Eat What You Grow: How to Have an Undemanding Edible Garden That Is Both Beautiful and Productive

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There are lots of interesting new edibles throughout the book, which may or may not be shown in the photos, but you can't tell, so you haven't a clue what they look like. The 103 third parties who use cookies on this service do so for their purposes of displaying and measuring personalized ads, generating audience insights, and developing and improving products. She is fascinated by urban nature and how we make space for it and was a creative consultant on public spaces and recently helped design the Greenwich Peninsula Gardens. She has presented on BBC's Gardeners' World, The Great British Garden Revival, Our Food , and her own six-part series The Edible Garden .

informative and interesting too, i learnt a lot and the idea of polyculture gardens has my brain buzzing. In Eat What You Grow, Alys shows you how to create a rich, biodiverse garden that feeds not only you, but supports a wide range of pollinators, bees and butterflies, as well as other wildlife.Her inspiration for urban gardening comes from her time volunteering in a community garden on the Lower East side in Manhattan, New York City. In Eat What You Grow, Alys Fowler offers expertise on cultivating a rich and biodiverse edible garden that will attract wildlife, including important pollinators, while also providing you with incredibly nourishing and wondrously home-grown crops. She has written seven books including T he Thrifty Gardener, The Edible Garden, The Thrifty Forager, Abundance , Hidden Nature and A Modern Herbal . I was especially intrigued by the Edible Water Garden section, as this is entirely unknown territory for me and I’d love to try my hand at growing edible aquatic plants.

And tells you how to raise these plants, guiding you through the process of feeding your soil, saving seed and taking cuttings to increase your supplies.

In Eat What You Grow , Alys shows you how to create a rich, biodiverse garden that feeds not only you, but supports a wide range of pollinators, bees and butterflies, as well as other wildlife. To calculate the overall star rating and percentage breakdown by star, we don’t use a simple average. I bought this book alongside “The Edible Garden”, (which i had been watching on the television), thinking it would be a food addition to my gardening library. Interesting and well written, but a huge disappointment after Alys's previous book, The Edible Garden.

Among the many possibilities, there are familiar faces such as fig trees, rocket and beetroot, as well as less commonplace plants and varieties such as Korean celery (Dystaenia takesimana) and mashua (Tropaeolum tuberosum), a flowering plant from the Andes with edible tubers. Her approach, which she describes as a polyculture, hinges upon ‘a good backbone of perennial edibles’ that can be relied on year after year to produce a healthy harvest, alongside a complement of annual plants that you can sow and grow to suit your tastes as well as your capacity.In 'Eat What You Grow', Alys Fowler shows you how to create a rich, biodiverse garden that feeds not only you, but supports a wide range of pollinators, bees and butterflies, as well as other wildlife. By comparison, there are far fewer photos, and the ones that are present are grainy and most frustratingly unlabelled! She has contributed to G ardens Illustrated, The Observer Food Monthly, The National Geographic and Country Living . What I enjoyed most about this book is that it is a galvanising treatise on the possibility of a truly nature- centric edible garden, a celebration of biodiversity as well as deliciousness. Even if you have read her earlier books The Edible Garden then there's still something to be gained from Eat What You Grow as there's a lot more introductory information about Polycultures in the latter.

I’ve enjoyed learning about some more unusual edible plants that I wouldn’t have thought of to grow. It's lacking the introductory detail to give structure, and some of the chapters feel rather cursory. Split into three main sections, the book takes a holistic approach by building from the basics, which are edible perennials in a variety of sizes and growth habits, up to fillers that self-seed, through to toppings, which are annual plants that will thrive in this mixed system. It suggests building a garden out of three components, "basics" (perennials), "fillers" (self-seeders that look after themselves) and "toppings" (more labour-intensive annuals). If the initial age verification is unsuccessful, we will contact you asking you to provide further information to prove that you are aged 18 or over.She also suggests effective design techniques for ensuring that your garden looks as good as it smells and tastes! I gave 4 stars rather than 3 because I felt Eat What You Grow had a great deal of poise, especially compared to The Edible Garden, which hinged on a very lifestyle driven TV companion, where many encountered Fowler's distinctive style for the first time. Fowler suggests that it is far less time consuming to garden alongside nature rather than being a chore that includes constant weeding and back-breaking digging. Alys Fowler trained at the Horticultural Society, the New York Botanical Garden and the Royal Botanic Garden at Kew.