If you are looking for a book on the subject of ‘grow your own’, here are three recent releases to consider. Read these reviews if you are keen to grow your own to save money, increase your repertoire or salad crops or want to know when your homegrown crops are properly ripe.
Our reviews of three new ‘grow your own’ books for 2017
Vegetable Growing – A Money-Saving Guide
By Jonathan Stevens
Michael O’Mara Books, £8.99
“If there’s one place in the world where an old, discarded eighties bathtub doesn’t look out of the ordinary, it’s an allotment,” says author Jonathan Stevens, founder of the allotment blog Real Men Sow. Many similarly matter-of-fact quotes can be found through the pages of this very readable guide to growing vegetables.
This is an honest and pragmatic guide to grow-your-own, based largely on Jonathan’s experiences of growing fruit and vegetables on an allotment. It manages to steer clear of doling out generic advice, something which many grow-your-own guides seem incapable of.
Another way that this book stands out from the crowd is in the way it shuns the trend for explaining how to grow every edible crop and instead focusses on those which Jonathan believes to be high-yielding, value for money and in his own words having a good ‘productivity versus faff ratio’.
Throughout the book, Jonathan shows an understanding of the potential danger of an allotment plot becoming overwhelming for its tenant, and his advice is tailored towards keeping a veg plot manageable as well as how to save money.
If you want to learn more about growing your own food and want someone to tell it like it is rather than sell a dream, then this is the book for you.
By Joy Larkcom
Frances Lincoln, £16.99
It is difficult to believe that The Salad Garden was first published in 1984. Full of detailed and anecdote-heavy advice on how to grow scores of salad crops, it was a truly pioneering work at a time when any salad leaf other than an ‘Iceberg’ lettuce was considered unusual.
Coupled with growing advice that is far more comprehensive and practical than many of the grow-your-own books that have followed in the intervening 33 years, it has now had a welcome update.
From advice on how to grow an array of crops from amaranth and Chrysanthemum greens, to mustards and choy sum, the reader is armed with the awareness and advice needed to transform their homegrown salads. Larkcom covers fully the wealth of salad crops with herbs, ‘weeds’, root vegetables and potatoes also covered, as well as lists of salad varieties recommended as a result of recent RHS trials, and Joy’s personal favourites.
A section of salad recipes to use once the ingredients are harvested is especially useful, as it allows the reader to work in reverse by picking a recipe first and then growing the appropriate ingredients.
It is the perfect companion to assist anyone growing salad, whether they are growing salad in a handful of containers, or on an allotment.
By Square Foot Gardening
Cool Springs Press, £11.99
There are literally hundreds of books that tell you how to grow your own fruit and vegetables from scratch but this book focusses on the end product Or more specifically on making sure you know when you’ve got an end product.
The main body of the book is a crop-by-crop guide explaining when the right time to harvest each one has arrived. The entry for each crop also has hints on how to know if the one sold in the shops are properly ripe and whether or not you can ripen them at home.
A comprehensive guide to getting the optimum flavour and quality from the crops you have spent ages tending, it addresses in detail a need that is perhaps overlooked by many far weightier guides to growing fruit and vegetables. If we don’t know when to harvest a crop, then the chances are we may be disappointed with the outcome. Anyone who has tried to bite into an underripe gooseberry will know this from bitter experience.
This book will go a long way towards not only helping vegetable gardeners harvest their crops when they are in tip-top condition but it may also help readers rediscover fruit and vegetables that they din’t think they liked; the truth being they had just never eaten them at their optimum ripeness.
For more book reviews from The English Garden, click here.
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