need it, but it rains little or not at all in summer when they do."

A word of caution: This is no picture book. It's an information-packed discussion. The book contains resources and advice on all the common vegetable gardening topics (irrigation, soil amending, composting, raised beds, pest control, fertilizer, etc.) customized for our region.

This makes the book far more reliable than doing an Internet search for a topic of interest, where you are likely to get generalized (and often East Coast) information. Instead, Solomon takes into consideration our unique climate and soils. Best of all, each chapter is replete with observations, suggestions and even warnings from a man who has gardened here most of his life.

Solomon is conversational, engaging the reader from the index page and reminding me of a West Coast version of England's Monty Don. I could do without the chatter in the introduction and first chapter, but by Chapter 2, I was hooked. This guy knows what he's talking about.

Where he can't fit it all in the 356 pages, Solomon defers to other authors, articles and Web sites, building a valuable annotated bibli-ography.

Overall, this is a great reference for gardeners in Whatcom County.