From perennial vegetables that come back year after year, to easy-to-grow delights, she has selected plants that hold their own in both the garden and on the plate. Eat What You Grow contains fewer lifestyle pictures, more focus on plants and more focus on science, which I'm sure all comes from a decade more of horticulture and more editorial influence with her publisher. It's lacking the introductory detail to give structure, and some of the chapters feel rather cursory. In ‘Eat What You Grow’, Alys Fowler shows you how to create a rich, biodiverse garden that feeds not only you, but supports a wide range of pollinators, bees and butterflies, as well as other wildlife. The 103 third parties who use cookies on this service do so for their purposes of displaying and measuring personalized ads, generating audience insights, and developing and improving products.

Her approach, which she describes as a polyculture, hinges upon ‘a good backbone of perennial edibles’ that can be relied on year after year to produce a healthy harvest, alongside a complement of annual plants that you can sow and grow to suit your tastes as well as your capacity. She also teaches you simple and effective design tools that will ensure your garden looks striking and wild, brings joy to your world and feeds you day after day. It suggests building a garden out of three components, "basics" (perennials), "fillers" (self-seeders that look after themselves) and "toppings" (more labour-intensive annuals). I’ve enjoyed learning about some more unusual edible plants that I wouldn’t have thought of to grow.She also suggests effective design techniques for ensuring that your garden looks as good as it smells and tastes! She has keen interest in agriculture and food politics and is setting up an urban farm in Birmingham.

Among the many possibilities, there are familiar faces such as fig trees, rocket and beetroot, as well as less commonplace plants and varieties such as Korean celery (Dystaenia takesimana) and mashua (Tropaeolum tuberosum), a flowering plant from the Andes with edible tubers. Allows you to use the information to suit your own garden and needs, rather than mapping out a plan that you then struggle to adapt to your own conditions. To calculate the overall star rating and percentage breakdown by star, we don’t use a simple average. She has an allotment and an urban back garden with two chickens, lots of flowers and plenty of vegetables.In Eat What You Grow , Alys shows you how to create a rich, biodiverse garden that feeds not only you, but supports a wide range of pollinators, bees and butterflies, as well as other wildlife. The book sets out the argument for gardening in this way in the introductory pages and then splits into subsequent sections. She is fascinated by urban nature and how we make space for it and was a creative consultant on public spaces and recently helped design the Greenwich Peninsula Gardens. She has contributed to G ardens Illustrated, The Observer Food Monthly, The National Geographic and Country Living . And as I now embark on my second year in a new garden, Eat What You Grow has provided a source of inspiration to consider more ambitious plans for each of the seasons.