The New Kitchen Garden

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

Look over the fences into the gardens, patios, courtyards and allotments behind, and you'll see a quiet revolution taking place. Amongst the lawns, the roses and the concrete, more and more of us are growing at least some of what we eat. A kitchen garden can be anything from a collection of pots to a small farm - it all depends on where you live and what space you have to create your own edible plot.

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 need from your garden. What follows is a series of invitations - fruits, nuts, herbs, spices, flowers and vegetables to grow and eat. Everything is here - the tools, the techniques, the ideas and the knowledge - to enable you to realise that vision of your own kitchen garden.

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 around 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.

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 can be. Whether you have a few pots of chillies or a community farm, whether you wish to plant in ordered rows or create an edible jungle, The New Kitchen Garden is for you.