Edible Garden: How to Grow Your Own Herbs, Fruit and Vegetables with This Gardening Book for Beginners (Collins Gardening)

by Joe Swift

Grown your own food with expert gardener Joe Swift.

Creating our own edible garden connects us with the natural world, improves our physical and mental health and contributes to eco-friendly and sustainable food production. If you want to learn to grow your own fruit and veg, Joe Swift shows you how with practical, easy-to-follow advice.

Joe's no-nonsense approach covers everything you need to know from choosing and buying plants to planning a plot and preparing for the different seasons.

He then guides you through caring for them including watering, feeding, and combatting common plant problems.

In this book Joe covers a vast range of wonderful and varied edible plants. He demonstrates how to grow your own food indoors or outdoors, whether in plots, containers, raised beds or green houses.

You'll also learn about sowing seeds, compost, fertilisers and pests and diseases. If you've ever wanted to save money and grown your own greens, this is the place to start!

Joe Swift is an author, TV presenter and garden designer. He makes regular appearances on BBC's Gardener's World and the RHS Flower Shows

• ISBN13: 9780008461140
• Publish Date: 3 March 2022
• Publish Status: Active
• Publish Country: GB
• Publisher: HarperCollins Publishers
• Imprint: Collins
• Format: Paperback
• Pages: 224
• Language: English
• URL: http://collins.co.uk

Reviews

[annieb123]

Originally posted on my blog: Nonstop Reader.

Edible Garden is one of a set of accessible gardening guides by Joe Swift covering a range of gardening topics. Due out 3rd March 2022 from Collins Reference, it's 224 pages and will be available in ebook format.

This is a well written and no-nonsense guide. The author has an encouraging and reassuring voice and information is presented in small digestible (haha) bits. Obviously the emphasis throughout is on edible plants, but he's done quite a good job of choosing the plants which are as attractive as possible and most of which have aesthetic appeal in addition to their utilitarian food uses. Most plants are referred to by both common and botanical (Latin) name for clarity and identification.

The book is full of full color photographs for inspiration and clarity. Although some of the photos are stock photos as credited, there are a number of bespoke photos and tutorials. One of the high points for me with this volume was the useful and specific extra information included on pruning, building up beds, winter protection, raised beds, year round gardening, and the small tutorials and other resource information. Spelling and terminology are British English, but won't present any problems in context with readers from North America.

Four and a half stars. This would be a good choice for public and school libraries, gardening groups, community/allotment gardens, suburban gardeners, homeowners, etc.

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