It’s never easy to learn something new, but in From the Ground Up, Amy Stewart puts all of her successes and mishaps on display in order to help plant the path for us.   Take your first step toward becoming a master gardener for only $1.99 through January 31st as one of this month’s Lucky 7 books.  This e-book also comes with a bonus recipe inspired by Stewart’s upcoming book, The Drunken Botanist — coming in March.

You can buy From the Ground Up at AMAZON, BARNES & NOBLE, KOBO, GOOGLE, INDIEBOUND, POWELL’S BOOKS and APPLE.

Amy Stewart had a simple dream.

She yearned for a garden filled with colorful jumbles of vegetables and flowers. After she and her husband finished graduate school, they pulled up their Texas roots and headed west to Santa Cruz, California. With little money in their pockets, they rented a modest seaside bungalow with a small backyard. It wasn’t much–a twelve-hundred-square-foot patch of land with a couple of fruit trees, and a lot of dirt. A good place to start.

From the Ground Up is Stewart’s quirky, humorous chronicle of the blossoms and weeds in her first garden and the lessons she’s learned the hard way. From planting seeds her great-grandmother sends to battling snails, gophers, and aphids, Stewart takes us on a tour of four seasons in her coastal garden. Confessing her sins and delighting in small triumphs, she dishes the dirt for both the novice and the experienced gardener. Along the way, she brings her quintessential California beach town to life–complete with harbor seals, monarch butterfly migrations, and an old-fashioned seaside amusement park just down the street.

Each chapter includes helpful tips alongside the engaging story of a young woman’s determination to create a garden in which the plants struggle to live up to the gardener’s vision.

“How-to gardening books abound; how-not-to gardening memoirs are rarer… Along with a witty description of her mistakes, the author shares her solutions. She gives other beginning gardeners tips… Written in a humorous, conversational style…” – Library Journal