Delia's Kitchen Garden: A Beginner's Guide to Growing and Cooking Fruit and Vegetables

by Delia Smith, Delia Smith

For leading cookbook author Delia Smith, the key to producing delicious, healthy food is to use first-class ingredients. Where fruits and vegetables are concerned, the best way to do that is to grow your own. In month-by-month chapters, this companion follows a year in the kitchen garden, providing detailed information on sowing and planting, fruit and vegetable varieties, and care and harvesting. At the end of each chapter, Delia includes marvelous recipes for using your produce at its peak. For those who have space constraints, there are notes on creating a square-foot garden, a patio garden, and container gardens. An outstanding guide from two experts, this book is richly illustrated with color photos of the gardens, the produce, and step-by-step techniques.

Genres: Gardening, Food, Cooking, Nonfiction

168 pages, Hardcover

First published January 1, 2004

About the author

Delia Smith CBE is an English cook and television presenter, known for teaching basic cookery skills in a no-nonsense style. She is the UK's best-selling cookery author, with more than 21 million copies sold.

Smith is also famous for her role as joint majority shareholder at Norwich City F.C. Her partner in the shareholding is her husband, Michael Wynn-Jones. Her role at the club has attracted varying media attention, from positive when she "saved" the club from bankruptcy, to negative, when making a controversial on-pitch announcement in 2005.

Already an Officer of the Order of the British Empire (OBE), Smith was appointed Commander of the Order of the British Empire (CBE) in the 2009 Birthday Honours, "in recognition of ... [her] contribution to television cookery and recipe writing".

Reviews

[Meredith · Rating 2 out of 5]

Actually written by Delia's gardener, (the unfortunately named) Gay Search with interjections from Delia including recipes and how she likes her fruit/veg prepared.

There were lots of pretty photographs, but I would not consider this a very useful book as it was hard to follow through and find the information on specific plants. It is grouped by season and then by month and then in italicised clusters by type of produce, so that you have to scan past lots of things you don't want to know about things you don't grow to find information you want.

Two small sections at the back offered good advice on getting decent crops from container gardening or a 4 x 2 square.