As the owner of a veritable black thumb, I’m always on the lookout for good tips on successfully growing and maintaining a simple garden. The One-Pot Gourmet Gardener by Cinead McTernan provides the perfect combination of gardening how-to’s and creating easy edible creations with your bounty.
The basics are well-covered, everything from assessing your space and choosing pots to knowing when to plant and harvest. More in-depth instructions such as feeding, soil options, and crop storage are all here, too. “Pot recipes” are included, where the author ingeniously suggests combinations of plants that grow together well together and gives details as specific as pot sizes and how many of each seed to throw in.
“Even if you have room for only one pot, you can still enjoy the experience of growing a crop, caring for it, and then harvesting it. And then of course you get to eat it, freshly picked and in season–just as Mother Nature intended.”
The recipe section is a little less impressive. Aside from a few interesting ideas for tarts and soups, the recipes were mostly simple things like drinks, gazpachos, and simple preparations of the harvested veggies, such as how to roast garlic. The book’s strength is definitely in its container gardening ideas, but the entire book is gorgeously designed, charmingly illustrated, and appealingly photographed.