The Kitchen Garden: Growing Vegetables and Fruit Naturally

Janet Arnett is the former campus manager of adult education at Ontario’s Georgian College. She is the author of Antiques and Collectibles: Starting Small, The Grange at Knock, and 673 Ways to Save Money.

With the gardening-book genre as prolific as dandelions in May, only
those with exceptional quality or a distinctive niche succeed. This one
scores on both counts. Its niche is organic, high-intensity gardening.
It focuses on growing vegetables on a manageable scale, using natural
methods to produce a high yield from small, easily worked plots.

The book’s quality comes from three sources: the informational
content, the photos, and the writing style. By sharing personal
experiences and maintaining an informal tone, Lima’s passion for
gardening shows clearly and helps to involve the reader. Scanlan’s
photos support this by being illustrative of the text; in many gardening
books, the photos are purely decorative.

Soil preparation, feeding, and care dominate the text, since healthy
soil is the key to all aspects of successful organic gardening,
including natural methods of weed and pest control. As well as this
emphasis on earth care, the book provides detailed information on
planting, transplanting, growing, and harvesting all the usual
vegetables, plus a few exotic ones. Melons, strawberries, and
raspberries also receive attention. For anyone eager to learn advanced
skills such as how to keep cauliflower white or how to have a successful
crop of asparagus year after year, the book will be invaluable. While it
is written for the novice, it assumes the reader is about to become
serious about gardening and will want to know the more involved
techniques that many books bypass.

The book is both enjoyable reading and a practical reference for all
who attempt to grow vegetables, regardless of the size and scope of
their undertaking.