To provide context, just a quick reminder of all the book titles, in this series, published so far: Book 1-Garden foundations, Book 2-Beginners crops, Book 3 – Herbs, Book4-Brassicas and roots and book 5-Legumes and alliums.
This is Book 6 in the Seed to Plate series, and it covers ground genuinely different from anything in Book 5's legumes and alliums. This book returns to the cucurbit family — last visited when cucumbers and zucchini were covered earlier in this series — with watermelon, melons, pumpkins, and winter squash, four crops that share a real need for space, sustained heat, and, in most cases, a genuine patience around reading ripeness that few other vegetable families in this series demand. From there, this book shifts into garden fruit, continuing on from strawberries and blueberries covered earlier in this series. Raspberries and blackberries, currants and gooseberries, and elderberries bring this series into perennial territory for the first time in a real, ongoing way — plants that return year after year rather than being replanted each season, with pruning and structure to manage rather than a single growing cycle to complete. The strawberry tree pushes further still, into genuine tree territory with a multi-year wait for first fruit. Goji berries and physalis close the book with two genuinely different, less commonly grown fruits, each with its own distinctive habit worth understanding on its own terms.
As with every book in this series, each chapter stands on its own — you don't need to have read the earlier books to follow along here, though a few chapters reference comparisons to crops covered earlier in this series, since this book builds on itself where it's genuinely useful to do so. Although, it is recommended to read primarily Book 1 of the series, as it contains the fundamentals of gardening and the background information needed to grow any plant.
Each chapter follows the familiar structure: difficulty level, health benefits, tools, choosing varieties, planting, growing conditions, feeding, timeline, common problems, harvesting, storage, food safety, recipes, and FAQ.
Let's get growing.