Local gardening author and entrepreneur Ginger Booth of Branford launched her book Indoor Salad: How to Grow Vegetables Indoors on Sept. 12, 2013, as the outdoor gardening season draws to a close.
Within a week of launch, Indoor Salad was already a best seller on Amazon in the urban gardening category. Early customer reviews on Amazon: “Highly recommended if you want to get on track, the smart way, to growing your food indoors.” “Unlike other books on this subject, the author doesn't focus on expensive HID systems, but gives affordable DIY projects to grow many different crops inside using fluorescent light systems.”
Autumn is prime time for indoor planting. Indoor Salad explains the technical options available to the indoor vegetable gardener, from the perspective of what the best indoor salad crops need in order to thrive.
Indoor Salad is based on six years’ experience with Booth’s own indoor vegetables, and as an online forum leader helping others with their gardening projects and experiments. Booth's mission is to reconnect people to their food supply, for better food, a better environment, and the know-how to thrive in a changing climate.
New techniques and products have emerged in the last decade for growing vegetables indoors – such as hydroponics, aeroponics, HID lighting, fluorescents, grow tents, and all-in-one systems. These product offerings present a high-priced maze to the uninitiated, and confuse even the experienced indoor gardener. Indoor Salad explains what’s really needed to grow the crops, and when the more expensive options are helpful – and when they’re not. While serving as a buyer’s guide to what’s valuable in turn-key products, the book also provides low-priced do-it-yourself projects.
Booth loves the plants themselves, and it shows. The focus of Indoor Salad is the key salad crops – lettuce, herbs, brassicas (the cabbage and kale family), and other leafy vegetables; the immature vegetables cucumbers, beans, and eggplant; and the mature vegetables tomatoes and peppers.
In a style reminiscent of Mel Bartholomew’s classic Square Foot Gardening, each of these crops are outlined with how-to-grow details, with hydroponics or in soil. Believing that every child should learn to grow food, Booth highlights best vegetables for kids.
Ginger Booth, a lifelong gardener, is also an interactive web developer specializing in environmental and math teaching simulators. Her work appears in the Annenberg Foundation’s award-winning online course The Habitable Planet, and many online teaching simulators for the Yale School of Forestry and the Yale Math Department.
The full-color book is available from eBook retailers including Barnes & Noble Nook and Amazon Kindle. The book is also available in soft cover (Amazon only), and at the Blackstone Public Library in Branford and the Willoughby Wallace Memorial Library in Stony Creek. Softcover retail price $24.95, ISBN-13: 978-1491214596.
Booth is available for interviews and appearances. For booking presentations, media appearances, interviews, and/or book-signings contact her at http://indoorsalad.com.
