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

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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 has contributed to G ardens Illustrated, The Observer Food Monthly, The National Geographic and Country Living . 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.

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.The notion of an undemanding edible garden has always seemed like an impossibility to me, but on reading Eat What You Grow, I realise that I am quite wrong. It's lacking the introductory detail to give structure, and some of the chapters feel rather cursory. She also suggests effective design techniques for ensuring that your garden looks as good as it smells and tastes!

You can change your choices at any time by visiting Cookie preferences, as described in the Cookie notice. I love all of her books including her novel and this was a splurge, whilst the paper is gorgeous and the pictures are delightful this is a coffee table book or possibly a seed catalog rather than an actual gardening book. 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. 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.

However, the book does work as a concept with its own focus and I think if you haven't read Fowler's earlier work then this is actually the best place to start. 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. 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. A thoroughly rich and engaging practical guide to creating a wildlife-friendly edible garden that is as beautiful as it is utterly delicious. 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.

Interesting and well written, but a huge disappointment after Alys's previous book, The Edible Garden. Allows you to use the information to suit your own garden and needs, rather than mapping out a plan that you then struggle to adapt to your own conditions. 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.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. Through anecdotal advice, you will learn how to raise and nurture your plants; from trees and shrubs to bulbs and climbers, Fowler covers everything from where to plant them, how to feed the soil and when they should be harvested. To calculate the overall star rating and percentage breakdown by star, we don’t use a simple average.

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 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 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.