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From the Ground Up: The Story of a First Garden |  | Author: Amy Stewart
Publisher: St. Martin's Griffin
List Price: $15.99
Buy Used: $2.73
as of 11/23/2009 17:52 CST details
You Save: $13.26 (83%)
New (22) Used (32) from $2.73
Seller: _beaglebooks_
Rating:  21 reviews
Sales Rank: 319053
Media: Paperback
Pages: 272
Number Of Items: 1
Shipping Weight (lbs): 0.6
Dimensions (in): 7.1 x 5 x 0.8
ISBN: 0312287674
Dewey Decimal Number: 712
EAN: 9780312287672
ASIN: 0312287674
Publication Date: March 5, 2002
Availability: Usually ships in 1-2 business days
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Product Description
Amy Stewart had a simple dream. She wanted a garden.
When she and her husband finished graduate school, they headed west to Santa Cruz, California. With little money in their pockets, they found a modest seaside cottage with a small backyard. It wasn’t much—a twelve-hundred-square-foot patch of land with a couple of fruit trees and a lot of dirt—but it was a good place to start.
From the Ground Up is Stewart's chronicle of the seedlings and weeds, cats and compost, worms and watering that transform a tiny plot of earth into a glorious garden. From planting the seeds her great-grandmother sends to battling snails, gophers, and aphids, Stewart takes us on a tour of her coastal garden and shares the lessons she's learned the hard way. In the process, she brings her California beach town to life—complete with harbor seals, monarch butterfly migrations, and an old-fashioned, seaside amusement park just down the street.
Delighting in triumphs and confessing to a multitude of gardening sins, Stewart dishes the dirt for both the novice and experienced gardener. With helpful tips in each chapter, From the Ground Up tells the story of a young woman’s determination to create a garden in which the plants struggle to live up to the gardener’s vision
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| Customer Reviews:
Showing reviews 1-5 of 21
From the Ground UP October 13, 2009
Jan Fazzio
I really liked the synopsis after each chapter-makes for a great reference book for gardening!
 from the ground up September 12, 2009
garden reader
Just a simple book about ups and downs of gardening. I'm a gardener so I enjoyed it very much but I think non-gardeners would also. Amy Stewart starts at the beginning when she knew very little and progresses through the stages and phases every gardener deals with. She also has a great sense of humor that she injects throughout the book.
My First Garden-From the Ground Up June 9, 2009
Teri A. Enright Maher (Monterey, CA)
This book was thoroughly entertaining and informative too. It really dealt with a go-getter first gardener right here on the central coast of California-just where I happen to live! She gave such useful information for dealing with weeds, pests, how to get your garden to live, and thrive.
Kind of a sad ending but well-worth the read for all beginning gardeners.
A gentle, West Coast read October 7, 2008
Valerie Adolph (Pacific Northwest)
I've enjoyed all of Amy Stewart's books, but this one took a much more personal turn than her others. Her other books required research, research and more research. This one was quietly personal with no research other than the experience of toiling in her first garden.
We've all had a first garden - a place to make our mistakes and be thrilled at what grew despite our best efforts. I still get thrilled over some flowers that other people call weeds, so it was a joy to know she had also been beguiled in the same way.
I enjoy Ms Stewart's apparently pointless meanderings, which always lead exactly where she intended them to go. Her observations of gardens and human nature are acute and vivid. Her mistakes and her successes remind us of our own.
This writer has a finely-honed vocabulary that she uses with precision to produce precisely the effect she aims for. This may not be great literature, but it is a pleasant read - a life and a garden accurately recalled.
The neighborly art of gardening November 1, 2006
E. A. Lovitt (Gladwin, MI USA)
1 out of 1 found this review helpful
This is a quick, enjoyable read for anyone who can still remember the joys and tribulations of their first garden. Amy Stewart makes many of the mistakes we all made concerning bed preparation, the inappropriate flowers and vegetables planted with such hope, the unexpected hordes of four- and six-legged diners---no wonder 'paradise' is a common theme in most religions. Most of us have tried to create our version of the perfect garden in our own backyard, but this author is one of the few who have tried to tell the tale.
And a very sprightly job she does of it, too. She doesn't make the mistake of overloading her prose with too many adjectives (a common fault among gardening writers) and the short sentences keep us reading briskly onward. Each chapter is followed by a series of hints in bold type on subjects such as "Sheet Composting" and "Tomato Trouble." The author actually found a product that chases gophers out of her garden (usually) which I'm going to have to try on our moles.
Even though Amy Stewart's small backyard garden luxuriates in the sun (and shade) of Santa Cruz, California, she still has much to share with us gardeners in less fortunate climates. She's still got to do battle with snails, aphids, and gophers. The plants that looked great in the gardening center succumb to all kinds of nasty diseases and acts of Nature. Tomatoes seem especially prone to yellowing, drooping, curling up, and getting spots. The author refused the heartless advice of the gardening books to "destroy all infected plants" and nursed her tomatoes with her "crude and ineffectual remedies, feeling like a Civil War doctor who has nothing but snake oil and dirty bandages to offer the wounded."
Doesn't that sound like something you did or might do with your first tomato plants? As my husband is prone to say, 'enjoy your hundred dollar tomatoes,' and take a trip through the mishaps and discoveries of this honest, sometimes hilarious first-time gardener.
Showing reviews 1-5 of 21
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