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

by Delia Smith, Delia Smith

Follow a year in the life of Delia’s kitchen garden while creating your own organic garden. With 56 enticing recipes and 300 colour photographs, it’s sure to be a labour of love.

Delia Smith is Britain’s bestselling food author whose priority has always been the quality and flavour of the ingredients she uses — and nothing comes fresher than produce from your own garden. So when the opportunity arose for her to work with garden expert Gay Search and create her own kitchen garden, she seized the chance.
This beginner’s guide, now in paperback, is for anyone interested in good food — free from pesticides — and who wants to try their hand at growing their own.

NO EXPERIENCE REQUIRED. Delia devotes a chapter to each month, with detailed advice on sowing and planting, fruit and vegetable varieties, and how to harvest. With Delia’s failsafe recipes, which use the produce at its peak, this is a wonderful book for novice horticulturists and cooks of all levels.

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.