A Victory Garden for Trying Times is a journey through a year of love and despair, and a testament to healing in the natural cycles of the earth.

When Emily volunteers to tend the neglected grounds of a Devonshire estate, she finds inspiration and support in the journals of a medicine woman after learning the devastating news of her fiancé's death.

A poignant story of a young girl desperate to do her part during uncertain times, and the loyalty, sacrifice, and friendship she finds in her community. It’s 1943, and everyone says the war will be over soon–World War II, that is–but Teresa Marks wonders exactly when that day will come. Her older brother, Jeff, is fighting overseas, and Teresa worries about him, hoping he’ll get home to Kansas safely. As a way of speeding Jeff’s return, Teresa and her dad help the war effort by planting a victory garden. For two years, they plant tomatoes (Jeff’s favorite!) and win taste-testing duels with a curmudgeonly neighbor. But as the war begins striking closer to home, Teresa's faith in secret weapons, victory gardens, people, and in life itself begins to shatter. Now Teresa must rely on her community, and her own strength, to get her through to the other side.

When Lily learns about a lottery for land plots to grow Victory Gardens, she tries to apply. But when the garden club president tells her she's too young to participate, Lily refuses to give up. She knows where there's a house with a big yard. The Bishops live in the largest house in town. It also has the largest yard. But the Bishops' son was the first soldier from the town to die in the war. Now Mrs. Bishop has hidden herself away in their house. When Lily asks Mr. Bishop for the use of a small plot within his yard, his grudging approval comes with the stern warning, "No bothering Mrs. Bishop." As Lily nurtures her garden, she discovers that the human heart is its own garden, with the same needs for attention and love. A former librarian, Helen L. Wilbur now works on the electronic side of the publishing world. Lily's Victory Garden was inspired by family stories of life on the home front during WWII. Helen also authored M is for Meow: A Cat Alphabet. She lives in New York City. Robert Gantt Steele has illustrated many projects and books about the American experience. He is particularly interested in military and WWII history. Robert lives in northern California.

Includes over 800 recipes for using fresh vegetables, plus essential gardening information and ideas on how to use your harvest.

The passion and urgency that inspired WWI and WWII Victory Gardens is needed today to meet another threat to our food supply and our environment—the steep decline of pollinators. The Pollinator Victory Garden offers practical solutions for winning the war against the demise of these essential animals. Pollinators are critical to our food supply and responsible for the pollination of the vast majority of all flowering plants on our planet. Pollinators include not just bees, but many different types of animals, including insects and mammals. Beetles, bats, birds, butterflies, moths, flies, and wasps can be pollinators. But, many pollinators are in trouble, and the reality is that most of our landscapes have little to offer them. Our residential and commercial landscapes are filled with vast green pollinator deserts, better known as lawns. These monotonous green expanses are ecological wastelands for bees and other pollinators. With The Pollinator Victory Garden, you can give pollinators a fighting chance. Learn how to transition your landscape into a pollinator haven by creating a habitat that includes pollinator nutrition, larval host plants for butterflies and moths, and areas for egg laying, nesting, sheltering, overwintering, resting, and warming. Find a wealth of information to support pollinators while improving the environment around you: • The importance of pollinators and the specific threats to their survival• How to provide food for pollinators using native perennials, trees, and shrubs that bloom in succession• Detailed profiles of the major pollinator types and how to attract and support each one• Tips for creating and growing a Pollinator Victory Garden, including site assessment, planning, and planting goals• Project ideas like pollinator islands, enriched landscape edges, revamped foundation plantings, meadowscapes, and other pollinator-friendly lawn alternatives The time is right for a new gardening movement. Every yard, community garden, rooftop, porch, patio, commercial, and municipal landscape can help to win the war against pollinator decline with The Pollinator Victory Garden.

During its thirty years on television, "The Victory Garden's" perennial mission has been to share sensible and sage advice that makes gardening both fun and easy. Now, the nation's oldest and most popular gardening program is proud to present The Victory Garden Companion, an indispensable guide that offers the best in gardening expertise in a straightforward and friendly manner, inviting gardeners of all levels to dig in and get their hands in the soil. Moreover, host Michael Weishan shows budding landscapers how to garden well, providing the technical and aesthetic fundamentals essential to creating a comfortable, beautiful, and rewarding garden. The Victory Garden Companion begins by showing you how to use pencil and paper to map out the garden of your dreams, and how to factor in all the stylistic, climactic, and environmental elements related to your particular location. From assessing your area's unique microclimate and sun and shade patterns to making your own landscape plan, Michael Weishan and coauthor Laurie Donnelly demonstrate in a clear and understandable fashion how to design an outdoor living space that complements the look and feel of your home. While setting the foundation for good gardening, The Victory Garden Companion also covers all aspects of landscaping, from creating hedges and designing perennial borders to treating your soil and selecting foundation plants. Michael and Laurie show you how to create a water garden, build a backyard terrace, plant a vegetable garden, and introduce many other amenities to the urban, suburban, or rural garden. Filled to the brim with creative ideas, weekend projects, and inspired gardens, readers can pick and choose from a myriad of undertakings, whether it's container gardening, laying sod, or creating a flower bed. With more than 250 lavish illustrations, troubleshooting tips, and informative charts of tried and true species of plants and flowers, The Victory Garden Companion is also an invaluable resource that gardening enthusiasts will turn to again and again throughout the year. Perfect for both serious landscapers and those who want to focus on smaller projects, The Victory Garden Companion is a must-have for novices and experienced gardeners alike.

Climate activist and farmer Acadia Tucker fell in love with container gardening after glimpsing its potential to produce food-lots of food. By applying select growing practices, and managing for square inches rather than square feet, she has come up with instructions for growing a small-scale farm on your patio, your stoop, or in? your dining room. If what you want is a garden big enough to line a windowsill, she's got you covered there, too. Tiny Victory Gardens profiles 21 container-friendly crops, and includes recipes for cultivating bountiful gardens, with names like Tiny Herb Garden, Salsa Fresca, and Beans, Bees, and Butterflies, It outlines how to find the right containers (there are wrong ones), identify prime tiny real estate, make food gardens beautiful, and raise crops all year long. Tucker describes how to maximize the environmental impact of growing food in pots. She offers tips on attracting pollinators, shows how to build microbe-rich living soil, and explains ways to ditch harmful pesticides and fertilizers. Her goal is to make it easier for anyone with access to a patch of sun to grow food, no backyard required. This is the third book Tucker has written for Stone Pier Press's citizen gardening series, which highlights how to garden in ways that are good for the planet. Book jacket.

Who knew modern civilization may be brought down, not by plagues or war, but by bees? Or, more correctly, by no bees? This book investigates the growing problem of bee mortality and offers practical measures we can all take to help. In ecological terms, bees play a critical role in the survival of many plant communities and continuation of life on this planet. No pollination, no seeds. No seeds, no future. Now that bees are facing unprecedented levels of die-off caused by a toxic mixture of environmental stresses, a community-based effort is needed to make gardens, fields and landscapes healthy sanctuaries for bees. Just as citizens banded together to produce Victory Gardens to offset the perilous food shortages of World Wars I and II, now a similarly vital level of collective effort is needed to make our gardens into lifesaving shelters for these essential creatures. Planning a bee-friendly space can provide a beautiful and bountiful selection of edible crops, native plants and fragrant ornamentals, as well as herbs that have medicinal properties for both pollinators and people. With the help of ten inspiring garden plans and planting guides, Weidenhammer shows how bee-friendly plants can be used in creative combinations for plots and pots of all sizes, and are easily grown by novices and seasoned gardeners alike. In the spirit of the history-making Victory Gardens, readers will learn how to pack optimum benefits into a limited space for the survival of hive and home, and backyard beekeepers will learn great planting strategies for making sure their honeybees are healthy and have ample food to overwinter. Victory Gardens for Bees is also buzzing with DIY projects that will provide nesting sites and essential supplies for precious pollinators. With plenty of photographs to help readers identify bees of all stripes, beekeeping tips and other interesting bee-phemera, this book is a must-have for anyone who wants to do their part to save bees.