Compost your old "complete" gardening guide. There's a new way of gardening in Texas that's healthier for people and the environment, more effective at growing vigorous plants and reducing pests, cheaper to maintain, and just more fun. It's Howard Garrett's "The Natural Way" organic gardening program, and it's all here in Texas Gardening the Natural Way. This book is the first complete, state-of-the-art organic gardening handbook for Texas. Using Howard Garrett's new mainstream gardening techniques, Texas Gardening the Natural Way presents a total gardening program: <ul>
<li> How to plan, plant, and maintain beautiful landscapes without using chemical fertilizers and toxic pesticides.</li> <li> Gardening fundamentals: soils, landscape design, planting techniques, and maintenance practices.</li> <li> Includes more native and adaptable varieties of garden and landscape plants than any other guide on the market.</li> <li> Trees: 134 species of evergreens, berry- and fruit-bearing, flowering, yellow fall color, orange fall color, and red fall color.</li> <li> Shrubs and specialty plants: 85 species for sun, shade, spring flowering, summer flowering, and treeform shrubs.</li> <li> Ground covers and vines: 51 species for sun and shade.</li> <li> Annuals and perennials: 136 species for fall color, winter color, summer color in shade and sun, and spring color. Also seeding rates for wildflowers.</li> <li> Lawn grasses: 10 species for sun and shade, with additional information on 16 native grasses, seeding rates for 32 grasses, and suggested mowing heights.</li> <li> Fruits, nuts, and vegetables: 58 species, with a vegetable planting chart and information on organic pecan and fruit tree growing, fruit varieties for Texas, grape and pecan varieties, and gardening by the moon.</li> <li> Common green manure crops: 29 crops that help enrich the soil.</li> <li> Herbs: 66 species for culinary and medicinal uses.</li> <li> Bugs: 73 types of helpful and harmful bugs, with organic remedies for pests, lists of beneficial bugs and plants that attract them, a beneficial bug release schedule, and sources for beneficial bugs.</li> <li> Plant diseases: organic treatments for 55 common problems.</li> <li> Organic methods for repelling mice, rabbits, armadillos, beavers, cats, squirrels, and deer.</li> <li> Organic management practices: watering, fertilizing, controlling weeds, releasing beneficial insects, biological controls (including bats and purple martins), and recipes for Garrett Juice, fire ant control drench, vinegar herbicide, Sick Tree Treatment, and Tree Trunk Goop.</li> <li> Average first and last freeze dates for locations around the state.</li> <li> Organic fertilizers and soil amendments: 61 varieties, including full instructions for making compost.</li> <li> Organic pest control products: 30 varieties.</li> <li> Common house plants and poisonous plants.</li> <li> Instructions for climbing vegetable structures and bat houses.</li> <li> 833 gorgeous full-color photographs.</li> </ul>

Texas Gardening the Natural Way: The Complete Handbook

Crafts, Hobbies & Home

Garrett, Howard

Gardening & Landscape Design

University of Texas Press

Texas Bug Book: The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly

Honeybees in the flowers, fire ants in the yard, roaches in the kitchen--the good, the bad, and the ugly bugs are all over Texas! And they're here in the Texas Bug Book, your complete guide for identifying and organically controlling all of the most common Texas insects. Drawing on years of practical experience and research, organic gardening experts Malcolm Beck and Howard Garrett give detailed instructions on how to identify, understand the life cycle of, and control or protect Texas insects, mites, snails, slugs, nematodes, and other critters. They also include striking color photos and black-and-white drawings to help you identify each bug. What sets the Texas Bug Book apart from other insect guides is the authors' organic approach to pest control. Beck and Garrett highlight the many useful roles that bugs play in nature and offer proven organic remedies for infestations of pest insects. Most importantly, they explain how to create a balanced, healthy environment in which infestations are much less likely to occur.

Science & Math

Garrett, John Howard

Beck, Malcolm

Beck, C. Malcolm

Biological Sciences

Texas Bug Book is your complete guide for identifying and organically controlling all of the most common Texas insects. Drawing on years of practical experience and research, organic gardening experts Howard Garrett and Malcolm Beck give detailed instructions on how to identify, understand the life cycle of, and control or protect Texas insects, mites, snails, slugs, nematodes, and other critters. They also include striking color photos and black-and-white drawings to help you identify each bug. Garrett and Beck highlight the many useful roles that bugs play in nature and offer proven organic remedies for infestations of pest insects.

Whether you're a first-time homeowner, dedicated gardener, or landscape professional, if you're gardening on the Gulf Coast, you need Howard Garrett's Plants for Houston and the Gulf Coast. Garrett is one of Texas's top organic gardening experts, and gardeners rely on him for accurate, sensible advice about what to plant and how to maintain healthy yards and landscapes without synthetic fertilizers and toxic pesticides. In Plants for Houston and the Gulf Coast, Garrett presents nearly 400 plants, both native and adapted, that grow well in Southeast Texas. Like all of Howard Garrett's books, Plants for Houston and the Gulf Coast is loaded with indispensable gardening information: <ul>
<li>Nearly 400 trees, shrubs, groundcovers and vines, annuals and perennials, and grasses</li> <li>400 full-color, close-up photos of the plants</li> <li>Expert information about each plant's appearance, growing requirements, landscape uses, potential problems, and other interesting facts</li> <li>Precise, easy-to-follow instructions about how to design a garden, prepare the soil, install trees and other plants, grow grass and control weeds, and maintain the landscape and control pests</li> <li>A detailed gardening calendar for Southeast Texas that lists specific plants to plant and maintenance tasks to perform each month</li>
</ul>
No other book currently available provides such extensive and reliable information for Texas Gulf Coast gardeners.

Plants for Houston and the Gulf Coast

Plant growers of all kinds are turning to organic products and procedures for vigorous, healthy plants. Since 1988, J. Howard Garrett has been in the forefront of the organic gardening movement, dispensing well-tested advice through "The Natural Way," his radio program and column in the Dallas Morning News. In this expert guide, he offers a complete program for organic gardening. After an opening chapter on the basics of organics, he covers soil management, fertilization and composting, pest control (even fire ants and mosquitoes), landscaping (including tree care, wildflowers, and lawn care), food crops, and wildlife (attracting helpful animals and repelling harmful ones). 
 With this information, professional and home gardeners alike can learn how to eliminate their chemical dependency and grow plants "the natural way." Let The Dirt Doctor's Guide to Organic Gardening be your one-stop source for cost-effective, earth-friendly, complete, and easy-to-understand gardening information.

The Dirt Doctor's Guide to Organic Gardening (Essays on the Natural Way)

Univ of Texas Pr

Howard Garrett's Plants for Texas

To learn all you need to know about gardening in Texas, you could collect a whole shelf full of specialized books on topics ranging from soil preparation to tree care. But all you really need is Howard Garrett's Plants for Texas. In this one book, you'll find a virtual encyclopedia of over 500 Texas plants—trees, shrubs, flowers, vines, grasses, vegetables, fruits, weeds, and cover crops—along with complete, easily understood instructions for planting and maintaining them. Gardening expert Howard Garrett draws on years of landscaping experience to provide "all-you-need-to-know" about each plant: <ul>
<li> Latin and common names </li> <li> sun or shade requirements</li> <li> mature height, spread, and recommended spacing</li> <li> type of bloom and fruit</li> <li> propagation</li> <li> habit and culture</li> <li> recommended uses</li> <li> problems</li> <li> tips and notes</li> </ul>
To help gardeners avoid costly mistakes, Garrett also specifically notes which plants grow very well or very poorly in Texas. In addition to the species descriptions (which are beautifully illustrated with color photos), the book includes reliable, easy-to-follow instructions for planting design, soil preparation, planting techniques, and plant maintenance. Garrett advocates a sensible organic gardening program that works with nature to create healthy yards and gardens. Whether you're a first-time homeowner planting a new yard or a seasoned gardener looking for new ideas and information, Howard Garrett's Plants for Texas is the book you need.

Covering Texas and beyond, Plants of the Metroplex is the only Texas book available giving practical landscape advice from a landscape architect's point of view. Howard Garrett uses his years of experience as a gardener, landscape contractor, maintenance contractor, and landscape architect to give you clear-cut, money-saving advice on the proper selection, installation, and maintenance of landscape plant material for the Dallas-Fort Worth Metroplex and beyond. Garrett also explains his organic approach, "The Natural Way," which gives gardeners greater success with lower costs and without the risks of synthetic fertilizers and pesticides. All of this information has been revised and updated from Garrett's popular Plants of the Metroplex III. J. Howard Garrett has converted several commercial projects to organic programs. They include Frito-Lay National Headquarters in Plano, Johnson and Johnson Medical in Arlington, and Collin County Community College in Plano.

Plants of the Metroplex: Newly Revised Edition

Arts & Photography

Howard Garrett has converted gardeners throughout Texas and beyond to gardening the natural way without chemical fertilizers and toxic pesticides. In this revised and updated edition of The Dirt Doctor's Guide to Organic Gardening, he uses a question-and-answer format to present a wealth of new information on organic gardening, landscaping, pest control, and natural living. The book also incorporates valuable feedback and suggestions from gardeners who've successfully used Howard's methods.

Dear Dirt Doctor: Questions Answered the Natural Way

A lush green lawn is one of the great pleasures of the natural world, whether it's right outside your front door or on a majestic fairway at a legendary golf course. But anyone who has tried to grow the perfect lawn the conventional way knows it requires an endless cycle of watering and applying synthetic fertilizers and toxic chemical pesticides that costs a lot of money and kills all the life in the soil, on the surface, and on the grass. Fortunately, there's a better way. Organic lawn care is not only healthier for the environment, it's actually cheaper and less water-intensive, whether you're managing a small yard or acres of turf.
In Organic Lawn Care: Growing Grass the Natural Way, Howard Garrett, the renowned "Dirt Doctor," takes you step-by-step through creating and maintaining turf organically. He begins with the soil, showing you how to establish a healthy habitat for grass. Then he discusses a variety of turfgrasses, including Bermudagrass, bluegrass, buffalograss, fescue, ryegrass, St. Augustine, and zoysia. Garrett explains in detail how to establish and maintain a lawn, including planting, mowing, watering, fertilizing, composting, and managing weeds and pests. And he offers alternatives to lawn grasses and turf, describing the situations in which they might be your best choice. 
Follow the program in Organic Lawn Care, and don't be surprised when your water bill drops dramatically and your lawn or golf course is the best-looking one around.

Organic Lawn Care: Growing Grass the Natural Way

See the best price to sell, buy, or rent books by Garrett, Howard. BookScouter helps to compare book prices from 25+ online bookstores and 30+ buyback vendors with a single search.

Books by Garrett, Howard

See the best price to sell, buy, or rent books by Garrett, Howard. BookScouter helps to compare book prices from 25+ online bookstores and 30+ buyback vendors with a single search.

Texas Gardening the Natural Way: The Complete Handbook

Texas Bug Book: The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly

Texas Bug Book: The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly

Plants for Houston and the Gulf Coast

The Dirt Doctor's Guide to Organic Gardening (Essays on the Natural Way)

Howard Garrett's Plants for Texas

Howard Garrett's Plants for Texas

Plants of the Metroplex: Newly Revised Edition

Dear Dirt Doctor: Questions Answered the Natural Way

Organic Lawn Care: Growing Grass the Natural Way