By Michelle Fabio

Maybe you’re not thinking about next year’s growing season just yet, but there’s no reason you can’t get a start on learning some new tips—and that goes for your favorite tomato gardener as well.

Here are 5 books that can help you get started, and they make great gifts for the holiday season to boot!

• Giant Tomatoes by Marvin H. Meisner

Published just a few months ago, this is reportedly the first book to deal specifically with growing, you guessed it, giant tomatoes. Don Langevin, author of How-to-Grow World Class Giant Pumpkins I, II, & III, says, “This is the most comprehensive treatment ever written on giant tomatoes.”

• How to Grow World Record Tomatoes: A Guinness Champion Reveals His All-Organic Secrets by Charles Wilber

Wilber is in the Guinness Book of World Records because he harvested 1,368 pounds of tomatoes from just four plants; if you’re interested in Read the rest of this entry »

By Michelle Fabio

Through the lyrical words of Demian Elainé Yumei and the beautiful illustrations of Nicole Tamarin, Little Yellow Pear Tomatoes provides parents with a way to introduce children to gardening and tomatoes as well as to life’s processes and how elements work together.

In 32 full-color pages, we follow a young girl’s realization as to just how many “not-a-tomato” things go into creating the yellow pear tomatoes that her father plants for her (because she loves them so much, of course).

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By Danny Thompson

[This article is part 5 of a 5 article series. View part 1 of the series.]

Wrapping Up

This is the final part of our series on Tim Ferriss’s book, the 4 Hour Work Week.

I’d like to throw out few disclaimers and explain a few things that might have confused some.

First off, The 4-Hour Workweek, as a title, shouldn’t be taken literally.

For some, 4 hours per week seems like too much time to spend in the garden. No problem.

The goal is to spend as little time on the unsavory bits and as much on the parts you delight in as possible.

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By Danny Thompson

[This article is part 4 of a 5 article series. View part 1 of the series.]

Liberation

The whole point of Tim Ferriss’s book, the 4 Hour Work Week, is to get the maximum enjoyment out of life with the absolute minimal stress and time spent on things that we don’t like.

This idea of liberation should be the guiding factor in any sort of 4HWW approach you take. If you enjoy the process of weeding or pruning or watering, then don’t eliminate or automate those parts.

This isn’t streamlining for the sake of streamlining, but for the sake of spending time doing what we enjoy.

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By Danny Thompson

[This article is part 3 of a 5 article series. View part 1 of the series.]

Automation

This is the third part in our five-part look at Tim Ferriss’s book, the 4 Hour Work Week.

So far we have looked at defining our expectations of our garden and eliminating as many unnecessary tasks as possible.

Once you have eliminated all of the unnecessary tasks in your garden, the next step is to automate as many of the remaining tasks as you can.

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By Danny Thompson

[This article is part 2 of a 5 article series. View part 1 of the series.]

Elimination

In part two of our attempt to apply the principles of Tim Ferriss’s book, the 4 Hour Work Week, to our favorite food, we are going to look at the principle of Elimination.

Ferriss explains how he has used this principle to establish an information-diet, and only checks his email once a week.

The point is to eliminate the unnecessary time-wasters in order to spend our time doing the things we love.

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