'Texas Fruit and Vegetable Gardening'

Texas Fruit & Vegetable Gardening

by Greg Grant
Cool Springs Press, 256 pp., $22.99 (paper)

If you are planning to garden in Texas, you had better be sure to consult gardening books written specifically about Texas. There's a reason Texas has so often been likened to a separate country: The climate and soil conditions here are like no other. Agriculture is hard here; it's hot, and mostly pretty dry, and much of the soil is either strongly alkaline or strongly acidic. Huge swaths of Texas have very little topsoil at all! Temperatures are extreme: We get Arctic blasts as well as endless, furnacelike summers. Obviously, this doesn't mean that growing food can't be done here ... we're just playing by a different set of rules, and it is a more complicated game.

Texas Fruit & Vegetable Gardening is the first book of its kind to come out in a while (the last being Texas Organic Vegetable Gar­den­ing, by Malcolm Beck and Howard Garrett, published in 1998; another book I highly recommend.) This is a how-to book, pure and simple. What makes it worthwhile is that it contains the correct information for the Lone Star State with no sugarcoating. Author Greg Grant, a seventh-generation Texan and lifelong horticulturist, conservationist and master gardener, has no qualms about telling you what will and won't grow here, and what you need to do to grow it successfully.

The book begins with an up-to-the-minute climate zone map, and a few sections on things you need to know to get started, such as soil, fertilizers, composting, pests, and weeds. Because the scope of the book is broad, these initial sections are general rather than exhaustive. The majority of the book consists of at least two pages about every garden vegetable, fruit, and nut tree that can be successfully grown in Texas. Presented in alphabetical order, each section informs the reader when to plant, where to plant, how to plant, and suggested care and maintenance, as well as information on harvesting, storing, and the most suitable varieties for your microclimate or zone. It's a lifetime of gardening know-how in an easily referenced format – the next best thing to living next door to a master gardener. A seventh-generation Texan master gardener, that is.