Once in a while a garden book comes along that stands the test of time. “The Vegetable Gardener’s Bible” by Edward Smith was published in 2000, and continues to attract the attention and praise of vegetable gardeners.

Community garden speaker, Julie Gahn, will be talking and showing slides at 6 tonight at Muskogee Public Library. Gahn said Smith’s book is probably the best on the market for beginning vegetable gardeners.

Smith’s approach to vegetable gardens is based on his word.

• System: Wide rows, organic practices, raised beds and deep soil.

• “From Seed to Harvest: Higher Yields with Less Work” is the first chapter about how wide, raised beds produce considerably more vegetables than narrow rows. In a standard garden, half the space is compacted by gardeners’ feet. Planting beds that are 3 feet wide and made deeper with 18-inch deep raised beds and narrow paths gives more of the square footage to production.

Wide beds save space and work. They allow closer planting and easier access for weeding and harvest.

That design also conserves water.

Either building plank-sided boxes around beds or simply piling additional soil onto the rows can accomplish the recommended depth of your growing beds.

Smith has pages on tools, planning a new garden, converting a grassy or sod area into a vegetable garden and how to read a seed catalog.

The pages on companion planting are arranged in charts for easy reference.

Then there are tips about inter-planting.

For example, he recommends that you plant light-feeding carrots with heavy-feeding tomatoes and pair deep-rooted parsnips with shallow-rooted onions.

Smith says crop rotation by plant family is crucial for fooling the insects that prefer specific plants and he gives examples of how to make it work.

One of the reasons you get more out of Smith’s method of vegetable garden planning is that he recommends that you grow plants a lot closer together. He says that you can put them closer in a 5x2 bed that is 2 feet deep, than in an 8 inches wide by 2 feet long row because the plants can get the nutrients they need from the deeper soil.

The chapter on jump starting the season with your own seedlings is detailed enough to help a new gardener get off to a good start using seeds.