This book is a lucid and encouraging guide to getting started with container gardening. The author carefully discusses a broad range of considerations that are worth thinking through before starting, including soil type, seedling preparation, irrigation and drainage, and plant nutrition.

I was interested in this book because I want to get started with growing food at home, and this book made me feel much more prepared for the journey. I would recommend it to anyone seriously interested in home gardening, using raised beds or containers. ( )

Andrews does an excellent job of breaking down the process of gardening into easy-to-follow steps and helpful tips and advice throughout the book. It is a beginner-friendly reference that does a good job of explaining the basics of gardening in a way that is easy to understand. If you are thinking about starting a vegetable garden, I highly recommend Raised Bed and Container Gardening. It is a good comprehensive guide that will help you get started on the right foot.

This e-book was a win from the Early Reviewers program.

I love the idea of raised-bed gardening, which the author provides a lot of information on. However, I live on a sloping lot with lots and lots of deer and wildlife that would eat my plants unless I built a fenced arsenal around such a garden. So, at this time, raised-bed gardening is not practical for me.

Instead, in recent years, what I've been doing is placing large pots (aka containers) on our enclosed deck and growing tomatoes and the like in them. The author touches on container gardening, but not as extensively.

There is an extensive bibliography with hyperlinks at the end of this e-book that allows the reader to investigate further on certain topics if desired.

Probably best for beginner/intermediate gardeners, of which I am one. So I can refer to this again when needed. ( )

I've been gardening for decades, off and on, sometimes in ground and sometimes in raised beds and containers, and once in straw bales (my favorite, actually), so much of the information in this book was already familiar to me, though there were a few important bits of info I hadn't known. My daughter, on the other hand, is new to gardening, and wants to plant a raised bed garden this coming spring. Now that I've read it, this will be perfect for her (if she gets the chance to read it, what with her two little kids). Now that spring is coming up, and every gardening site is sending emails or catalogs of tempting seeds to plant, I think she just might make time. Anyway, I'm grateful to LT and the author for choosing me to read and review the book.

Emma Andrew's guide, “Raised Bed and Container Gardening” is a good foundation for anyone interested in container gardening, but it fails to provide much room for individuals to grow their skills after they finish reading the book itself.

It provides a good high-level introduction to the world of gardening: it's easy to read and terminology is explained in-text as well as in a glossary. The focus is on common questions or beginner problems people have when the start gardening, based on my experience starting container gardening three years ago.

That being said, I don't think this book is providing anything new above the dozens of similar books that I found in a quick internet search. It doesn't focus on a specific topic, it doesn't provide advice for a specific region, and most frustrating for me it felt like a dead end to the reader's gardening journey. Since this is self-consciously an introductory text, I wanted Andrews to guide the reader towards more specialized resources, because when it comes to gardening the devil really is in the details. ( )