Growing at human scale — vegetables, fruit and propagation, composting and the small plot worked well.
10 topics · 10 curated works
No prior grounding assumed.
Growing Greener Cities in Africa: First Status Report on Urban and Peri-Urban Horticulture in Africa
FAO · 2012
Argues urban and peri-urban horticulture is a real source of food security and livelihoods for African city dwellers rather than a marginal hobby,…
Assumes you know the vocabulary.
The Nursery-Book: A Complete Guide to the Multiplication of Plants
L. H. Bailey · 1891
Sets out plant propagation — seeds, cuttings, grafting, layering — as a small set of general physiological methods that apply across species, rather…
+5 more at this level
Primary sources and full treatments.
The Standard Cyclopedia of Horticulture
L. H. Bailey · 1900
Compiles the accumulated knowledge of American horticulture — species, techniques, tools — into a single reference that functioned as the field's…
+2 more at this level
10 works
FAO
Argues urban and peri-urban horticulture is a real source of food security and livelihoods for African city dwellers rather than a marginal hobby, and sets out what municipal policy needs to do to support it.
link checked 17 Sept 2026L. H. Bailey
Sets out plant propagation — seeds, cuttings, grafting, layering — as a small set of general physiological methods that apply across species, rather than a separate trick to learn for each plant.
link checked 17 Sept 2026L. H. Bailey
Treats fruit growing as applied plant physiology — pollination, pruning, rootstock choice — rather than a craft passed down by rule of thumb, and became the standard American textbook on the subject for a generation.
link checked 17 Sept 2026L. H. Bailey
Treats pruning as controlled injury governed by plant physiology, arguing a gardener should cut toward a specific purpose — fruiting, form, health — rather than by habit or season alone.
link checked 17 Sept 2026L. H. Bailey
Works through vegetable growing as a set of physiological principles — soil, spacing, succession, seed — rather than a fixed recipe per crop, aimed at turning gardening into a teachable discipline.
link checked 17 Sept 2026Cyrus R. Crosby & Mortimer D. Leonard
Works through the insects that attack vegetable crops as a set of distinct, identifiable life cycles each with its own point of control, rather than a single undifferentiated pest problem to spray away.
link checked 17 Sept 2026Robert Rynk
Works through the biology and engineering of composting at farm scale — carbon-to-nitrogen ratios, turning schedules, moisture — as the practical basis for turning organic waste back into usable fertility.
link checked 17 Sept 2026L. H. Bailey
Compiles the accumulated knowledge of American horticulture — species, techniques, tools — into a single reference that functioned as the field's working encyclopaedia for decades.
link failing as of 17 Sept 2026Baudoin et al.
Sets out greenhouse vegetable production as a controlled-environment discipline, arguing the biggest yield and quality gains come from managing climate and irrigation together rather than either alone.
link checked 17 Sept 2026Pautasso et al.
Argues that informal farmer-to-farmer seed exchange, not formal gene banks alone, is what keeps traditional crop varieties in active cultivation, and sets out how the structure of these exchange networks shapes how much diversity actually survives.
link checked 17 Sept 2026