Designing the New Kitchen Garden: An American Potager Handbook Review

Average Reviews:

(More customer reviews)The sub-title for this book might be "A landscape designer dabbles prettily in vegetables" The book is beautifully produced, although I found the strong raking light in some of the photographs actually obscured the plants.
The chapter of historical background is almost worth the price of admission itself (if you're interested in history and the history of gardening) Although somewhat preciously phrased, the author does remind us of the connection of spirit, body, and garden, something we may forget when we in the middle of a vicious battle with cabbage loopers.
But the excursions into real gardens felt to me like a fantasy. If these gardens are meant to be inspiring, they failed with me. Every page I turned reminded me that these gardens are big, and clearly cost a lot of money to build and maintain. I never had a clear sense of the good eating that should be coming out of these gardens. And of course, nothing ever seems to go wrong in these gardens; there is no sense of how the gardeners have learned and evolved their gardens over time.
For a book ostensibly about "American" potager gardening, most of the country was omitted. Including midwest, southern, and western garden would have been a big help.
The design chapter starts off on the wrong foot by discussing a potager garden that was never built. Even worse, it was never built in a large urban space with which few of us will ever have to contend, so I fail to see the point. The second garden design discussed, designed for a small restaurant, also has not been built. The third garden is the author's own, now giving me the uncomfortable feeling that the entire book is a vanity project.
When the winter weather keeps you indoors, this will not a bad book to page through; just don't let it be the only book on your shelf about potager gardening.

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