Organic Vegetable Gardening, Simplified
Stop Guessing. Start Harvesting.
The Harvest Helper is the no-fluff organic gardening guide that tells you exactly what to do, and exactly when to do it, for 30 different vegetables, season after season.
What you'll find inside
Soil Mastery, the Organic Way: Build rich, living soil with natural fertilizers, no chemicals required.
Seed to Storage: Easy charts for planting, watering, and preserving your harvest through winter.
The Pest & Disease Playbook: Protect your crops with proven, chemical-free methods.
Companion Planting, Made Simple: A clear, illustrated guide to pairing vegetables for better growth and natural protection.
Tested in real dirt, not just on paper
Kathy's own garden was certified organic by the Northeast Organic Farming Association of Connecticut, and she spent four years on their certification committee. Every tip in this book has grown an actual vegetable in an actual backyard, including hers.
Every gardening book promises a perfect harvest. Most just bury you in pages.
You don't need 300 more pages of theory. You need to know what to feed your tomatoes this week, what's eating your squash, and whether it's too late to plant. Somewhere between the 40 gardening blogs you've bookmarked and the gardening "bible" gathering dust on your shelf, that simple answer keeps getting lost.
One book. 30 vegetables. No digging required.
The Harvest Helper skips the prose and gets straight to the point. Every vegetable gets its own page, broken into 23 categories, so you can flip straight to "pest control" or "spacing" and have your answer in seconds, not chapters. It's a field guide, not a textbook.
The Harvest Helper Organic Gardening for Vegetables is a book designed for the busy gardener. This unique book is different from every other gardening book because it is written in outline format with Step-by-Step instructions and covers 23 categories for each vegetable. My book not only teaches vegetable gardening but organic gardening and covers from Seed Stating to Storage. I teach gardeners of all experience levels how to transition from Petro Chemical dependance to Organic Methods and Products. Everything is summarized for you, so you don’t have to do any research or waste time looking for the information you need.
For the kindle version, purchase here.
Calculate your exact seeding, transplanting, and harvest dates based on your local frost date, no guessing, no zone maps. Durable, UV-protected plastic means it can live in your garden, rain or shine.
Spacing chart for 30+ vegetables on the back
Frost tolerance, pH preferences, and mulching needs at a glance
Calculate the number of weeks between any two dates
Meet Kathleen deMaCarty
Gardener, author, and the woman behind The Harvest Helper.
The Spark
It started with ruined books. Kathy kept losing her favorite gardening "bibles" to rainstorms after leaving them out in the garden one too many times. So one winter, she sat down and started summarizing everything useful from her library onto a single data sheet.
That's when she noticed something: a 300-page gardening book might only contain a few pages of information she actually needed. The rest was padding. There had to be a faster way to find the one fact that made the difference between a good tomato and a great one.
The Wheel
Within a year, the idea for a planting wheel was born; first as eight separate wheels for different vegetable families, then refined into a single 10.5" wheel with everything a gardener needs to calculate planting and transplanting dates, plus spacing information on the back. She patented the design in 1993. By 2000, the wheel and the book it accompanies, The Harvest Helper: Organic Gardening for Vegetables, were both in print.
Proven in Her Own Backyard
Everything in the book was tested in Kathy's own garden, market garden experience included. Her garden earned organic certification from the Northeast Organic Farming Association of Connecticut, where she also served four years on the certification committee.
Before the Garden
Gardening wasn't Kathy's first career; it was practically her therapy. She holds a Bachelor's degree from Pace University and a Master's from Hunter College, both in Speech Pathology. She spent years working with developmentally disabled and autistic children before joining the Peace Corps, where she taught speech to deaf children in Manila and eventually became a sign language interpreter, including for Billy Graham and Ambassador Madeleine Albright.
Back in the U.S., she spent decades as a school and private-practice speech pathologist. In 1987, while home with her second child, she started a little project to keep her sanity: organizing everything she knew about organic vegetable gardening into a system. That "sanity project" is the same skill at the heart of The Harvest Helper: taking something overwhelming and breaking it down into steps anyone can follow. It just turned out to work as well in the garden as it did in the therapy room.
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