The Food Lover's Garden: Amazing Edibles You Will Love to Grow and Eat

by Mark Diacono

"Makes growing your own into a swashbuckling and delicious adventure where you travel the world and taste its finest fruits in your own backyard."--Hugh Fearnley-Whittingstall, founder of River Cottage and author of The River Cottage Cookbook

For the food-loving gardener, Mark Diacono has a new mantra: Life is too short to grow ordinary food. Head gardener at the famed River Cottage, Diacono wants us all to stop growing onions, potatoes, and carrots, because it's just as easy to cultivate mouthwatering delights such as Chilean guava, kai lan, daylilies, Japanese wineberries and Szechuan pepper. In The Food Lover's Garden he shows how easy it can be to reap extraordinary flavor.

Selected for their deliciousness and ease of growing, the fruits and vegetables in the book come with straightforward gardening advice and detailed information on how and when to harvest. Preparation suggestions plus fifty recipes, such as sweet Blue Honeysuckle Pancakes, stunning and delicate Daylily Fritters, and a rich, double cream Cardoon Gratin, teach readers how to showcase the unusual ingredients in their home cooking.

Brimming with practical advice for growing and enjoying 39 of the most remarkable fruits, vegetables, nuts, herbs, spices, and flowers, The Food Lover's Garden is a sumptuous and lyrical invitation to garden, eat, and live more adventurously.

Genres: Gardening, Nonfiction, Adult

192 pages, Hardcover

First published February 9, 2011

Reviews

[Amanda · Rating 3 out of 5]

Beautiful and interesting book and educational for me as many of these plant varieties were new to me.

[Joe.bell · Rating 5 out of 5]

Mark Diacono has collected a large and interesting book of plants and recipes. His choices are all about avoiding spending your gardening time and energy growing some of the food plants that you can go buy for a few cents a pound at the local grocery store. He advocates growing some really exotic fruits and veggies so that what you have you couldn't find anywhere but in your garden. A second thread in this search is that many of the plants he documents and gives very complete planting and cultivation directions about are perennials so that once you get them started there isn't any more starting from seed each year. It is really a great idea. I am barely able to keep myself at work for wanting to get going on planting all of these wonderful sounding plants and living happily ever after. His cultivation directions are a study in thoroughness, along with a sweet beckoning like that Frost poem about going out to clean the stream, you come too. I have to say that I have eaten pretty widely over the last 65 years and still at least a half of the fruits and vegetables that he provides both cultivation information and lovely prose poems about the flavors of are completely new to me. I look forward to starting over again with eating and gardening.

[Sher · Rating 3 out of 5]

Book 59 2012 Reading Challenge --Unusual book, and the title is misleading. The book could be titled Unusual Edibles You Might Want To Grow and eat --Here is what the book covers: Medlars, Mulberries, Quince, Almonds, Chestnuts, Autumn Olive, Blue Honeysuckle, Guava, Goji Berries, Japanese Wineberry, Carolina Allspice, Chervil, Lovage, Cicely, Cardoons, Romanesco, Microleaves, Mizuna, Sorrel, Egyptian Walking Onion, Oca, Salsify, and Yacon. Now do you agree with me? Of course there are a few recognizables in this book too, but if you have dying to grow chestnuts or microleaves, thne this book is for you.

I did find the section on Cranberry Beans WONDERFUL, and I plan on copying that section and trying to grow thses beans. Worth the book - I 'd say. And the photos are marvelous too!

[Susan · Rating 3 out of 5]

I'm probably not going to plant the unusual plant suggestions that are Diacono's favorites, but the book does have a good message to grow what you love to eat, grow what you pay big bucks for at the grogery, and grow what gives alot of flavor to dishes. Guess I'm going to keep growing the sugar snap peas, basil, and hot peppers.

[Phil · Rating 5 out of 5]

Quince, mulberries and sweet chestnuts should be found in my next yard. Amazing book. Not to be missed by gardeners and cooks!

[Charlene · Rating 4 out of 5]

Philosophy similar to mine - I should grow as many bizarre and exotic things as I want because it's my garden and there are no rules limiting me to lettuce and onions.

[Heather · Rating 5 out of 5]

Very enjoyable read with concisely captured information, will definitely influence what we will plant this season.

[Alisa Kester · Rating 5 out of 5]

Really excellent book, and really well written. I now have a long list of plants I need to add to my garden!

[ACRL]

Read by ACRL Member of the Week Clint Chamberlain. Learn more about Clint on the ACRL Insider Blog.