Bountiful Container or Julie and Julia

Bountiful Container: How to Create Container Gardens of Vegetables, Herbs, Fruits, and Edible Flowers

Author: Rose Marie Nichols McGe

Clear and easy directions: Vegetables for every season: 21 varieties of beans, including favas and haricots verts; peppers from sweet orange Valencias to fiery Thai Dragons (a scorcher at 60,000 Scoville units); dwarf eggplants; fingerling potatoes; 17 terrific tomatoes; lettuces; and Asian greens like bok choy, mizuna, and Chinese kale. Herbs, including basils green and purple, exotic lemongrass, soothing chamomile, saffron crocus, and the essential culinary herbs such as parsley, rosemary, sage, tarragon, and the many thymes. Fruits: Meyer lemons, strawberries, gooseberries, figs, and even apples, peaches, and grapes. And edible flowers, like tart begonias, pepper nasturtiums, clove-spicy dianthus, and sweet daylilies, to add enchantment to meals.

Complete with all the basics of choosing the right containers, determining soil types, applying fertilizers, and knowing when to start from seed and when to start from seedling.

Publishers Weekly

McGee (Basic Herb Cookery) and veteran gardening writer Stuckey (Gardening from the Ground Up) share their expertise and experience in the art of container gardening. Armed with this manual, frustrated apartment dwellers can indulge their passion for growing edible things. If there is an available balcony, porch, front or back steps, according to the authors, growing produce in containers can be easy and rewarding. With some limitations, it is even possible to grow foods in a window box or on an indoor windowsill. This compendium of practical advice includes detailed information on the types of containers to use, equipment needed, the right soil, when to plant which seeds and how best to deal with problems such as too much or too little sunlight. They also explain more sophisticated techniques like succession planting, whereby ongoing seasonal planting takes place in the same container. This can yield a harvest of peas in early summer, tomatoes in late summer to early fall and kale that will grow into winter. Included are mouth-watering recipes for harvested container crops. Written for the beginner as well as for those with a background in gardening, McGee and Stuckey's directions are comprehensive, clearly written and frequently inspiring. Illus. (May) Copyright 2002 Cahners Business Information.

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Julie and Julia: My Year of Cooking Dangerously

Author: Julie Powell

Nearing 30 and trapped in a dead-end secretarial job, Julie Powell resolved to reclaim her life by cooking, in the span of a single year, every one of the 524 recipes in Julia Child's legendary Mastering the Art of French Cooking. Her unexpected reward: not just a newfound respect for calves' livers and aspic, but a new life--lived with gusto.

About the Author: After spending a long, long time working as a temp, Julie Powell now writes in her pajamas in Long Island City, Queens, where she shares a "loft" apartment with her husband, Eric.