Just Vegetating: A Memoir

by Joy Larkcom

Joy Larkcom, proclaimed by the Observer 'the queen of vegetable growing', transformed the experience of growing vegetables in Britain - and indeed can be said to have played a large part in changing the whole of the British attitude to vegetables. Among many innovations she introduced saladini and bags of mixed salad leaves, and popularized the practice of cut-and-come-again.

All this, according to Joy, stemmed from the Grand Vegetable Tour she undertook with her husband, Don, and their two young children in the 1970s, travelling around Europe by caravan. While Don did the cooking and taught the children, Joy bicycled off to find out everything she could about how people were growing vegetables and to collect seeds of rare varieties. The tour led to books (famously Grow Your Own Vegetables) and a lifetime of garden writing.

The articles published here, for the first time in book form, are selected from that life's work. They describe not just her adventures on the Grand Vegetable Tour - from a rollicking evening's dancing after husking maize with French farmers to visiting ancient Portuguese gardens excavated in sand dunes - but many other experiences, including life at the small experimental market garden she set up in East Anglia on her return; her travels in China and Japan in quest of oriental vegetables; and the creation of a new 'retirement' vegetable garden at a farmhouse on the west coast of Ireland.

Genres: Gardening

336 pages, Hardcover

First published September 11, 2012

Reviews

[Agnes Goyvaerts · Rating 4 out of 5]

A very nice and interesting read, especially the section where the author discusses different vegetables in Europe, and not so well known seeds and plants, enjoyed that very much and learnt some things too. I did not quite finish the book as it is more a reference even though it reads quite easy. So kept the last bit for another read, another time.

[Phil · Rating 3 out of 5]

Larkom's 'Grow your own Veg' has been my go-to veg book for decades (and is one I recommend to anyone who is remotely interested in GYO), so I was eager to read this 'memoir' and learn more about one of my favourite garden writers. Unfortunately, it's a bit of a stretch to describe 'Just Vegetating' as a memoir - it functions more as a kind of scrapbook. The book consists of articles Larkcom has written for various publications over a period of 40 years, starting in the early 1970s and organised into sections. She prefaces each section with a brief introduction, which does give a little bit of background information about her life at the time, but a memoir this is not!

It is interesting to see how gardening knowledge and interests have developed over the past four decades, although I think this book is one that is best dipped into than read from cover to cover - there are only so many gardening articles one can read in a single sitting! If this were meant to be a collection of gardening articles, then I'd rate it at 4 or 5 stars, as it is very well put together. But I'm giving this 3 stars because it is not what it claims to be.