Review

Diacono wants new gardeners to discover ways to think for themselves and build their own strategies from the many modes of food production. (Irish Sunday Times)

Visionary and useful, this is altogether an inspiring book. (The Lady)

Rush out and buy it. It is in point of fact very good. (Monty Don, @TheMontyDon)

Mark’s writing style is conversational and engaging, he’s deeply knowledgeable, yet he’s low-key and modest. He’s ‘can-do’ and accessible without ever being patronising. (English Garden)

The New Kitchen Garden doesn’t begin with the usual plan of an allotment quartered into beds awaiting their rotation, it starts by asking what you wish to have. (Sunday Mirror – Book of the Week)

Book Description

A practical, how-to gardening book that uses the kitchen as its inspiration for what you grow in your garden.

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Whether you are taking your first steps in growing some of what you eat, or experienced and on the lookout for inspiration, ideas and some new plants to grow, The New Kitchen Garden is for you. Inspired by a range of gardeners growing food on allotments, on rooftops, in container gardens and in other edible spaces, many of them urban, Mark shows you the full exciting breadth of what a kitchen garden will also be. Whether you have a window sill, space for a couple of plants by the back door, an allotment or an acre, you’ll be able to find a series of invitations to grow any of almost 200 fruits, nuts, herbs, spices, flowers and vegetables to suit your space, time and inclination. Everything is here – the tools, the techniques, the ideas and the knowledge – to enable you to realise that vision of your own kitchen garden, wherever you live. There’s also a dozen fantastic edible gardens – a rooftop food forest, a courtyard of metre-square raised beds, Charles Dowding’s no-dig garden, a child’s container garden and Raymond Blanc’s heritage garden at Le Manoir among them – their gates flung open by the gardeners to reveal their methods, ideas and techniques, with plans, key plants and photography to accompany. Mark Diacono – who was head of the gardening team at Hugh Fearnley-Whittingstall’s River Cottage – captures the spirit of adventure and imagination of those growing food in the twenty-first century. He takes ideas from gardens all over the world, including that of his own home, Otter Farm in Devon, with its unique blend of orchards, vineyards, forest gardens, edible hedges, perennial garden and veg patch.No matter whether you have space for a collection of pots or a small farm at your disposal, The New Kitchen Garden will show you how to create the most fantastic edible garden you’ll.