No Dig Cookbook: Seasonal Feasts from Homegrown Vegetables

A unique cookbook, packed with recipes for seasonal vegetables as well as tips on how to grow them, using Charles Dowding's fantastic and time-saving no dig methods.

It explains and develops the strong links you can achieve between garden and kitchen, which keep changing according to the season. The garden decides your menu!

The recipes are by Catherine Balaam, who cooks for day and weekend courses at Charles' Homeacres no dig garden. Catherine has created and tested over 60 delicious plant-based recipes, inspired by those lunches which see the participants salivating, after an intense morning of learning in the garden. They are simple dishes bursting with flavor, from seasonal vegetables and herbs.

To complement them, Charles has written ‘Advice on growing your own’ sections throughout the book. He outlines some key growing tips for many of the vegetables in the recipes. 

He also includes his own recipe for no-knead bread, another great timesaver.

You can also find ideas on how to adapt recipes to your own harvests, using different vegetables which are similar to cook with.

Some of the recipes are how to ferment and store vegetables so that you can use any gluts and enjoy them later.

Recipes are categorized as follows:
•    Pestos, dips and sauces
•    Ferments and vinegars
•    Salads
•    Cooked salads
•    Roasties
•    Stews and hot dishes
•    Sweet treats

There are beautiful photos of the cooked dishes, a few including preparation, and of Charles Dowding's garden at Homeacres.

Charles Dowding develops and explains time- and labour-saving methods of high-yielding nature-friendly gardening. He has written ten books and an annual calendar of sowing dates, runs a YouTube channel with 36 million views, writes for national gardening magazines, and gives talks and courses at home and abroad. He has created three online courses: No Dig Gardening, Course 1; Growing Success Course 2. His third online course appeared in 2021.

He has been growing professionally since 1982, and has been experimenting with No Dig methods for the past 20 years. His current site at Homeacres is well known for its rapid transformation from weedy pasture to beautiful garden in just a half-year (see the video “No Dig Abundance” on Youtube). Currently he crops an intensive 0.35 acres/1300 square metres, and sells £20,000 of harvests―mainly salad leaves―locally.