Rocky Mountain Fruit & Vegetable Gardening ─ Plant, Grow, and Harvest the Best Edibles: Colorado, Idaho, Montana, Utah & Wyoming

If you’re interested in growing your own fruits and vegetables, you’ve joined the ranks of a blossoming group of DIY gardeners who place a premium on the idea of self-reliance. But like any other kind of gardening, growing edibles is not a one-size-fits-all pursuit: in order to be successful, you’ll need to know not only which plants grow well in your state or region, but also how to grow them with careful methods and a schedule that caters specifically to your local climate. Fortunately for you, Rocky Mountain Fruit & Vegetable Gardening is written exclusively for gardeners who want to grow edibles in Montana, Wyoming, Idaho, Utah, or Colorado. Co-authors Katie Elzer-Peters and Diana Mahanao rely on their extensive gardening knowledge and familiarity with the Rocky Mountain region to equip you with all the information you need to design your edible garden, tend the soil, maintain your plants throughout their life cycles, and—most importantly—harvest the delicious foods they produce. So whether you live near the Big Horn Mountains, on the Front Range, along the Green River, or anywhere else in the Rocky Mountain region, you’ll discover the best fruit and vegetable plants for your garden in this beautiful step-by-step how-to guide . . . and they’ll be on your table before you know it.

Diana (Dee) Maranhao has been an active member of the horticulture/landscape industry for over 35 years. The majority of her professional career was spent in higher education, serving as Horticulture Program Manager, Nursery Production Specialist, and as an educator specializing in Xeriscape-Low Water Use Landscaping, Greenhouse Nursery Management and Plant Propagation. She developed the program, Xeriscape for the Classroom and presented the monthly workshop to K-12 educators to bring water conservation gardening techniques to children in the classroom. The course syllabus is still being presented today. Diana developed and taught a full-day, intensive, hands-on workshop for educators on “Building School Gardens”, which addressed designing school gardens, grant search, and educational program development.

Upon retiring from her long tenure in education, Diana has served as horticulture editor and project editor for numerous educational texts, magazines, garden guides and horticulture book titles. She has been a regular featured garden columnist for over ten years, authoring hundreds of gardening and horticulture articles for the public and for the horticulture industry. Combining her professional background and education with the constant learning experience her home gardens provide, she serves to encourage, to teach and to inspire others to garden, and to do so with water conservation and sustainability of natural resources in mind.

Diana has an Associates in Science degree in Ornamental Horticulture/Cuyamaca College in San Diego, completion certificates in Copyediting from University of California and Merchandising from Kinman Business University, and holds a life-time teaching credential in California specializing in Ornamental Horticulture. She is currently the Administrative Assistant for the Desert Green Foundation, Las Vegas, a non-profit group that presents a yearly educational conference for professionals to encourage continued learning in the landscape industry.

Diana and her husband, Steve, live and garden in southern Utah. Since moving to their little plot of land, they have planted over 100 low-water-use trees, shrubs and perennials, intermingled with vineyard, orchard, vegetable, herb and flower gardens.