Product Description

"The Complete Book of Vegetables, Herbs and Fruit" is a comprehensive guide to selecting, cultivating, harvesting and cooking your own fresh produce at home. The coverage is phenomenal - from the care of asparagus through the seasons to the huge number of apples that can be grown in even the smallest spaces. The book combines lavish illustration with an accessible layout and details the cultivation, companion planting, pests and diseases and culinary, medicinal and cosmetic uses for each variety. It is a must-have for every gardener and cook..

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #116256 in Books
• Published on: 2006-09-21
• Original language: English
• Binding: Paperback
• 640 pages

Telegraph Gardening, December 2, 2006
...a valuable addition to the library of anyone who wants to grow
their own food.

The Times, December 04
The authors, all well-known personalities, write with authority based on practical experience.

Sainsburys Magazine, April 2003
This book has it all

Customer Reviews

Top effort from Matthew Biggs, et al
Now I bought this book along with Fork to Fork looking as you do for inspiration and this is the book I still refer to 6 months after purchase. You can obviously look stuff up in a book like this or you can just jump in on any random page to emerge several hours later with a whole list of interesting plants you would like to be growing. Now that's what I call a good book.. not your hey wow look at me living the good life Fork to Fork rubish. A superb database of a book that manages to be as interesting as it is useful.

Excellent book on growing food
This excellent big manual is as complete as it needs to be. It is in fact 3 books in one with 3 authors being experts in their fields. It gives great introductions to each fruit etc. and gives details of origins you may not normally know. eg. The apple has over 5000 varieties. Gives descriptions on varieties, cultivation, companion planting and culinary uses with a recipe at the end. The only thing I find a little annoying is that the book is arranged alphabetically by family which many will not be familiar with. However this is overcome by an excellent index including common names. The back of the book gives a chapter on Practical Gardening including such things as planning your garden, identification of pests and diseases, growing systems etc. Fully illustrated and a joy to browse through. I bought this book to help with starting an organic garden and I have not been disapointed.

Shame it's aimed at gardening in Australasia!
As a huge fan of 'The Gourmet Gardener' by Bob Flowerdew, I ordered this book and it too would have received 5 stars from me because it also contains a wealth of useful information (e.g. advantages and disadvantages of different varieties, companion planting).

However, the more I read it in detail, the more frustrating it became. For example, the section on garlic listed just three varieties - Oz Garlic Rosea, Oz Garlic White and Aussie White - instead of referring to the four colour types of white, rose, violet and red and their differing characteristics. Similarly, the sections on both potatoes and apples referred to common varieties in Australia - which is not much use to me in Northern Europe! All became clear to me when I read 'The Yearly Calendar' on page 616 which referred to July (Midwinter), January (Midsummer) etc. The edition supplied to me (on Jan 08) was published in 2006 in Australia.

Therefore just one star for this edition. Amazon have been very helpful and explained that the UK edition is not currently available. I look forward to being able to buy it when available but cannot recommend the Australian edition.