My family has been gardening for a long time but we've always relied on the wisdom of experience and habit to guide our choices. It has long been my opinion, for just about any subject, that there is always room to learn. I as eager to see what this volume could teach us. And there's a lot to glean here, even for the experienced gardener. There's a solid section on soil types and micro-climates which will absolutely inform your gardening experience. A large bulk of the text is dedicated to individual vegetables: how and when to plant them and the kind of maintenance care that they need. I am confident that the information I've learned from this book will improve the quality of our plants and eagerly encourage you to do the same.

A lovely reference book for Michigan gardeners, especially those new to the state or to the Midwest region. The layout is practical and inviting. While experienced gardeners will also find useful knowledge, such as the state’s gardening microclimates, this is a how-to book that belongs on the beginning Michigan gardener’s shelf.

I previewed an advanced copy of this book from NetGalley, and this is quite possibly the most useful book in my gardening book collection! The second section provides a month-to-month guide for my state... why hasn't anyone thought of that before? The way it's laid out is genius, and the A-Z guide to vegetables is clearly laid out, with valuable information. It packs a lot of information, but is very concise, and gets right to the point. No long winded stories, waxing poetic... this is the guide to get if you're time is limited, and you want to get to the how-to's and need-to-know information immediately. I'm hoping the author plans to do this with flowers and other plants as well.

Thank you to the author, Timber Press and NetGalley, for an ARC in exchange for an honest review.

This gardening guide is specifically tailored to the state of Michigan, and offers a lot of good solid advice - particularly for the beginning gardener who is unsure where to start. After a very generalized introduction which could apply to any number of states in the Midwest, with slight variations, there are chapters organized by month which include tasks for each month, tips and potential problems. This is followed by an alphabetical guide of vegetables, giving planting, care and harvesting guidelines. The photographs are well-done, and after reading this almost anyone should not only be motivated to go out and get their hands dirty, but also equipped to know how to plan and what to do when gardening.

This is a really great guide for beginners! It has lots of diagrams and pictures that would be helpful to people unfamiliar with gardening. I would not recommend this for those who have experience with plants and gardening, as it's pretty basic information. But you may find something helpful. The best feature in my opinion is the first page of each month's section with a checklist of what you can do that month in your garden, with a bit of wiggle room if you are reading this book a little bit later in the season.

Where has this book been all my life?! Step by step monthly directions with modifications for our ever-changing weather and things like our beautiful Michigan deer eating anything they can in our yards. Thanks to Timber Press for the advanced copy - I’m going to wear it out!

Grow Great Vegetables in Michigan is a regionally tailored home gardening guide for producing vegetables for taste and nutrition and to increase self-reliance and food security. This is one of a series of regionally/state specific guides released & reformatted by Timber press. Edited by Bevin Cohen, it's due out in May 2023, runs 212 pages and will be available in paperback and ebook formats. It's based on an earlier release Vegetable Gardening in the Midwest by Michael VanderBrug, reformatted and edited for MI gardeners. All of the guides in this series follow the same format.

This guide is arranged by seasons with a chapter for each month. The introductory chapter (~13% of the page content) covers garden planning, climates and subzones in MN & WI, as well as very general gardening advice. Worth noting that a majority of the content of the books in this series based on/edited from the same volume (in this case Vegetable Gardening in the Midwest) contain overlapping information and there are only slight differences in content and recommendations.

The monthly sections include tasks for each month, potential problems and troubleshooting, planning and placement of the garden plot, harvesting and more.

The third section of the book is a regional guide to choosing vegetables and specific varieties which will thrive in the area.

There's a resource list (slanted to readers in the Midwest), a bibliography and further reading list, USDA based hardiness zonal map, and an index. The photography is crisp, clear, and abundant. This is a well crafted book which will provide gardeners with hours of blissful dreaming as well as serving as a valuable troubleshooting guide. For readers who have the aforementioned Gardening in the Midwest, much of the content is verbatim here. For readers unfamiliar with the earlier title, there's a lot of worthwhile info here.

Four stars. Very well done.

Disclosure: I received an ARC at no cost from the author/publisher for review purposes

This series is cut and pasted for all the midwest states, with just a handful of pages changed. I have read this one and the Minnesota one cover to cover and almost all of it is absolutely identical -- the intro about what it's like to live in the state (literally, it's a whole page about how great the state is and they just change the state name and leave all the same descriptions in), photos, monthly guide, etc. I am in MN and can't speak to how accurate it is for MI but I suspect it's fairly accurate. It is not entirely accurate for MN. For instance, it says to harvest asparagus in March. That had me literally laughing out loud. We're buried in snow in March. We harvest our asparagus in May, every single year. Maybe in MI you harvest your asparagus in March and maybe it will be more accurate for your state.

This series really should have been one book, Grow Great Vegetables in the Midwest, and then added the few pages showing the maps with zones and the list of a handful of cities average frost dates that are shoehorned in. I have no idea what state the author really lives in, since it's kept deliberately very vague. All that said, it has good basic growing information.

I read a temporary digital ARC of this book for review.