There's no shortage of books these days on growing vegetables, but not many of them focus on how to design a kitchen garden and make growing herbs and vegetables an easy thing to do.
In her new book,The Complete Kitchen Garden: An Inspired Collection of Garden Designs and 100 Seasonal Recipes
Ogden is co-founder of the Cook's Garden seed catalog and obviously hasn't overlooked anything in her lastest literary effort. In the introduction, Ogden explains that you can tap your inner artist, as she did, when you grow your own food: "I built a collage of lettuces splashed with dabs of red orache, fronds of chervil, and rosettes of claytonia. Seeds and plants were my paintbrush, as I combined waves of bronze-tipped lettuce with swirls of magenta radicchio and spikes of blue-green kale."
Growing herbs and vegetables is a mystery to many gardeners, but Ogden gives you easy clues -- in less than 10 pages -- on how to get started, keep the area weed free and going successfully in coming years. That's followed by separate chapters on specific kinds of gardens, from one for salad lovers to one for children to others for artists, families, and chefs. I particulary liked the Heirloom Maze Garden (who doesn't love a maze?), a labyrinth winding through tomatoes, beans, carrots, peas, fennel and melons. The Cooks' Garden has an exterior border of boxwood, arborvitae, peonies, and the interior beds are filled with everything you'd want for any kind of dish.
Each chapter contains an illustated "plan" of the garden, a complete plant list, along with a brief essay, photos of many plants, and mouth-watering, healthy recipes. Anyone who includes a recipe for using sorrel has my heart and mind ... can't wait to try the Crispy Sorrel and Spinach Tartlets.
Even if you're only thinking about growing vegetables, this is the book for you.
Nice book review. The book looks really useful for designing gardens.
Posted by: shed plans | March 18, 2011 at 08:12 AM
I really enjoyed your blog post, i always got good, relevant and useful information from your new and unique posts, i m sure your blog will keep us continues update. Thanks for providing us such useful information.
Posted by: Wholesale Nursery Web Design | March 07, 2011 at 04:15 AM
How fun! I linked to this on last weekend's weekly roundup and am just now getting around to letting you know. (I guess we were busy celebrating Easter!) Thanks so much for sharing!
Posted by: Coach Boots | March 02, 2011 at 02:19 AM