Free Gardening books, Public Domain pre-1923

I’ve found that much of the “new” gardening information in (expensive) contemporary publications is más o menos recycled from old texts, those meaty, wonderful, captivating books that are in the public domain.

Some are available as PDFs, others must be read online or purchased from a book service.  Many are available as free e-book downloads, but OJO!  many times the illustrations are lacking and frequently the text is garbled by the limitations of the OCR (Optical Character Recognition)  involved in the digitizing.   

Best to look around online, check www.archive.org or http://www.gutenberg.org/, with luck the PDFs of the original transcripts are available, with non-garbled text and full illustrations.  At least one of these pre-1923 volumes is available on www.librivox.org as an audio book: Gardening Without Irrigation: or without much, anyway.

Here are a few that I’ve run across, in PDF, audio, and/or online reads.  Anyone who wants to add to the collection, just send them in.  The goal would be to avoid the OCR-translated volumes that frequently are hodgepodges of strange characters.  Of course once the PDF is located, it can be easily downloaded to an e-reader. 

1)   Farm Gardening, quick cash crops and how to grow them. (anonymous)   http://www.archive.org/details/farmgardeningwit00john

2)  The New Horticulture  by H.  Stringfellow   http://www.archive.org/details/newhorticultur00stri

3)   Dry Farming by J.A Widtsoe   http://www.archive.org/details/dryfarming00widt

4)  Gardening Indoors and Under Glass  by F.F. Rockwell   http://www.archive.org/details/gardeningindoors01rock

5)  Gardening Without Irrigation: or without much, anyway  by Steve Soloman  http://www.archive.org/details/gardeningwithout04512gut 
And,  as audio book from Librivox.org   http://librivox.org/gardening-without-irrigation-by-steve-solomon/

6)  Crops and Methods for Soil Improvement  by Alva Agee http://www.archive.org/stream/cropsandmethods00ageegoog#page/n8/mode/2up

7) and my favorite:  My Summer in a Garden by Charles Dudley Warner.  Excerpt:  “The lettuce is to me a most interesting study. Lettuce is like conversation: it must be fresh and crisp, so sparkling that you scarcely notice the bitter in it. Lettuce, like most talkers, is, however, apt to run rapidly to seed. Blessed is that sort which comes to a head, and so remains, like a few people I know; growing more solid and satisfactory and tender at the same time, and whiter at the center, and crisp in their maturity. Lettuce, like conversation, requires a good deal of oil to avoid friction, and keep the company smooth; a pinch of attic salt; a dash of pepper; a quantity of mustard and vinegar, by all means, but so mixed that you will notice no sharp contrasts; and a trifle of sugar. You can put anything, and the more things the better, into salad, as into a conversation; but everything depends upon the skill of mixing. I feel that I am in the best society when I am with lettuce. It is in the select circle of vegetables.”