Building a Better Garden: DIY Gardening Projects

by Anna Hess, Duncan Wall

Create a productive, flourishing, and pest-free garden right in your backyard!

Building a Better Garden shares proven, low-cost techniques for increasing the productivity of your home garden. Bestselling author of The Weekend Homesteader Anna Hess and inventor of the Avian Aqua Miser Mark Hamilton draw on over fifteen years of homesteading experience to teach you their secrets for big berry harvests, bug-free greens, and year-round vegetables.

This practical, step-by-step guide contains detailed descriptions and photos for six construction projects that are guaranteed to make your garden the envy of the neighborhood. Learn

Grow delicious crops right on your porch, creating a green oasis just outside your doorShelter plants from frost while maintaining easy access with structures you can move from bed to bedProtect your harvests from deer, chipmunks, and birds using humane, effective barriers and absolutely no chemicalsAnd more!Whether you’re a dreamy-eyed beginner or a seasoned pro, a prospective homesteader or a city dweller looking to grow fresh food on the weekends, this book will make your garden both beautiful and productive. You'll discover time-tested solutions for common garden challenges while doubling or tripling your yields in the same space.

So grab your tools, roll up your sleeves, and get ready to build a better garden!

Kindle Edition

Published January 26, 2025

About the author

Anna Hess dreamed about moving back to the land ever since her parents dragged her off their family farm at the age of eight. She worked as a field biologist and nonprofit organizer before acquiring fifty-eight acres and a husband, then quit her job to homestead full time. She admits that real farm life involves a lot more hard work than her childhood memories entailed, but the reality is much more fulfilling and she loves pigging out on sun-warmed strawberries and experimenting with no-till gardening, mushroom propagation, and chicken pasturing.

She also enjoys writing about the adventures, both on her blog at WaldenEffect.org, and in her books. Her first paperback, The Weekend Homesteader, helped thousands of homesteaders-to-be find ways to fit their dreams into the hours leftover from a full-time job. The Naturally Bug-Free garden, which suggests permaculture techniques of controlling pest invertebrates in the vegetable garden, is due out in spring 2015 from Skyhorse Publishing. In addition, a heaping handful of ebooks serve a similar purpose.

(As a side note, I use Goodreads more as a personal way of keeping track of the books I read than as a way to share the books I write. If you're here to learn about me as an author, check out my gardening-homesteading shelf and ignore all the fluff. You can also drop by www.wetknee.com for my authorial musings.)