A thirty-by-forty garden, one picture a month on a Saturday, and a bookkeeper's ledger: every crop, the day it went in, the day the first one was picked, and a line on how it did. That ledger is worth more to a northern gardener than a shelf of books. It tells you that in St. Cloud the lettuce, peas and onions go in late in April and most of the rest on one Saturday late in May, that Early Girl gives the first ripe tomato in the middle of July, and that a Brandywine, planted the same day, takes until the middle of August and is worth the wait. She has kept that notebook since 1976 and this is the first year she has typed it. I hope she keeps typing. The pictures are small so the page loads quickly on a modem, which I noticed, and appreciated.

Sixty dahlias in a back yard, and the clearest instructions for growing them I have read anywhere. Put the stake in before the tuber, or you'll drive it through the tuber later. Pinch the plant when it's a foot tall. Disbud: take off the two side buds and let the center one have everything. Trap the earwigs in a roll of damp newspaper. And in the fall, wait for the frost to blacken the tops, dig with a fork and not a spade, and store the clumps in damp peat at forty to fifty degrees. She says what zone she's in and tells you to adjust for yours, and she tells you which advice came from her dahlia society. Every bit of it is sound.

Added September 20: At her society's show on September 11 and 12, she brought home five blue ribbons, three reds and two whites, and Best Miniature Ball in show. The disbudding works.

I have never grown a giant pumpkin and I don't intend to start, but I read every word of this page, because Hank explains a strange hobby so plainly that you could follow him. Use the Atlantic Giant variety (a Cucurbita maxima, for the record, not the pie pumpkin's Cucurbita pepo). Give one plant 800 to 1,200 square feet. Cover the vine with a shovel of dirt at every leaf joint so it puts down extra roots. Pollinate by hand. Then keep one pumpkin and cut off every other one, all summer long, so the plant puts everything into one fruit. He is honest about what went wrong, which is my favorite thing in a garden page, and he keeps a log with dates. As I write this he has done the hardest part: cut his plant down to a single pumpkin.

Added September 26: The pumpkin is still growing, under a bedsheet to keep the sun off its skin, and the weigh-off is Saturday, October 2. Good luck, Hank.

Twenty-four open-pollinated tomatoes, two plants of each, grown side by side, with the method written out before the first fruit is ripe: seed started indoors on March 20, set out May 15, caged, mulched with straw, no sprays, no pruning, so that every variety shows its natural habit. She gives her soil (a heavy clay loam, pH 6.6), says plainly that one garden and one season is not science, and calls her early blight Alternaria solani, which gets her all five botanical points. She lost points on my card for not saying what zone or state she gardens in, and she won anyway. It was the best-planned garden on the Web this month, and I'll be watching for the results.

Added September 26: The results are up, with yields, flavor scores and disease ratings for all twenty-four. Brandywine scored highest for flavor, with Cherokee Purple two-tenths of a point behind and a week earlier. Read her section on saving seed by fermentation, too; it's exactly right.

A twenty-by-thirty plot behind the garage, and a planting calendar a beginner could follow to the letter. Betty puts her zone right at the top of the page and her last frost date at the top of her season log (May 15, give or take), and she won't put a tomato in the ground before it no matter how nice the weather is. She learned that the hard way and says so. Seeds under a shop light in March, peas and lettuce and radishes in April because they don't mind the cold, the tomatoes hardened off on the back step an hour a day, and then the big day. She started the page so she wouldn't have to tell her daughter-in-law the same things over the phone every spring, which is the best reason I know to write anything down.

Added September 26: Her tomato tally reached 214 by September 22, from fourteen plants, with frost on the way. Her section on fall chores (garlic in October, a cover crop of winter rye) is as good as the spring one.

The first Trowel goes to a woman with 140 African violets (Saintpaulia ionantha, though she never calls them that) and a page that would teach anybody to grow one. Water from below, with lukewarm water, never cold. Use a light, airy mix: she gives her recipe of peat, perlite and vermiculite in equal parts. Keep the pot small. Her leaf cuttings section goes step by step, from picking the leaf to separating the babies, and tells you honestly that it's about a year from leaf to first flower. Houseplant growers don't have a zone, so I asked myself whether she told me the room, and she did: 65 to 75 degrees, shop lights ten to twelve inches above the plants, twelve to fourteen hours a day. Her problems table is the best thing of its kind I've seen, and I've sent two callers from the plant clinic to it already.

Added in May: The weekend I gave her the Trowel, she took a blue ribbon at her society's spring show with a dark purple double she grew from a leaf. She counted 43 open blooms that morning.