Protect Your Garden

Posted byNancy Taylor RobsonPosted inSustainable Living

Protect Your Garden: Eco-Friendly Solutions for Healthy Plants by Ed Rosenthal is a great book for young gardeners and young-in-experience gardeners, but it’s also one more experienced gardeners will occasionally take into the garden, too.

Ed Rosenthal's book coverIt’s very well organized, helped tremendously for those looking for a quick answer to a specific problem by the color-coded page edges. Want to look up those clustered bronzy seed-like eggs on the underside of the squash leaves? Brick-edged Pests pages are your section. Want to know why your perfectly watered tomato leaves are curling up as though trying to retain moisture?  The green-edged Diseases and Nutrients section may point you to copper deficiency. Caramel pages contain the environmental stresses section while the burgundy pages offer time-tested methods of control.

The bibliography spans six pages followed by several pages of what Rosenthal dubs ‘sources,’ which are actually full-page ads. (Gotta admire the commercial enterprise involved).

 I like this book for several reasons: The pictures are terrific close-ups and a helpful size for easier identification of pests, diseases, whatever while holding the book right next to the problem. They also offer at least two stages of a pest’s life, so you can not only definitively identify that thing that’s crawling out of the cuke or squash stalk, you can go to the Exclusion and Prevention list on the same page to see if there’s something you could do NOW, like trap them with the color yellow, or allspice, clove or bay oil, Neem oil, Pyrethrum or Spinosad, and what beneficial(s) you could bring to bear — assassin bugs, those fascinating fire-engine red dune buggies-like insects, tachinid flies, and/or parasitoid  wasps for example.

Some of the pests and pictures are not really necessary – the gopher strikes me as superfluous, but whatever.  I appreciate the focus on the ecological approach, and like the front cover of a dad teaching his son in a hands-on way to prune what might be a blight-ravaged leaf off a tomato plant. Get kids in the garden as early as possible is my motto. My kids bellowed mightily for years about it, but one now gardens assiduously, and both eat organically and cook, so I must have done something right.

 Ed Rosenthal’s Protect You Garden: Eco-Friendly Solutions for Healthy Plants (Quick American Publishing, 2013, $24.95).

Published by Nancy Taylor Robson

I grew up sailing and building boats with my dad, married a tugboat captain, (who I'm still happily married to) and embarked on a life of adventure, challenge and fun. My first book, Woman in the Wheelhouse, told the sometimes harrowing story of working on an old coastal tugboat as cook/deckhand then worked in Mexico in the Campeche oil fields on a supply boat. I was one of the first women in the country to earn a tug operator's license. I'm the author of three other books, Course of the Waterman, which won the Fred Bonnie Prize for the novel, the historical novel, A Love Like No Other: Abigail and John Adams, A Modern Love Story, and OK Now What? A Caregiver's Guide to What Matters, which I wrote with longtime RN and hospice nurse, Sue Collins during the time my mother-in-law was moving to the end of her life. My second, Course of the Waterman, the coming of age novel of a young Eastern Shore waterman, won the Fred Bonnie award in 2004. My third book, second novel, A Love Like No Other: Abigail and John Adams, A Modern Love Story, takes readers into the lives of the new nation's strong-willed second First Lady and her stubborn, often-absent and adored husband, John, our second US President. I wrote the book because I'd spent big chunks of time raising children alone while my husband was at sea and felt an affinity for Abigail, but also looked to her life as a MUCH bigger challenge that informed and encouraged my own. My fourth book, OK Now What? A Caregiver's Guide to What Matters (Head to Wind Publishing, 2014) was written in collaboration with Sue Collins, RN and longtime hospice nurse and has received heartwarming feedback on how helpful it's been to many caregivers. A freelance writer for many years, I've published personal essays, features, maritime reporting and analysis, travel, garden and more for such places as The Washington Post, Yachting, House Beautiful, The Baltimore Sun, the Christian Science Monitor, Southern Living, Sailing, and more. I'm also a University of Maryland Master Gardener who grows and cans the family's fruits and vegetables, and a Bay-Wise program certifier. I write, sail, race sailboats (occasionally), walk the German Shepherd dogs, and cook for friends and family.

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