Get the Inside Dirt, Massachusetts! Grow Great Vegetables in Massachusetts is the ultimate guide to growing food in the Bay State! This must-have guide to growing vegetables, fruits, and herbs provides you with insider advice on climate zones, average frost dates, and growing season details. Information includes details on sun, soil, fertilizer, mulch, water, and the best varieties for your region. A garden planning section helps with design and crop rotation, and monthly lists explain what to do from January through December. In-depth profiles of fifty best edibles help ensure a can't-miss harvest. With month-by-month regional vegetable gardening information, 50 detailed plant profiles, and color photographs throughout, this is the essential guide for vegetable gardening in Massachusetts. Marie Iannotti is an avid gardener, writer, photographer, and speaker. She is a master gardener emeritus, as well as a former Cornell Cooperative Extension Horticulture educator. She was the gardening expert at About.com for over a decade, and her writing has been featured in outlets nationwide. You can find out more at marieiannotti.com. Preface I can't look through a seed catalog without choosing enough varieties to plant a football field-sized garden, with an appetite for more. Just thinking about vegetable gardening makes me hungry. Few things in this world can compete with biting into a freshly picked fruit or vegetable. The scents, the vibrancy, and the anticipation of that eruption of flavor make growing food an all-sensory delight. Very few edible plants can't be grown in Massachusetts, especially if you are willing to push the seasonal envelope. Leafy greens, earthy root crops, luscious berries, and hearty winter squash are all possible. This climate provides gardeners a warm, sunny summer and plenty of chill days for those exacting plants like rhubarb that need a rest between seasons (kind of like us gardeners). We take a brief pause to celebrate the holidays, and then we reach for our seed catalogs and the gardening season is back underway. Vegetable gardening allows us to be part of the seasons and their changes. Although some people mark spring by the whims of a mercurial groundhog, there is no denying that spring has begun when we see the first green shoots of spinach, asparagus, or rhubarb. It's not summer until we can bite into a beefy, glowing tomato, and just when the garden is overflowing with abundance in early fall, the shortening days remind us that it is time to slow down. The Massachusetts vegetable garden may go under cover for the winter-under mulch, under plastic, under snow, or underground-but the process never ends; it just keeps re-creating itself in a most comforting, and often frustrating, way. Our part of the world is the perfect place to enjoy the change of seasons, and each season brings its own reward. The information offered here will help you make sure you do not miss out on any of the gardening enjoyments the state has to offer, whether it is filling your winter home with sprouting greens and luscious fruits or the succession of harvests from the first spring thaw through the closing curtain of frost in the fall. Massachusetts may be thought of in some places as urban and industrial, but it is also home to some of the best farmers' markets, locavore restaurants, and resilient gardeners who can turn any abandoned lot or alleyway into a feast for the soul. Having four true seasons offers the down time needed to plan and prepare the garden year, and getting the most from a vegetable garden does require a little advanced planning. It's all laid out for you in this book, including a year-round schedule to show what you can prepare, plant, and harvest each season. Whatever your level of gardening experience, you can jump in at any time and get up to sp

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