Growing Edibles

“For us, there is a deep, elemental pleasure in growing at least some of our own food.” Joe Eck & Wayne Winterrowd (North Hill Garden).

Check out the photos of their gardens on their website or read one of their books. My favorite is “Living Seasonally.” You can’t go wrong with any of them!

Here’s an article about them in the NYTimes.

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Great Gardening Books: Kitchen Gardens

I’ve been reading as many books on kitchen gardening as I can get from the library. Some are good, some are bad, some have great photos, some have none.

Taylor’s Weekend Gardening Guide to Kitchen Gardens: How to Create a Beautiful and Functional Culinary Garden (Taylor’s Weekend Gardening Guides)is a great book. It’s small so it’s a quick read. There are a ton of great photos of real gardens, not perfect magazine gardens here, just real gardens with weeds & imperfect plants. It highlights a bunch of different kitchen gardens in different zones. This is a great book for photos of gardens that can be translated into your own garden. I found a sapling fence that might be in my garden next year.

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Great Gardening Books: Moosewood Restaurant Kitchen Garden

I’ll have to admit, when I first got The Moosewood Restaurant Kitchen Garden: Creative Gardening For The Adventurous CookI was a bit disappointed. There are no photos, just drawings. One of my favorite things about gardening books are the photos. I get a lot of inspiration and ideas from photos in magazines and books.

Once I started reading, I was pleasantly surprised by the content of the book. This book goes in to great detail about each type of vegetable, listing specific kinds to try and includes great detail about the soil and moisture needs of each plant (it also specifies where to get each specific kind of plant). Since this book is written specifically for growing vegetables for cooking, it has cooking tips, which is a great addition since cooking is another one of my hobbies! Another great feature of this book is the resource section and the bibliography. I’m sure I’ll be spending some time looking through all the resources and reading few of the books listed in the bibliography. This book will be a great resource to refer to throughout the garden planning, planting, and harvesting season. I’m definitely putting it on my “Want to buy” wishlist!

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Gardening Books: Culinary Gardens

I have been trying to decide on a final design for my culinary garden, so I have been reading a lot of books on the subject looking for some inspiration.

I just finished reading Culinary Gardens: From Design to Palate. I wasn’t super impressed with this book. It has a lot of garden styles with plans for each one, but the plans are hard to decipher. She has plants labeled by color, but it’s hard to tell which green on the plan is for basil and which is for chives. Besides a few recommendations for specific types of vegetables to grow, I didn’t get much out of this book. I’m glad I borrowed it from the library and didn’t buy it!

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Great Gardening Books: Living Seasonally

While reading through Designing the New Kitchen Garden: An American Potager Handbook,the Gardens at North Hill were featured in the book. I remember thinking, “Wow, I’d like to see their gardens.” Then I found out that there was a book about the gardens at North Hill. Living Seasonally: The Kitchen Garden and the Table at North Hillis truly a fantastic read! I enjoyed every single page. Joe and Wayne do a fantastic job describing seasonal living. The writing was fantastic, it didn’t read like a normal gardening book. It is more of a biography of a garden. The book was filled with advice on which kinds of plants do well in a cool climate garden and tips about how to get specific things to grow well. I loved that they included a lot of information about their animals (from Scottish Highland Cows, to tiny Bantam hens). It truly was a wonderful read. I’m going to put it on my wish list of books I would like to add to my gardening library. I’m sure I’ll be reading it again soon.

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