Grow Your Own Food (Make Your Own)

by Clare Macnaughton

This beginner's guide to growing your own food is the perfect introduction to homegrown planting and growing. Whether you live in a flat or a field it will furnish you with all the information you need to plant the seeds of your first vegetables and gather the eggs from your pet chickens. It is a jam-packed, how-to, step-by-step guide on how to grow food and keep chickens, which will set you up with everything you need to begin your journey.

It is important to note even with this book at your disposal, growing vegetables is still a process of trial and error. But don't let that put you off, because every trial and error is a wonderful learning curve. Eating homegrown food is one of the most rewarding, delicious experiences, and no food tastes better than your own homegrown food. Let's not forget the sense of triumph felt watching seeds grow into plants and the plants provide food to harvest. You don't need to be an experienced gardener to grow vegetables, you simply need the basic components of pot, soil, seed, light and water, then you can watch your seeds grow into delicious edibles. Everything you need to know to kickstart your new hobby is in this handy sized guide.

• ISBN13: 9781399001793
• Publish Date: 30 September 2022
• Publish Status: Forthcoming
• Publish Country: GB
• Publisher: Pen & Sword Books Ltd
• Imprint: White Owl
• Format: Paperback
• Language: English

Reviews

[annieb123]

Originally posted on my blog: Nonstop Reader.
Grow Your Own Food is a helpful tutorial guide by Clare Macnaughton for gardeners who wish to begin, to improve, or to increase their food security. Released 29th July 2022 by Pen & Sword on their White Owl imprint, it's a compact 120 pages and is available in paperback format.

This is a basic guide full of general advice on getting started with raised bed gardening, sourcing and starting seeds, growing (with a little bit of troubleshooting along the way), and even a short bit on chickens for egglaying. The advice is written with an emphasis to readers living in the UK (and associated climates), but is also general enough to be moderately useful to readers living outside the UK.

The guide's chapters are full of photographs to illustrate the advice and planning details included in the text. This is in no way an encyclopaedic start to finish one-size-fits all guide which will turn readers into professional gardeners with one read-through, and the author wisely says precisely that. Gardening is less a destination so much as a journey and a process.

Her advice about allotments, personal gardens, and even balcony/windowsill gardens will allow a complete beginner to make some progress toward a successful harvest of some sort. Gardening is a very therapeutic hobby, and one that brings benefits in the form of physical exercise, mental health and stress reduction, life skills, and with hopefully the promise of high quality food at some point. The author's style is chatty and informal and definitely not at all intimidating. It reads more like a friendly chat with a helpful neighbour.

Four stars. This isn't the -only- book a new beginner should depend on, but it could be a good addition to a starting gardener's bookshelf.

Disclosure: I received an ARC at no cost from the author/publisher for review purposes.