How to Grow Food: Your Crop-by-Crop Guide to Growing, Cooking, & Preserving
Praised by Jamie Oliver as 'a cracking book', this collaboration between gardener Huw Richards and chef Sam Cooper covers everything from bed to plate across 70 different crops. It's a genuinely practical volume, written without fuss or fluff, and it manages to feel equally at home in a muddy potting shed or a busy kitchen. Each crop gets its own focused section, covering spacing, sowing times, and harvesting alongside straightforward recipes that make good use of whatever you've brought in. Whether you're tending a few containers on a balcony or working a generous plot, the per-square-metre plant counts and yield guidance let you plan realistically for your specific situation. Variety recommendations are included too, chosen with both flavour and resilience in mind. The recipes themselves span the full range of what a productive garden demands. Some are built for eating straight away (a root vegetable tartiflette being a particularly tempting example), while others focus on preserving the glut, including a tomato sauce ready to enrich winter pastas and stews. Quantities scale depending on your harvest, which keeps things flexible rather than prescriptive. For anyone motivated primarily by the pleasure of good food, this book ties growing and cooking together in a way that feels genuinely useful rather than merely aspirational.
- Author: Huw Richards
- Publisher: DK
- Genre: Gardening & Horticulture
- ISBN: 978-0241767030
- Pages: 224 pages