Dan Hemenway
Vermont gardener Charlie Nardozzi’s new book “Continuous Vegetable Gardening” (Cool Springs Press, 2026) is a great book for the new or incipient gardener. It describes a no-till gardening system for continuous harvests throughout the growing season.
As a fellow gardening instructor, I found more than enough ideas new to me to make the book a valuable read. A gorgeous full-page photo near the opening of the book stunned me with its simple efficiency — runner strawberries under asparagus!
Nardozzi packs the book with ideas elegant in their simplicity while describing how to develop raised bed gardens and details about growing specific crops.
After explaining how to build new no-till beds or rejuvenate older beds, the author launches into a section on perennial vegetables, their advantages, and how to grow, harvest, and utilize a dozen perennials, from asparagus to wine cap mushrooms. He follows this with eight more perennials including several familiar to Vermonters such as fiddleheads and ramps. He then offers comparable information about caring for nearly a dozen more perennial culinary herbs, from chives to thyme.
As one who prefers to let plants sow the next season’s crop, I applaud the section on self-sowing herbs, vegetables, and edible flowers, naming and illustrating nearly 20 such plants and explaining how to cooperate with their zeal to reproduce. From there he goes right into edible plants that colonize gardens without any work — “weeds” — again listing common species including tasty nutrient power plants such as lamb’s quarters, purslane, and dandelion.
The book’s section on fruits starts with low, relatively early bearing bush and vine fruits followed with tree fruits that bear reliably and wraps up with native fruits including some of my favorites such as Juneberry, elderberry (one native and European species), and blueberries.
Nardozzi thus prepares us for the concept of “edible hedgerows.” A few pages on growing fruits in containers follows. The author advises growing only the amount of each fruit that a family can reasonably consume during harvest season.
The grand finale organizes the information, suggestions, and ideas transitioning to how we actually design beds to maximize yields while avoiding gluts, and utilize the traits of the many plants discussed.
Nardozzi does not merely show one spatial design for plants, but three progressive designs, suggesting how the garden can change with the seasons and continue to produce food from as early as possible in spring to as late as possible in the fall. This he shows with drawings for six sample scenarios, depending on climate and crops desired.
Each drawing of a bed shows the relative position of specific crops and how that changes over the growing season. It is what the book has been leading up to: how to grow the maximum of desired food in a given space, how to position the crops relative to one another, and how the bed changes in time. In short, this is a book about informed gardening design strategy over the entire growing season.
“Continuous Vegetable Gardening” is a treasury of ideas, suggestions, and facts that gardeners new and experienced will refer to often over the years.
More Gardening Books
Nardozzi includes further reading that he recommends. In addition I recommend the following. The books have been available for some time and should be available second hand.
- “Designing and Maintaining Your Edible Landscape Naturally,” by Robert Kourik
- “Lazy Ass Gardening” by Robert Kourik
- “Perennial Vegetables” by Erik Toensmeier
- “How to Grow Perennial Vegetables,” by Martin Crawford
- “Eat More From Your Garden Without Growing More: A Beginning List of Underutilized Vegetable Parts,” Yankee Permaculture (permaculturemail@aol.com)
- “How to Grow More Vegetables: Than You Ever Thought Possible on Less Land Than You Can Imagine,” by John Jeavons
