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The Year Round Vegetable Garden: How To Grow Your Own Food 365 Days A Year, No Matter Where You Live
The first frost used to be the end of the vegetable gardening season -- but not anymore In "The Year-Round Vegetable Gardener," Nova Scotia-based gardener and writer Niki Jabbour shares her secrets for growing food during every month of the year. Her season-defying techniques, developed in her own home garden where short summers and low levels of winter sunlight create the ultimate challenge, are doable, affordable, and rewarding for gardeners in any location where frost has traditionally ended the growing season.Jabbour explains how to make every month a vegetable-gardening month. She provides in-depth instruction for all of her time-tested techniques, including selecting the best varieties for each season, mastering the art of succession planting, and maximizing the use of space throughout the year to increase production. She also offers complete instructions for making affordable protective structures that keep vegetables viable and delicious throughout the colder months. What could be more amazing than harvesting fresh greens in February? Jabbour's proven, accessible methods make this dream possible for food gardeners everywhere.
247 pages, Hardcover
First published January 1, 2011
235 people are currently reading
1046 people want to read
About the author
Niki Jabbour
10 books40 followersNiki Jabbour is the author of the best-selling, award winning book, The Year Round Vegetable Gardener (American Horticultural Society Book Award), Groundbreaking Food Gardens & Veggie Garden Remix (All published by Storey Publishing). Niki writes for a wide variety of magazines and newspapers, including Fine Gardening, Horticulture, Garden Making and Birds & Blooms. She speaks at garden shows, events and venues across North America. Niki is also the award-winning host of the long-running show The Weekend Gardener on News 95.7 FM (www.news957.com) that airs Sundays 10 to noon Atlantic time, April through October. Niki is a founding member of the award-winning website, www.SavvyGardening.com (2017 Gold Award for Best Overall Garden Blog & Best Digital Media from the Association for Garden Communicators).
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Displaying 1 - 30 of 65 reviews
September 29, 2014
I checked this out from the library three times and finally ended up just buying it. That's how much I like it.
Also, I've already built a hoop house, thanks to this book. I don't know, yet, if it works, but I made it and that makes me happy.
Update:
Yes. My hoop house worked and will work again this winter!
http://006point7ekgo.wordpress.com/20...
Also, I've already built a hoop house, thanks to this book. I don't know, yet, if it works, but I made it and that makes me happy.
Update:
Yes. My hoop house worked and will work again this winter!
http://006point7ekgo.wordpress.com/20...
January 1, 2017
When a book is written from the region you live, it has a lot more credibility than when a Floridian tells you what’s possible in Canada. She and others are growing lots of fresh veg through bona-fide Nova Scotian winters. Whoohoo. Very inspiring; immediately expanded our intentions and expectations for growing food for ourselves.
January 1, 2023
More practical for small scale backyard gardeners than Winter Harvest Handbook.
February 20, 2017
Another gardening book I think I need to own. Written by a Canadian gardener...
January 7, 2015
When I saw The Year-Round Vegetable Gardener on the library's "new" shelf, I snagged it up without hesitation. I love gardening, and I would very much like to see how I can grow my own food all year round -- despite being in the middle of zone 5 and living in the city.
Jabbour does a fairly good job of glossing over a wide variety of the science topics such as timing, temperature, and light needs of the plants. I was most surprised, however, at the depth on which she talks about keeping a decently healthy soil with a combination of organic methods like crop rotation, cover crops, and organic fertilisers. As a soil scientist, I approved heartily of this, and applaud her spending more than a page or to on the topic.
I really liked the introduction Jabbour makes for intensive farming in small spaces, which will be very useful for urban and rural farmers alike when it comes to growing a lot lot in a small space. While there are whole volumes of books written on the subject, as well as experimentation as to what works best together, Jabbour does a really good job of explaining the basics and giving the beginner a good head start.
The reader should be warned, though, that this book focuses heavily on winter farming with cold frames and tunnels. It gives you tips on how to plant, when to plant, and what to plant. In the back of the book it also gives the blueprints for building the same cold frame she uses. This is not a bad thing -- unless you really don't know a whole lot about gardening the rest of the year.
The best part of the book for intermediate level gardeners is the second half of the book. This second half goes over the various type of vegetables, when to plant them (usually from seed), how to take care of them, and how to harvest. There are lots of helpful tips for many different types of vegetables and even some herbs.
All in all, this was a pretty good book for beginners to gardening, and even had a few tips for urbanites to get their patio gardens thriving in a small space. The cons of this book were that it didn't go into a whole lot of science about why crops need what they need, how cover crops work, and why you really want them for increase the nutrient of the soil. So, if you are looking for more advanced gardening books infused with the background logic behind things, this is not for you. (And that's why I only gave it 3 stars -- I crave to know why things work the way they do so I can alter them for my own circumstances.)
Jabbour does a fairly good job of glossing over a wide variety of the science topics such as timing, temperature, and light needs of the plants. I was most surprised, however, at the depth on which she talks about keeping a decently healthy soil with a combination of organic methods like crop rotation, cover crops, and organic fertilisers. As a soil scientist, I approved heartily of this, and applaud her spending more than a page or to on the topic.
I really liked the introduction Jabbour makes for intensive farming in small spaces, which will be very useful for urban and rural farmers alike when it comes to growing a lot lot in a small space. While there are whole volumes of books written on the subject, as well as experimentation as to what works best together, Jabbour does a really good job of explaining the basics and giving the beginner a good head start.
The reader should be warned, though, that this book focuses heavily on winter farming with cold frames and tunnels. It gives you tips on how to plant, when to plant, and what to plant. In the back of the book it also gives the blueprints for building the same cold frame she uses. This is not a bad thing -- unless you really don't know a whole lot about gardening the rest of the year.
The best part of the book for intermediate level gardeners is the second half of the book. This second half goes over the various type of vegetables, when to plant them (usually from seed), how to take care of them, and how to harvest. There are lots of helpful tips for many different types of vegetables and even some herbs.
All in all, this was a pretty good book for beginners to gardening, and even had a few tips for urbanites to get their patio gardens thriving in a small space. The cons of this book were that it didn't go into a whole lot of science about why crops need what they need, how cover crops work, and why you really want them for increase the nutrient of the soil. So, if you are looking for more advanced gardening books infused with the background logic behind things, this is not for you. (And that's why I only gave it 3 stars -- I crave to know why things work the way they do so I can alter them for my own circumstances.)
April 7, 2025
A great book for beginner and seasoned gardeners. All the information you need to garden year round, plus interesting tips and insights into seed starting, pests & vegetable storage! A great reference book!
September 23, 2024
It's been a rough year for books when a gardening book gets one of my only 5 star ratings... but it is a good one
June 19, 2020
I have really amped up my gardening game this year thank to this book :)
November 8, 2019
December 2011 - I was a Greenhouse Technology student at Niagara college, new to this thing called "twitter" when I stumbled across a quote from Niki Jabbour "In the middle of winter, there are no bugs, there are no slugs"
Having started my food-growing career in Mattawa and Thunder Bay, my main motivation for going to horticulture school was to Improve Food Access and Food Security in the North. I was already experimenting with winter harvest techniques I had learned up north (Teresa Daniele, Thunder Bay deserves her own book) and here was this incredible, inspiring woman sharing her successes with winter growing in Halifax!
When The Year-Round Vegetable Gardener first came out, I convinced the Niagara College Library to acquire the book for its horticultural collection... and then promptly borrowed it for the rest of the winter semester!
Eventually, I returned my library book and purchased my own copy because The Year-Round Vegetable Gardener by Niki Jabbour continues to be a main reference when I plan my seasons every year.
Having started my food-growing career in Mattawa and Thunder Bay, I am often skeptical of claims made by books and resources from outside of Canada (with the exception of Eliot Coleman's Winter Harvest Handbook). Even books from Southern Ontario rarely deal with the realities of Thunder Bay's short season, short days and long, sunny winters. Niki's unique experience growing in Halifax was very transferable to the northern regions where I started Garddwest, and continue to be relevant here in Hamilton. As another Goodreads reviewer mentioned, "when a book is written from the region you live, it has a lot more credibility than when a Floridian tells you what’s possible in Canada" and I can't agree more.
Eliot Coleman's Winter Harvest Handbook is a rigorous and scientifically thorough manual, the go-to reference on this subject, but Niki's Year-Round Vegetable Gardener is possibly a better fit for a beginner-intermediate winter gardener getting started at home or in a community setting.
Niki touches on the basics of timing, temperature and light needs providing background for her more practical instructional content. One area where Niki does dig deeper is soil sciences - suggesting sustainable methods including cover crops, crop rotation, organic fertilizers and building a healthy soil profile. A section on intensive farming in small spaces directly addresses small scale urban agriculture and backyard farmers. With tips and tricks for growing, plus concrete blueprints for building cold frames and tunnels, this book has all the information required to get started with Cool Season Gardening.
Having started my food-growing career in Mattawa and Thunder Bay, my main motivation for going to horticulture school was to Improve Food Access and Food Security in the North. I was already experimenting with winter harvest techniques I had learned up north (Teresa Daniele, Thunder Bay deserves her own book) and here was this incredible, inspiring woman sharing her successes with winter growing in Halifax!
When The Year-Round Vegetable Gardener first came out, I convinced the Niagara College Library to acquire the book for its horticultural collection... and then promptly borrowed it for the rest of the winter semester!
Eventually, I returned my library book and purchased my own copy because The Year-Round Vegetable Gardener by Niki Jabbour continues to be a main reference when I plan my seasons every year.
Having started my food-growing career in Mattawa and Thunder Bay, I am often skeptical of claims made by books and resources from outside of Canada (with the exception of Eliot Coleman's Winter Harvest Handbook). Even books from Southern Ontario rarely deal with the realities of Thunder Bay's short season, short days and long, sunny winters. Niki's unique experience growing in Halifax was very transferable to the northern regions where I started Garddwest, and continue to be relevant here in Hamilton. As another Goodreads reviewer mentioned, "when a book is written from the region you live, it has a lot more credibility than when a Floridian tells you what’s possible in Canada" and I can't agree more.
Eliot Coleman's Winter Harvest Handbook is a rigorous and scientifically thorough manual, the go-to reference on this subject, but Niki's Year-Round Vegetable Gardener is possibly a better fit for a beginner-intermediate winter gardener getting started at home or in a community setting.
Niki touches on the basics of timing, temperature and light needs providing background for her more practical instructional content. One area where Niki does dig deeper is soil sciences - suggesting sustainable methods including cover crops, crop rotation, organic fertilizers and building a healthy soil profile. A section on intensive farming in small spaces directly addresses small scale urban agriculture and backyard farmers. With tips and tricks for growing, plus concrete blueprints for building cold frames and tunnels, this book has all the information required to get started with Cool Season Gardening.
March 4, 2012
My dear friend, Sherri, picked this book out for herself, and I mooched off of her suggestion and got one for myself. I've always wanted to have a vegetable garden, but I don't have any experience. I don't know where to start, and I don't know how to proceed. This book was like living with a professional gardener for a year. It is so easy to read and well laid out. There are lots of pictures and clear explanations. Whether you're doing a year-round garden or not, this book is a terrific resource for how to have a successful garden. I actually read this book like a novel every night before going to bed for about two weeks, and I would fall asleep dreaming about mache and butterhead lettuce and cold frames.... I can't wait to have my own garden, and now I feel like I have enough background knowledge to actually do it.
December 23, 2019
This book is highly touted and I think it lives up to the hype. I spent hours copying info out, but if you have more shelf-space, this is probably a worthwhile reference book.
Stuff it does well:
- Provides decent primer material on gardening in general
- Provides decent material (beginner to intermediate) on season-extension techniques
- Provides decent material on a variety of vegetables most people want to grow, how to grow them, and how to extend their season (if relevant).
Stuff it doesn't do so well:
- I was hoping for more granularity on the precise difference between a hoop-house, low tunnel, greenhouse, and cold frame. (Plus combinations with floating row covers). Perhaps bluetooth thermometers weren't available when the book was written, but by now it should be quite straightforward to take data to prove which option provides the most sheltered winter environment. Ditto for cloches and water bottles and black plastic mulch.
These are all touted as Good Things to Try and It Gets Warm In There but no real data is provided. The rule of thumb that a plastic hoop cover plus a row cover takes you two zones up (eg from Zone 5 to zone 7) is verbatim from Eliot Coleman and I'm not sure where he gets that from. (Although he has a reasonably data-driven approach, if empirical rather than quantitative, based on what I've seen so far. So I trust him, but I'd like to see numbers.)
Although Jabbour intimates that cold frames are the ultimate in winter growing, she only sometimes differentiates it from hoop tunnels in her plant guides. Which leaves me somewhat puzzled as to how much to extend myself to obtain one.
- The Nicki's Picks section for each vegetable is nice but falls into the same "seed catalog description" problem where you're looking for what info gets left out. Everything is mild, crisp, sweet, and crunchy. And if not, does that mean it tastes bad? If one plant is described as "easy to grow" and the next one isn't, what does that mean? What about when the entire description is actually the breeding history of the variety, with no info on the plant or vegetable? I wish people would come up with four or five key items to hit when describing any vegetable and then be consistent with every plant. For example, tell me:
- growth habit
- flavor/texture
- disease/pest resistance (or lack thereof)
- length of production window
Describe this for every single plant. Everything else is icing.
Obviously this is not just a problem for Jabbour, but for an entire industry. However, I can't write reviews on seed catalogs so here I go.
Anyway, this was a great and easy read. Definitely worth getting.
Stuff it does well:
- Provides decent primer material on gardening in general
- Provides decent material (beginner to intermediate) on season-extension techniques
- Provides decent material on a variety of vegetables most people want to grow, how to grow them, and how to extend their season (if relevant).
Stuff it doesn't do so well:
- I was hoping for more granularity on the precise difference between a hoop-house, low tunnel, greenhouse, and cold frame. (Plus combinations with floating row covers). Perhaps bluetooth thermometers weren't available when the book was written, but by now it should be quite straightforward to take data to prove which option provides the most sheltered winter environment. Ditto for cloches and water bottles and black plastic mulch.
These are all touted as Good Things to Try and It Gets Warm In There but no real data is provided. The rule of thumb that a plastic hoop cover plus a row cover takes you two zones up (eg from Zone 5 to zone 7) is verbatim from Eliot Coleman and I'm not sure where he gets that from. (Although he has a reasonably data-driven approach, if empirical rather than quantitative, based on what I've seen so far. So I trust him, but I'd like to see numbers.)
Although Jabbour intimates that cold frames are the ultimate in winter growing, she only sometimes differentiates it from hoop tunnels in her plant guides. Which leaves me somewhat puzzled as to how much to extend myself to obtain one.
- The Nicki's Picks section for each vegetable is nice but falls into the same "seed catalog description" problem where you're looking for what info gets left out. Everything is mild, crisp, sweet, and crunchy. And if not, does that mean it tastes bad? If one plant is described as "easy to grow" and the next one isn't, what does that mean? What about when the entire description is actually the breeding history of the variety, with no info on the plant or vegetable? I wish people would come up with four or five key items to hit when describing any vegetable and then be consistent with every plant. For example, tell me:
- growth habit
- flavor/texture
- disease/pest resistance (or lack thereof)
- length of production window
Describe this for every single plant. Everything else is icing.
Obviously this is not just a problem for Jabbour, but for an entire industry. However, I can't write reviews on seed catalogs so here I go.
Anyway, this was a great and easy read. Definitely worth getting.
February 11, 2023
I can say that this is, hands down, the best gardening book I have ever read. It goes far beyond giving advice to people who want to extend their gardening seasons, and I used it to get ideas for my seed order this year in January. Since Jabbour lives in Nova Scotia, her techniques for fall, winter and spring gardening will surely be applicable to my home in CT. I find her photographs and organization to be extremely informative and user friendly, so I'm not trying to guess exactly what she means. It's easy to hop around the book to find the info you want, but be sure and go back to read the other parts, because it is so informative. The methods are scaled to a home garden, rather than to a small commercial farm, as in other books I've read. Then, scattered through out the entire book is all kinds of wonderful gardening advice so that I have things underlined to look back on in almost every page, and I've been gardening for over 40 years. Often she has something that clarifies something I've observed, then tells me what to do about it. Happily, somethings she writes things that I've already learned on my own. When my daughter, who owns a gardening business, picked it up one day, she ordered her own copy as soon as she got home. This was a pleasure to read. Thank you Niki Jabbour.
April 26, 2023
"...Grow Your Own Food 365 DAYS A YEAR..." is quite a boast! The most important information I gleaned from this book is when the proper times are to start planting your seeds. After that, there's so much good stuff in here that I don't know what's next. Info on hoop tunnels or building your own cold frame? Interplanting, cloches, or raised beds? I think it's the individual vegetable information! Not all veggies are included—no artichokes—but enough to keep you busy and your family fed. Also, nothing on berries or grapes —I know, technically fruits but so are tomatoes and tomatoes are in the book—and the info on herbs is abbreviated. The charts on Succession Planting and Interplanting are very helpful and the Resources are something to look into. This is the best Niki Jabbour book I've read.
February 6, 2023
Like Niki Jabbour, I try to extol the virtues of winter gardening to everyone I meet. It is truly amazing what bounty nature can provide in the depth of winter in cold climates. Sadly, most American gardeners only focus on warm weather crops like tomatoes and peppers. (Is it because most Americans eat so few vegetables?) There are so many more possibilities that can even be harvested in the middle of winter. I recommend this book to any gardener, who loves their hobby and laments the arrival of winter.
January 9, 2020
I saw Nikki on Growing a Greener World. She has so much knowledge and I live outside of Buffalo NY, never even thought about extendeding gardening season. Extending? I didn't even Garden!!! I got this book and another od hers and I can't wait to get started! There is sooooo much good information in this book. I am quite sure I will be referring to it often. I also found her Garden Show podcasts. Nikki is my Inspiation! Beatiful photos also.
November 12, 2017
I go back to this book time and again all year round. This is a fantastic comprehensive guide to gardening year round. Great information about individual crops, succession planting, planning, everything you need to get started having fresh veggies from your garden, even in January!
January 11, 2018
Great vegetable growers read
Very easy to read and full of good advice. Very inspirational for beginners. How to grow vegetables and herbs in your garden all year round. Can't wait to get started.
Very easy to read and full of good advice. Very inspirational for beginners. How to grow vegetables and herbs in your garden all year round. Can't wait to get started.
March 12, 2018
This is the cold-climate gardener's go-to guide for everything. I wish I had this book years ago! I will continue to reference it for design, cold frame choice, and detailed vegetable and herb advice.
May 9, 2021
Really great information and ideas in this book. Plus lots of colourful photos illustrating the text. I’m definitely inspired to try using row covers more and build a cold frame until we get our greenhouse built.
February 21, 2025
A good overview for a beginner (or an amateur prepper, as I'm now referring to myself - see my last read lol). Gave me lots of ideas for earlier and later harvests, using the gardens I already have. Always nice to find a real gardener who doesn't live in Zone 8.
October 2, 2017
More than just information on cold frames, contains a decent sized section on cold climate crops
May 3, 2020
An easy to read and empowering book; if you're handy you'll have a cold frame built and planted before you're halfway through. A must have reference for gardening in cold climates year-round.
May 21, 2020
had some information on interplanting designs and plant rotation based on nutrient needs
November 20, 2020
Lots of great info for gardening and extending the seasons.
February 2, 2021
The Year-Round Vegetable Gardener by Niki Jabbour is a good reference for cold frame gardening. I keep it handy to help plan my plantings throughout the year.
February 14, 2021
Written by a Novia Scotia gardener with 120 frost-free days. A lot more information than one might expect on such a specific topic
Read
May 25, 2021I’m in zone 7b and I gained a few things from this book but it mostly applies to colder climates.
August 15, 2021
Great reference source
July 2, 2022
I checked this out of my local library and love it so much that I’ll be purchasing my very own copy!
November 22, 2022
A keeper. Will buy for my homesteading collection.
Displaying 1 - 30 of 65 reviews