The New Kitchen Garden

Book excerpt: Whether you are taking your first steps in growing some of what you eat, or experienced and looking 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 can be. Whether you have a window sill, space for a few plants by the back door, an allotment or an acre, you'll 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 incredible 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 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. 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 incredible edible garden you can.