Product Description

An indispensable compendium for a new generation of eco-conscious kitchen gardeners: Elspeth Thompson, The Sunday Telegraph gardening columnist The Alternative Kitchen Garden is an evolving idea of what a kitchen garden could be in the twenty first century organic, environmentally sustainable, resilient and about relocalising at least some of our food production. Its also a place not only for learning and practising growing skills but for enjoying ourselves and having fun. Both an ideal companion for anyone getting dirt under their fingernails for the first time and full fascinating ideas and experiments for the adventurous gardener. A self confessed 'cyber geek', Emma began to document the transformation of her ropey old lawn with potholes and brambles into a fertile and abundant permaculture plot via internet radio and a popular blog site. Eight years on her postings and stories have been collected in here, illustrated with beautiful colour photographs and arranged into easily accessible alphabetical order. Covering subjects as diverse as growing achocha (a lost Inca crop) to zucchinis Emma s style is light and friendly yet at the same time informative and based on personal experience you feel you could actually be sitting in the garden chatting face to face as she shares her knowledge and experience, especially when she veers off into non directly garden related tangents such as osteopathy and freecycling. A concise and valuable practical guide, and a lovely read that you can also dip in and out of. Emma Cooper is an unstoppable force, one of life s positive people, and The Alternative Kitchen Garden sets out her inspiring personal vision of how to grow your own: Emma Townshend, The Independent on Sunday gardening columnist

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #200986 in Books
• Published on: 2009-08-17
• Format: Illustrated
• Original language: English
• Number of items: 1
• Binding: Paperback
• 376 pages

Review
The Alternative Kitchen Garden is, according to author Emma Cooper, an evolving idea of what a kitchen garden could be in the twenty first century organic, environmentally sustainable, resilient and about relocalising at least some of our food production. Its also a place not only for learning and practising growing skills but for enjoying ourselves and having fun. There are many incarnations across the globe, but Emma s particular Alternative Kitchen Garden came into being in 2001 when she and her husband bought a new home in Oxfordshire and decided to grow a few pots of herbs on the patio. A self confessed cyber geek, she began to document the transformation of her ropey old lawn with potholes and brambles into a fertile and abundant permaculture plot via internet radio and a popular blog site. Eight years on her postings and stories have been collected in this fascinating volume, illustrated with beautiful colour photos and arranged into easily accessible alphabetical order. Covering subjects as diverse as growing achocha (a lost Inca crop) to zucchinis, and forest gardening to xeriscaping, Emma's style is light and friendly yet at the same time informative and based on personal experience you feel you could actually be sitting in the garden chatting face to face as she shares her knowledge and experience, especially when she veers off into non directly garden related tangents such as osteopathy and freecycling. A dual purpose book a concise and valuable practical guide, but at the same time a lovely little read for the deck chair or hammock! Graham Burnett, Permaculture Magazine 61 If you are new to growing food, relax and enjoy this book: It brings together the many spokes of growing edibles into one hub, drawing together techniques, processes and concepts, pleasures and possibilities, experiences and insights without sparing the failures. This is gardening as a whole and as it should be. If you are already converted, rest assured that this stream of thoughts and experiences, exciting ideas and fascinating facts make The Alternative Kitchen Garden a book to grow with, in all senses. There s a lot of talk at the moment that this, now, is the time to grow your own, but what we are seeing is a more enduring reconnection and fascination with what we eat. Since the 1950s, we have seen the wider population who used to grow at least a little of what they ate fall by the wayside (though allotmenteers and kitchen gardeners have never gone away). Undoubtedly our obsession with saving time and the availability of cheap food has played a key part in this, but the tendency of some garden writers to cloak the pleasure of growing in endless jargon, to dress up complex techniques as critical and create an expert/novice divide has done little to encourage and inspire. Happily Emma is helping to put this to rights. It is one thing to do , quite another, as Emma does, to multiply the value of doing by enthusing, inspiring, encouraging and enabling. Through her website, blogging, podcasts and now this book, Emma beautifully conveys the simultaneous inconsequentiality and enormity of growing: Planting a tree, while a matter of hole-digging and backfilling, engages us with our cultural heritage and becomes an opportunity for creativity and expression, as well as offering a gift to the future. And as you d expect if you re familiar with Emma's work, it s a generous book, linking people, organisations and the reader throughout, joining the dots as it goes. Many books present the reader with what feels like a mountain to climb. Emma s gift is in breaking down barriers, inviting us into the resulting space and presenting numerous ingenious opportunities to fill it. What and how we do this is up to each individual. Now I'm off to sow some quinoa. --Mark Diacono, from the Foreword, is author of Veg Patch River Cottage Handbook

The Alternative Kitchen Garden is an indispensable compendium for a new generation of eco-conscious kitchen gardeners. --Elspeth Thompson, The Sunday Telegraph gardening columnist

Emma Cooper is an unstoppable force, one of life's positive people, and The Alternative Kitchen Garden sets out her inspiring personal vision of how to grow your own. --Emma Townshend, Independent on Sunday gardening columnist

About the Author
Emma Cooper lived a very uneventful life until she met her husband, Pete. She went to The University of Birmingham, earned a degree (a BSc (Hons) in Physics and Astrophysics), and then started a string of office jobs of an increasingly computery nature. At one of those jobs she bumped into Pete, and together they have embarked on a journey towards a greener lifestyle. It started off relatively simply, making good use of the local recycling collections and moving towards organic food. In 2001 they bought a house, and Emma wandered out into the garden and planted a few herbs and vegetables in pots on the patio merely to cut down on the family Food Miles. She soon developed a towering obsession with edible plants and is on a quest to grow them all, from the humble spud to the exotic achocha and beyond. Over the past 8 years, Emma's garden has developed from an unloved urban back yard into an edible paradise, albeit a rather untidy one. Because this is a place where wildlife is welcome and nothing grows in straight lines. Pete is normally quite happy to leave the gardening to his wife, although he has made a few contributions of his own most notably building the Grow Dome, installing several large water butts and insisting on chickens. Princess Layer and Hen Solo arrived in 2006 and happily munch their way through more than their fair share of the home grown veggies, plus the occasional slug when Emma insists. In the autumn of 2006, Pete left the world of air-conditioned offices and vending machine coffee to work from home. He seemed to be having so much fun doing it that Emma joined him early in 2007. Since then she has had far more time to spend in the garden, although it s a shame that it has coincided with two of the worst possible growing seasons of recent years! And although there s not as much spare cash to spend on gardening goodies, it doesn t matter making the garden more self-sufficient has been huge amounts of fun and very rewarding. When she s not in the garden, Emma can be found huddled over a gardening book from her over-stuffed bookshelf, or in front of the computer. Emma writes about environmentally friendly gardening, keeps a regular online diary (blog) about her gardening exploits and green issues and records a (fairly) regular online radio show called The Alternative Kitchen Garden, which draws its audience from all over the world.

Customer Reviews

An A-Z of enthusiasm and ideas which has relevance for any kitchen gardener irrespective of experience
Ever since I knew Emma Coopper was writing a book about her Alternative Kitchen Garden, I'd been intrigued how she would make it stand out from the many books about vegetable and fruit growing currently found in our bookshops today.

Thankfully she's taken a different approach to the monthly/seasonal calendar one and come up with a unique guide on how to transform a garden into a productive one. Like many of us, Emma started with just a few pots, but soon realised this wouldn't be enough for her. Today, her garden is dedicated to growing fruit and vegetables - and chickens! - with a 'grow dome' installed to extend the productive season and to grow her more tender crops.

It's not a 'How to' book - there's plenty of those on the market already - but there are plenty of hints and tips within its 371 pages. Instead it's an A-Z of enthusiasm, ideas and experiments, where Freecycling, Osteopathy and Zero Waste cheerfully rub shoulders with Achocha, Peas and Strawberries. Unlike most gardening books, Emma is looking at the kitchen garden in its widest sense. She isn't afraid to talk about her failures as well as her successes and sometimes you won't find definitive answers either as Emma is discussing what she's found out so far from eight years of gardening. That honesty is most refreshing and should encourage pretty well everyone to 'have a go', whether they're starting out or just wanting to try something that bit different.

A positive, friendly and informative book, which has relevance for anyone growing their own in the 21st century, irrespective of whether they're a beginner or have some experience.

A fab read, and one you'll keep going back to
A great book, a great read, and one that i keep going back to having read it from cover to cover. Growing some of what you eat doesnt have to be boring, neither is it without failures, nor is it either no work/endless slog and Emma communicates all of this so well. Full of ideas, very personal too, and most importantly it makes you want to grow, to try something new, to be outside

full of good, tested, personal advice
This book is an A-Z, which makes it sounds rather dry - yet it contains lots of enthusiastic tried-and-tested tips. Emma Cooper is a gardening blogger and this is her first print book, but her experience of writing for the web means it's really readable and full of good information actually, too. And she does have a sense of humour... her chicken is called Princess Layer.

It is alphabetical, but if i tell you the first entry is 'Achocha' you will realise that this is an alternative kitchen garden guide indeed. I'd never even heard of it before reading this book, but it's a member of the cucumber family so I'll be keeping my eye out...

There is lots about how to grow more usual crops like carrots and potatoes, too. And for the first time in print I found an explanation of why my attempts over the last two years to grow Edamame, the green soy beans you get in japanese restaurants, haven't worked. There are problems with how the beans are stored, it seems, and many people have germination problems.

It's a very personal account - she admits she can grow baby carrots like anything, but big strong roots eludecontinue to elude her... and she made me laugh when she describes how a 'labellling drama' meant that she doesn't know which lemon and orange pips actually germinated. There's even a bit where she explains how you can fertilise the plants with human wee....

I think it would be a good buy for anyone hoping to dip into growing veg organically, who wants a personal, fun book on how to do it.