Texas Month-by-Month Gardening: What to Do Each Month to Have a Beautiful Garden All Year

One of America’s biggest and most diverse landscapes begins in your yard. There’s no way around it: Texas is huge. The state dials in at well over 250,000 square miles, housing most of the United States’ power grid, arguably all of its delicious food, and almost every kind of environment imaginable: formidable mountains, rolling hills, flat plains, and coastline. If you’re a home gardener, knowing what to do when can be overwhelming--that’s where Texas Month-by-Month Gardening, the companion book to our Texas Getting Started Garden Guide, comes to the rescue. Inside, Houston horticulturist Robert ＂Skip＂ Richter makes it easy with a in-depth month-by-month breakdown of what to plant, when to plant, and how to take care of it in order to have a beautiful Texas garden all year round. During each month, you’ll learn to plan, plant, care for, water, fertilize, and troubleshoot in-season annuals, bulbs, lawns, natives, perennials, roses, shrubs, trees, vines, and groundcovers. As with all of our renowned gardening books, you’re treated to gorgeous full-color ＂here’s how＂ and plant photography and USDA zone maps. Plus, you’ll get a detailed introduction to gardening specifically in the Lone Star State. So have no fear: from the red buckeyes in Dallas to Sunshine roses in Abilene, you’ll have the best little garden in the biggest state around. For our full introduction to gardening in Texas, we also recommend companion books Texas Getting Started Garden Guide and Texas Fruit & Vegetable Gardening.

Robert ＂Skip＂ Richter (Houston, TX), author of Cool Springs Press’ Texas Month-by-Month Gardening (due to publish in 2014), is a horticulturist, gardening educator, garden writer, and avid horticultural photographer. Skip received his master’s degree in horticulture from Texas A&M University and has gone on to manage Master Gardener programs in Montgomery, Travis, and Harris counties, where he currently coordinates over 250 volunteers. He helped develop a variety of environmental gardening programs, including the Extension’s Don’t Bag It yard waste recycling programs, the Composting for Kids educational web page, and the Grow Green environmental education program. Skip serves as a contributing editor for Texas Gardener magazine and has appeared weekly on the Central Texas Gardener television program for over a decade. He has gardened in the brush country of south Texas, the rocky hills of the Missouri Ozarks, the acid sands of the East Texas piney woods, the semiarid climate and high-pH soils of central Texas, and the humid, hot climate and black clays of southeast Texas. YouTube: www.youtube.com/user/skiprgarden