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

by Gay Search, Gay Search

Delia Smith has always been concerned with the quality and flavor of the ingredients she uses, and nothing comes fresher than fruit and vegetables straight from the garden. When the opportunity arose for her to work with garden expert Gay Search to create her own kitchen garden, she seized the chance. This guide, with gardening advice by Gay and recipes and advice on cooking the crops from Delia, is for any cook interested in good food, free from pesticides, who wants to try their hand at growing their own. It follows a year in the life of Delia's kitchen garden, with a chapter devoted to each month, and contains detailed advice on sowing and planting, fruit and vegetable varieties, and how to harvest. Lavishly designed with hundreds of color photographs, and with Delia's recipes that use the produce at its peak, this guide is suitable for first-time horticulturists and cooks of all levels.

Genres: Cookbooks

168 pages, Paperback

First published February 1, 2007

About the author

Gay Search is a BBC televison gardener.

Reviews

[Budge Burgess · Rating 3 out of 5]

As I try to bring my back yard up to scratch I’m browsing a dozen gardening books for ideas and advice. These opening paragraphs will open every review of the dozen – the review of this specific book will appear at paragraph 5.
Can’t imagine any gardening book could be described as perfect – I live in Scotland, which might have a slightly colder climate than other places in the world. But gardening books are useful if you’re trying to bring a piece of land into productive use for yourself, family or community. Useful, to supplement what you may already know, useful to give you ideas and encouragement, useful to remind you of the essentials and the possibilities.
I’d caution against picking just one book – unless it covers a particularly narrow, specialist field. Browse half a dozen or a dozen books before and as you start your new project. Don’t necessarily buy new – pick up some second hand ones online or in charity shops. Seriously, gardening is not going to have changed much in the last 30 years, you don’t need to pay £20 to buy the latest piece by some celebrity gardener when you can get a half a dozen books for that money from charity shops or online.
Browse, take notes, compare, learn, become enthused … but don’t forget to get your hands dirty.
GAY SEARCH – “DELIA’S KITCHEN GARDEN”.
This is more a coffee table book than a manual for the gardener. The bulk of the book takes you through a month-by-month calendar of jobs to do (planting, harvesting, etc.), supported by some good photographic illustrations of plants and techniques. It’s interesting, and there is valuable information there, but there are better books for the calendar.
There are also a couple of recipes from Delia for each month. I’m sure there are some useful pieces there to fire your imagination as a cook and, of course, if your objective in gardening is to produce fresh fruit and vegetables, advice on how best to cook your produce might be at a premium. However, … .
However, if you’re already experienced in growing plants, if you have spent several years growing your fruit and veg and consider yourself a competent gardener, there’s probably not much here to interest you. I’m finding my feet creating a garden, the gardening advice in this book is a tad too limited to be of specific use to me.
That’s not to say there aren’t some pieces of advice in the book which I found useful – there were pages on composting which were informative and from which I’ve learned (and I’m sorry if this is damning with faint praise).
There’s also a brief look at ‘Square Foot Gardening’ – well worth looking at, particularly if you only have a tiny patio or patch of soil.
Some useful advice, some interesting points, recipes which might stimulate your imagination, but not a first choice as a book to inform your gardening skills and motivate you to get your fingernails dirty.

[Joani · Rating 5 out of 5]

I love this book for many reasons, some of them have nothing to do with how good the book actually is, so you might want to knock a few stars off to compensate for bias. You see, this book was written by a British gardener and a British chef and is about the chef's walled kitchen garden and how they made it perfect. The garden has raised beds, lots of old brick, espalier trees, a green house, I think you get the picture. It is basically my dream garden, in the land I practically worship (anglophiles unite!), so yeah, I am a bit biased. It's a, "you had me at walled kitchen garden" kind of thing. However, even without my British leanings, there are many elements I like about this book. To start, it has many gorgeous, large and small photographs and while some are basically eye candy, most are very helpful snapshots of the garden. I also find the format of the book helpful, as it goes month-by-month, explaining what the garden is doing and what you should be doing as the year marches on. In addition, after a gardening chapter for each month, there is a chapter of garden-fresh recipes by the chef, Delia Smith. For me, this book ticks all the boxes, it's beautiful, informative, well-oraganized and, most of all, inspiring!

[Janet · Rating 4 out of 5]

A birthday gift from my hubby as we will have our vegetable garden together.