Homegrown: A Growing Guide for Creating a Cook's Garden

by Marta Teegan

Swap the annuals for edibles, creating attractive beds and containers that both beautify the yard and provide a bounty of fresh produce

As a trained chef-turned-professional kitchen garden designer, Marta Teegen knows what a difference freshly harvested vegetables can make to a meal-and how easy it is to ensure seasonal vegetables are always available when you need them. She touts the joys creating front yard-friendly raised beds and container gardens that take up only a small amount of space and look beautiful to boot, and shares ideas for tucking productive gardens in other small nooks and corners.

Teegen's unique cuisine-based planting methods mean herbs, vegetables, and edible flowers grow next to each other in comingled plots quickly, reliably, and efficiently. You'll find more than 40 top picks for small-space vegetables that yield big and are trouble-free, plus a variety of menus and 50 recipes for fresh and delicious summer dishes.

With food prices on the rise and concern over pesticide residues on produce ever present, the number of home owners growing vegetables nearly doubled in the last year. Homegrown shows that even urban and suburban dwellers can grow their own vegetables in easy-to-tend plots and spaces.

Genres: Gardening, Cookbooks, Cooking, Nonfiction, Food

192 pages, Paperback

First published May 11, 2010

About the author

Marta Teegan teaches gardening classes in downtown Los Angeles.

Reviews

[Corinnagoodwin]

lots of good info, and a nice story to go with it.

[jess]

I really liked this book. I'm sad it has to go back to the library so quickly. The author has a business helping people transform their lawns into edible gardens. She's a trained master gardener, and prefers some of the same gardening styles that I do - intensively planted raised beds, for example. I didn't get a chance to throughly go through all of the sections, but I agreed with a surprisingly amount of her recommendations. I tend to be fairly disagreeable with these types of books, so that was a nice surprise. My biggest issue was that she lives in Southern California, and it's just hard for me to relate to how she can garden. I would like to check this out again and read more of it, but I should probably wait until my fines are paid at least.

[Rachelreads]

I LOVED this book. It was my best friend this year when planning my garden. I learned soooo much about what is possible with a garden (companion planting, beneficial flowers, a helpful section with instructions for each vegetable and herb). The simple and straightforward structure of the book was just right for me. It wasn't too overwhelming and intimidating like some other garden books I've looked at. And so far, my garden is turning out really well with this intensive method. I love having the flowers mixed in with the vegetables and herbs. It brings me so much joy. Can't recommend highly enough.

[Jason]

It's a pretty good overview of the practice of intensive gardening. However, I've read enough gardening books to know that a lot of the methods she suggests are more geared for latitudes further south. I was looking for something more specific to planning for weekly feeding. She covered this, but not in the depth I would have liked.

[Sarah]

It was an incredibly detailed account of how to set up various polycultural gardens, mostly in beds in land around a house. I wish there had been more attention paid to apartment/container gardening, and that the recipes in back didn't call for so much cheese and bacon.

[Marisa]

This is a great book for those who container garden. Easy to read and very informative and includes recipes.

[Renee]

easy to read book about intensive planting for home gardening. Our summer garden is mostly finished, so I'm motivated. A great reference to keep!

[Alisa Kester]

Some great ideas here.

[C-Jane]

Great garden reference.