BOOK REVIEWS

Kitchen Harvest
A Cook's Guide to Growing Organic Fruit,
Vegetables and Herbs in Containers

Susan Berry
Frances Lincoln
Distributed by Bookwise
$NZ35.95

AS the subtitle - Growing Organic Fruit, Vegetables and Herbs in Containers - suggests, this is another book emphasising small-space gardening. Susan Berry, with three other books in this field, has made it something of a specialty.

From the gardening viewpoint, the book is an eye-catching primer, tackling the ABC of planning and cultivating a small-space container garden. Thus, the opening chapters outline soil requirements, container types, basic equipment, sowing and planting and so on. When it comes to crops, there's a range of vegetables here (classified under roots, stems, leaves, fruiting and salad). With a chapter devoted to each veggie, there's a summary of varieties (some won't be available here), requisite container size (essential) and harvesting.

The bonus is the recipes. Some recipes accompany the entries, while there's a couple of pages worth at the back for good measure. Again, they're mostly simple - beans in garlic or strawberries and lemon syllabub, for instance - but appealing.

In keeping with the organic emphasis - more appealing in the small-space garden because of fewer plants to concentrate on - there's information on composting and pest control, with a special page at the back with instructions on how to make you own "growing medium".

Kitchen Harvest, with its appealing photography, could make a gift for a new inner-city urban gardener or someone downsizing to the garden constraints of a retirement village.

Reproduced with permission from the former Weekend Gardener magazine. The views expressed here are not necessarily those of the RNZIH