Members of the 1000 Islands Master Gardeners have curated a selection of favourite resources – books, podcasts, websites and more – to support your learning journey, whether you are a new gardener or a seasoned veteran.

General websites to get you started

A word of caution: Use sources that promote evidence-based gardening practices. There are unfortunately some websites that perpetuate garden ‘myths’ (we did a series of talks on these a couple of years ago). The best sites are from university extension offices, the Ontario Ministry of Agriculture, Food and Rural Affairs (OMAFRA), botanical gardens, horticultural societies and master gardener sites.

• Master Gardeners of Ontario (MGOI): especially the Resources page
• Gardening Advice (University of Saskatchewan): great guidelines about how to find reliable sources
• Plant Grow Share a Row: Grow Your Veggie Garden Guide: a printable handout developed by the Compost Council of Canada for beginning vegetable growers
• From the Ground Up (Toronto Public Health): a series of guidelines for soil testing in urban areas 
• Grow Me Instead Guide (Ontario Native Plants Council): suggested native plants to replace aggressive non-native plants
• Small Farm Canada: interesting articles and resources for anyone interested in small- or large-scale agriculture, including an application for a Canadian source list for free seeds (as well as mushrooms, bulbs and tubers) 
• Missouri Botanical Garden: trustworthy plant profiles with well-documented growth habits, cultural requirements, problems and uses
• Plant Library from NVK Nurseries and Nursery Plant Finder from Connon Nurseries: find and investigate gardening and landscaping plants, includes filters for native plants
• Homegrown National Park: project developed by biologist Douglas Tallamy, contains information about biodiversity and native plants
• The David Suzuki Foundation Butterflyway Project: similar nation-wide project in Canada
• Garden Myths (by Canadian Robert Pavlis): includes an extensive list of de-bunked topics, a list of products you should not buy and free gardening books to download. 
• West Coast Seeds (WCS): contains, among many other resources, regional planting charts indicating when to start seeds indoors, direct sow, and transplant; here is a chart specific to our area

Gardening treasures for the book-lover

• A Garden for the Rusty-Patched Bumblebee: Creating Habitat for Native Pollinators: Ontario and Great Lakes Edition by Lorraine Johnson and Sheila Colla: the importance of pervasive re-wilding
• Eating to Extinction: The World’s Rarest Foods and Why We Need to Save Them by Dan Saladino: food systems awareness
• Braiding Sweetgrass by Robin Wall-Kimmerer: Indigenous world views and their relationship with contemporary botany. 
• Four Season Harvest by Eliot Coleman: everything you need to know to get veggies growing all year long (recommended varieties, planting distances, growing and storage tips
• The Harrowsmith Salad Garden by Turid Forsyth and Merilyn Simonds: uber-local, takes you from seedbed to salad bowl, with readable bed-preparation and planting instructions, and a range of detailed recipes for seasonal salads, dressings, vinegars, and other herb-infused delights
• Gardening Grief and Glory by Ed Lawrence: general gardening advice, a good resource to get a quick answer to a basic question 
• All New Square Foot Gardening 3^rd Edition by Mel Bartholomew: outlines system of vegetable gardening in wooden raised bed plots, open to the bottom, each 4 feet by 4 feet and divided into 1-foot squares, designed to save space and resources
• Kitchen Garden Revival: A modern guide to creating a stylish, small-scale, low-maintenance, edible garden by Nicole Johnsey Burke: basic design and rationale, plant lists, sowing, harvest regimes. 
• The Market Gardener by Jean-Martin Fortier: aimed at those wanting to establish a commercial market garden but has lots of great information for the home vegetable gardener as well (e.g. sections on soils, drainage, seed starting, organic fertilization, weed management, pests, and season extension)
• The Seed Garden; The Art and Practice of Seed Saving ed. Lee Buttala and Shanyn Siegel: first half is about the botany of seed saving, pollination, genetics, plant life cycles, isolation distances, harvesting and planning a seed garden; second half is specific crop profiles

Podcasts

• Joe Gardener (Joe Lamp’l) extensive website, incredible resource of podcasts, videos, summary documents etc.; weekly podcast features guests who are experts in their fields, the interviews are polished, informative and don’t contain extraneous filler
• A Way to Garden by Margaret Roach: interesting guests covering a variety of topics, well-researched, thoughtful interviews: full transcripts available on the website 
• The Great Simplification by Nate Hagens, tackling the poly-crises faced by contemporary humans in a dispassionate, clear and non-political way

YouTube

A word of caution here; while some channels are truly excellent, others are less so, and the weekly or even daily pressure to churn out content can result in even the best creators producing mediocre videos. So, YouTube might be a good place to start your research, but rarely a good place to end it. Nevertheless, there are some real gems.

• Garden Answer: information about flower gardens
• Roots and Refuge Farm: not only a YouTube channel but a website, blog and at least two books so far, details the daily ups and downs of gardening, homesteading and family life.

Facebook pages

• Master Gardeners of Ontario: information about a wide variety of topics, very well-moderated–extraneous comments quickly get pruned, contains information about upcoming webinars and courses
• Ontario Native Plant Gardening: interesting and lively discussions about native plants, their cultivation and ecological uses. One of the botanist convenors, Peyton Landsborough, has truly amazing native plant knowledge
• A Cultivated Art Inc.: Ottawa/Perth native plant grower Sundaura Alford-Purvis posts regularly about plants, plant propagation and soil

Plant identification apps

• Google Lens: easy and accurate 
• Leaf Snap
• iNaturalist

Humans have been using, tending and cultivating plants for as long as we have been around. Gardening brings us closer to our plant relatives and opens an ancestral window of joy, the connection with our fellow living beings all around us.