Books: Gardening & Vegetable Garden

Semer, c’est poser un geste simple et ancien, à la portée de tous. C’est créer les conditions pour que la vie prenne forme, observer les premières feuilles apparaître, et tisser un lien plus intime avec son jardin.

Dans ce guide accessible et profondément ancré dans l’expérience terrain, Jean-François partage l’essentiel de son savoir-faire de semencier. De la sélection des semences parmi une grande diversité de variétés jusqu’au repiquage au potager, en passant par la lumière, l’arrosage et la santé des sols vivants, chaque étape est expliquée avec clarté et sens.

Un compagnon pour semer avec confiance.

Pensé pour les jardiniers d’ici, ce livre vous accompagne pas à pas pour structurer votre projet de jardin, comprendre votre environnement, prendre soin du sol et suivre l’évolution de vos cultures, au rythme des saisons et du climat québécois.

In recent years, Quebecers have rediscovered the joys of gardening and are increasingly willing to invest time and money in this activity. The book "Seedlings" will therefore become the perfect resource for starting your seedlings!

Get your seedlings off to a great start, whether you're a complete beginner or a seasoned gardener. Calendars, indoor and outdoor sowing, methods, equipment, and seed-starting guides are all covered in this book, which will quickly become essential for all horticulture enthusiasts! Inside, you'll find a sowing calendar organized by date and 165 seed-starting guides for fruits, vegetables, herbs, and flowers.

You can read an excerpt by clicking here: Excerpt from the book Sowing .

—

Author: Collective
Edition: Practical Practices
Dimensions: 20 x 25.5 cm (8 x 10 in)
Page: 208, color
Publication date: February 2022
ISBN: 9782896589333

—

This book gives you simple and precise advice on growing vegetables and indicates all the associations to favour or avoid, for a healthy garden.

Spinach is more tender when planted near strawberries, but onions don't grow well next to potatoes. Dill repels carrot flies, and marigolds deter nematodes... Plants help each other thrive. Their neighbors can modify their flavor, influence their growth, repel pests, or trap them. This book offers simple and precise advice on growing vegetables and indicates all the companion plants to favor or avoid for a healthy garden.

--

Author: Noemie Vialard
Publication date: April 2007
Publisher: Rustica
ISBN: 9782840387268

Acting daily according to one's convictions? This is the choice that Marie-Thérèse Thévard (Marie-Thé, for close friends) made about thirty years ago by successfully developing her food self-sufficiency in no-till farming in Saguenay, her adopted region in Quebec.

The Kitchen Garden is the story of her practices, convictions, and research to embody an ecological lifestyle based on independence from fossil fuels, resilience, healthy eating, permaculture, agroecology, and community living. Designed to follow each step month by month to create a thriving organic vegetable garden, this manual details the principles and techniques for growing vegetables, fruits, legumes, and even grains. One guiding principle underpins her approach: no-till farming. Faced with the soil depletion that plagues industrial agriculture, Marie-Thé champions "the genius of the soil," avoiding plowing while enriching it with mulch. All this in a boreal climate, in a context considered challenging for market gardening.

Marie-Thé's many years of experience will teach you:

• The principles of permaculture, agroecology and no-till farming;
• Crop associations to create a living and resilient ecosystem;
• Techniques for protecting crops against the cold;
• Biological methods of getting rid of major pests;
• A toolbox to organize your garden (storage, tools, sowing, planting and harvesting calendars);
• Methods for preserving vegetables and seasonal recipes;
• The essentials you need to know about poultry farming.

Marie Thévard grew up on her mother Marie-Thé's farm. She wrote this essential guide to successfully growing your own food using no-till methods and gradually achieving food self-sufficiency. Richly illustrated with diagrams and photos, this book is a must-have for ecological gardening.
Marie Thévard participated, with her mother, in the development of the Nordic no-till food gardening technique which she shares in Le jardin vivrier.

Browse online via Écosociété

—

Author: Marie Thévard
Preface by: Benoît Thévard
Edition: Ecosociété
Publication date: May 2021 (Canada)
Pages: 384
Collection: Know-how
Theme(s): nature, animals & ecology
Subject(s): ecology / environment
ISBN: 9782897196653

Growing your own vegetables in winter in a northern climate is possible!

What you will learn:

Knowledge is the driving force behind success. This bible of ecological gardening is aimed at the gardener or aspiring amateur gardener seeking advice on choosing the best cultivation method according to their needs and how to optimize it.

Whether you garden in containers, pots, or directly in the ground, it's important to understand what each growing method entails. The aim of this book is not to promote one gardening method over another, but rather to help you develop a greater understanding of the plants you grow, enabling you to achieve greater food self-sufficiency and easier, more cost-effective cultivation.

Why is container gardening suddenly attracting so much interest? Is it a revolution in the way we grow plants? What will happen to gardens in the ground? Written in clear, accessible language, this book will guide you toward understanding. It will help you better assess your needs and meet your gardening expectations. You will also benefit from a wealth of new tips for dealing with the various situations that inevitably arise when exploring the complex world of nature and plants, and for achieving great results.

The content of this book proves useful to all kinds of gardening, whether you enjoy growing flowers, vegetables, your lawn, or want to rethink your landscaping!

You can read an excerpt by clicking here: Excerpt from Gardening in Containers .

—

Author: Serge Fortier
Publisher: PRATICO-PRATIQUES EDITIONS
Dimensions: 20 x 25.5 cm (8 x 10 in)
Page: 208, color
Publication date: March 2022
ISBN: 9782896589340

—

Why grow them? They're healthy, eco-friendly, economical, and so enjoyable! Treat yourself to the appetizing microgreens of broccoli, radish, or sunflower. Discover those of sorrel or amaranth. Add delicious alfalfa sprouts to your menu.

In this unique reference work, Lili Michaud draws on her expertise, acquired through 40 years of experience, to make this very particular cultivation accessible. This book covers everything you need to know about germination and sprouting:

The choice of seeds, their acquisition and their storage;
The necessary equipment;
The methods, step by step;
A detailed directory of 51 seeds;
The harvest;
Conservation.

Whether you are starting out in this activity or looking to enhance your knowledge, this is the ideal book to maximize your harvests and make the most of these small greens with high nutritional value and incomparable flavors.

Browse

—

Author: Lili Michaud
Edition: Multimondes
Dimensions: 16.51 x 20.32 cm (6.5 x 8 in)
Page: 200
Publication date: October 12, 2022
ISBN: 9782897733063

Méthode pour cultiver mieux et récolter plus

Le nouveau livre de l’Académie Potagère est enfin disponible !

Le potager abondant est un guide clair et concret pour penser votre potager autrement et obtenir des résultats stables, saison après saison.

Une méthode issue du terrain, pensée pour le jardin

Un potager, ce n’est pas seulement une suite de tâches à accomplir. C’est un espace vivant et nourricier qui peut évoluer et s’améliorer avec le temps.

Que vous débutiez ou que vous jardiniez depuis des années, il est possible de faire plus simple, de mieux comprendre ce qui se passe au jardin et de récolter davantage, sans y consacrer tout votre temps libre.

Le potager abondant est né de cette envie : rendre le jardinage plus satisfaisant et plus nourricier pour tous et toutes!

Fidèle à notre démarche, il ne propose pas une accumulation de trucs sans liens entre eux. Plutôt, il pose les bases d’une méthode claire qui permet de comprendre les priorités au potager, d'éviter les essais-erreurs et de récolter davantage, plus simplement.

This presentation on biochar details its production, uses, and benefits for soil fertility and maintenance. Instructions are also provided for creating and using your own activated charcoal.

Author: Jeff Cox
Publisher: Ed. de Terran
Publication date: January 2021
Pages: 112
ISBN: 9782359811445
Size: 12 x 24 cm
Language: French

Jean-Martin Fortier shares his tried-and-tested techniques and practical advice for a productive and healthy vegetable garden. This accessible book invites you to reconnect with the land, cultivate self-sufficiency, and join a movement toward a more sustainable lifestyle. Grow, nourish, transform!

Who hasn't dreamed of having their own vegetable garden, growing and harvesting an abundance of vegetables, even with a busy schedule and little space? After mainly addressing professionals, Jean-Martin Fortier, master market gardener and pioneer of ecological agriculture, offers us Dans mon jardin, his very first book for the general public.

In addition to proven techniques and all of Jean-Martin's secrets, this book offers avenues for reflection for those who wish to reconnect with the land and cultivate their future.

In this book, you will find:

• Practical and accessible advice for starting and maintaining your vegetable garden.
• An expertise-driven approach: Jean-Martin presents proven techniques and tools to help you cultivate a productive and healthy garden.
• An invitation to join a movement: by growing your own vegetable garden, you not only feed your family, but you also become part of an awakened community, ready to transform its habits to adopt a more sustainable lifestyle.

---

Preface by Marilou
---
Photo credit: Cardinal Editions
---

Author: Jean-Martin Fortier
Publisher: Cardinal
Publication date: March 25, 2025
Pages: 392
ISBN: 9782925354437

An original, easy-to-use instruction manual that fits perfectly into the major global trend of urban agriculture!

Crop rotation and companion planting are the two pillars of an ecological vegetable garden. Generally used in large gardens, these principles allow for healthier vegetable harvests and can be perfectly applied to very small urban spaces.

Productive Vegetable Garden: Easily Combine Your Vegetables explains how to plan and maintain a small garden. It shows us why it's important to use herbs and flowers, edible or not, as companion plants, while highlighting the benefits of this practice.

The role each plant plays in relation to its companions is precisely described. The author also identifies the pests it repels and the beneficial insects it attracts! This guide also presents the steps to follow for practicing companion planting and crop rotation in raised beds, vertical gardens, in-ground gardens, or in pots.

In addition, the author introduces a completely new concept of vegetable garden which he suggests to avant-garde urban gardeners.

You can read an excerpt by clicking here: Excerpt from the book "My Productive Vegetable Garden"

—

Author: Bertrand Dumont
Publisher: MultiMondes Publishing
Dimensions: 22.8 cm x 19.5 cm (x in)
Page: 220, color
Publication date: 2017-04-06
ISBN: 978-2-89773-023-9
Language: French

—

Prepare your family vegetable garden! Create unforgettable memories together, hands in the soil! The Family Vegetable Garden Notebook is a perfect introduction to local and sustainable agriculture. It allows you to transform your vegetable garden into a shared, enriching, rewarding, and fun project for children. Involve children at every stage, from ideation to harvest, by giving them a notebook where they can write, draw, and/or paste the information needed to plan, create, and maintain the vegetable garden.

The family vegetable garden is a source of pride for all families, and above all, an annual tradition for many of us. Even if we do it year after year, it's not uncommon to forget what we tried and accomplished in previous summers. Our family garden journal will be the perfect project to collect all our notes about the garden, track its progress throughout the season, and then remember our successes—and the little mistakes—for the following summer!

The different sections of our gardening journal are:

Our vegetable garden | Our team | Our wishes | Our seedlings | Our friends | Our great plan | Let's get to work! | The weather station | The harvest calendar | Story of (x14 for your different plants) | Our colors | Our recipes | Our memories

The gardening journal will surely be a beautiful keepsake of all the wonderful moments you will spend as a family working together for a great harvest!

Printed in Quebec (Sorel-Tracy)

Illustrations: Aurélie Grand

===

Materials : 35 pages // Thick kraft cardboard cover and recycled paper inner sheets.
Dimensions : Height: 11 inches, Width: 8.5 inches

Notebook in French

Starting seeds is both a pleasure and a challenge for the amateur gardener. When should I start my seedlings? What care will they need? What materials should I use?

This seemingly simple task can quickly become a maze of complications. But not anymore. In this straightforward and concise book, the Lazy Gardener, Larry Hodgson, reveals all his secrets for successful sowing, whether it's annuals, perennials, or vegetables. You'll instantly know if spinach needs darkness to germinate, if alyssum can be sown directly in the ground, how deep to plant sunflower seeds, and much more.

---

In the first part of the book, the author explains how to sow seeds, both indoors and outdoors. Each step is clearly indicated: sowing seeds has never been so easy.

The second part of the book presents the secrets of success for more than 300 popular plants: their requirements, their preferences, and even their little peculiarities.

With all this information to guide you, you'll soon have a green thumb!
---

Author: Larry Hodgson
Edition: Broquet
Publication date: 2020
Pages: 224
ISBN: 9782896546503

Manual for the artisanal breeding of broiler chickens, laying hens and dairy goats.

In 2008, Dominic Lamontagne and his partner Amélie decided to settle in Sainte-Lucie-des-Laurentides with their two children, motivated by a desire to escape urban life, get away from it all, and learn to feed themselves. To their great surprise, the project encountered numerous regulatory obstacles. Despite these constraints, they managed to build a subsistence farm on less than one hectare of cleared land, consisting of a small number of dairy goats, laying hens, and broiler chickens.

Step by step, taking into account the legislative framework and current environmental standards, this practical guide, featuring over 250 illustrations by the author, teaches you how to:

• raising laying hens, broiler chickens and dairy goats on a plot of land of less than one hectare;
• favour seasonal livestock farming over grazing;
• construct a mobile cage for raising broiler chickens and a mobile chicken coop for raising laying hens, a table for milking goats and a small poultry slaughter station, with illustrations to support;
• produce, process and cook your own eggs, poultry and dairy products;
• prepare fresh cheese and make soap from goat's milk;
• create a self-sustaining ecosystem to ensure your subsistence.

Whether you're interested in small-scale farming or dream of owning a small farm and practicing diversified, non-mechanized, and ecological subsistence agriculture, L'Artisan fermier is an unparalleled source of information. Let's eat freely!

---

Foreword by Marc Séguin and Claude Lamontagne

---

Author: Dominic Lamontagne
Publisher: Ecosociété (Montreal)
Publication date: 2019
ISBN: 9782897195229

Who hasn't dreamed of growing their own fruit at home: apples, pears, plums, blueberries, raspberries, strawberries, hardy kiwis, etc., and thus having fresh fruit on hand all summer long?

The author presents his ecological vegetable gardening technique, the result of over 30 years of experimentation. It is a precise and easy-to-understand method for growing vegetables in companion planting.

The author presents his ecological vegetable gardening technique, the result of over 30 years of experimentation. It is a precise and easy-to-understand method for growing vegetables in companion planting. The planting diagrams are clear and easily reproducible in the garden.

This technique will be particularly suitable for those who cannot cultivate on mounds or wish to maintain a linear vegetable garden structure, while wanting to stop tilling, work with cover crops (surface composting), associate crops with each other, fertilize naturally... Furthermore, the author's overall "all ecological" approach will also interest those looking for a coherent cultivation technique for a permaculture approach to the vegetable garden.

Aromatic and medicinal plants play a vital role in this farming system. The author believes they are also essential for human health, enabling a healthy diet. Therefore, she dedicates a significant portion of her book to describing their uses for health and cooking, including numerous recipes. Each plant description is accompanied by a photograph to help identify the plant.

---

Author: Gertrud Franck
Publisher: Imagine a Hummingbird Publishing
Pages: 256 pages
Date: July 2013
ISBN: 978-2953734447

Already considered "the little bible of ecological vegetable cultivation" by several gardeners since its first publication in 2010, it is a reference work that is aimed at both apprentice gardeners and those who want to improve their practices, whether in the suburbs, the countryside or the city.

Growing your own vegetables in an environmentally friendly way is a wonderful way to protect your health and the environment.

Thanks to My Healthy Vegetable Garden, you:

• will understand what the "health" links are that unite all living organisms and why growing your own vegetables in an ecological way helps to protect the environment;
• you will learn why growing and consuming your own vegetables has a positive effect on your physical and mental health and that of your loved ones;
• you will discover tips and tricks to maintain your health potential while gardening;
• You will learn how to plan and carry out your vegetable garden project in all conditions: in your yard, in a community garden, on your balcony...
• You will learn all about the ecological cultivation of around forty vegetables, from sowing to harvest;
• you will be informed about the various health benefits of vegetables;
• You will benefit from a complete chart on vegetable preservation in order to enjoy their value for as long as possible;
• learn how to make a self-watering container to easily grow your tomatoes and other vegetables on your balcony;
• will be informed of natural methods of prevention and control of damage caused to vegetables by pests (insects and others) and diseases.

You can read an excerpt by clicking here: Excerpt from the book "My Healthy Vegetable Garden"

—

Author: Lili Michaud
Publisher: MultiMondes Publishing
Dimensions: x cm (x in)
Page: 328, color
Publication date: March 2017
ISBN: 9782897730338
Language: French

—

It is indeed possible to have a wonderful vegetable garden right there, at your kitchen doorstep, planted entirely with perennial vegetables. Let them grow and enjoy!

Annual sowing, regular watering and weeding... Do you lack the time to provide the daily care necessary for the success of your vegetable garden? What if perennial vegetables were the solution?

It is indeed possible to obtain a wonderful vegetable garden, right there at the kitchen door, entirely planted with perennial vegetables and "generous" species, food or condiment, which, with a minimum of effort, will lavish their bounty year after year.

Beautiful in the garden, these plants will surprise you with the variety of their flavors: the indispensable artichokes and perennial leeks, of course, but also the original crunchy tiger nuts, the tasty ground pears, the delicious Mauritanian mallow and the surprising mertensia with an oyster flavor.

Plant, let it grow, and enjoy!

---

Note: Some species mentioned in the book are not perennial under the climatic conditions of Quebec.

---

Author: Collective
Publisher: Rustica
Publication date: April 2012
Pages: 111
ISBN: 9782815302104

A fascinating culinary journey. This magnificent book, written by Caroline, Stéphanie, and Patricia Ho-Yi Wang, and featuring photographs by Virginie Gosselin, is brimming with information and recipes to help you better understand Asian vegetables. A true tribute to the land, good food, and roots.

While bok choy has carved out a prime spot on Western shelves, many other Asian vegetables remain relatively unknown. Yet, these are flavorful and nutritious vegetables that thrive in temperate, and even northern, climates!
Caroline, Stéphanie and Patricia Ho-Yi Wang, three sisters of Cantonese origin, have made it their mission to introduce and make people love these vegetables in a unique book, at the crossroads of gardening guide, cookbook and family story.

Organized around 15 Asian vegetables presented according to the seasons, the book offers organic growing and harvesting advice for both casual gardeners and aspiring market gardeners, as well as preservation techniques, nutritional information, and cooking methods. Around forty recipes, some developed by renowned chefs, are also included.

The Wang sisters also explore the world of Asian vegetables from a cultural perspective, tracing the place they have occupied in their own lives and in that of their family, part of which left China to emigrate to Madagascar before settling in Quebec.

You can read an excerpt by clicking here: Excerpt from Asian Vegetables .

—

Authors: Caroline, Stéphanie and Patricia Ho-Yi Wang
Illustrated by Virginie Gosselin
Edition: Scent of Ink
Dimensions: 22 x 28 cm (8.5 x 11 in)
Page: 352, color
Publication date: October 2022
ISBN: 9782925101048

—

Try something extraordinary in your vegetable garden by growing unusual fruits and vegetables! From choosing seedlings from 50 unusual plants to cooking tips that will spice up your dishes, this book explains everything!

Try something extraordinary in your vegetable garden by growing unusual fruits and vegetables! From choosing seeds from 50 unique plants to cooking tips that will spice up your dishes, this book explains everything! Discover the cucamelon, the earth chestnut, the yacón, strawberry spinach, and even turmeric, and master all the steps to cultivate them. As surprising as it may seem, these seeds, tubers, and plants are available in many garden centers in Quebec, and the varieties described in this original book can easily be grown in pots or in a garden. Enjoy gardening and treat yourself to some truly unique flavors!

----

Author: Matthew Biggs
Publication date: March 2020
Publisher: Multimondes
ISBN: 9782897731885