How to Grow Food: Your Crop-by-Crop Guide to Growing, Cooking, & Preserving

Gardener Huw Richards and chef Sam Cooper bridge the gap between the garden and kitchen, profiling the growing and cooking of 70 crops.

In this super-practical companion for all kitchen gardeners, each crop has no-nonsense growing information on spacing, sowing, and harvesting, accompanied by delicious and simple recipes for food made well.

Whether you have containers on a balcony or acres of land, easy guides show the number of plants you can grow per square meter and the approximate harvest per plant so you can easily work out how many plants to grow and expected yield. There are also suggestions for the best varieties to grow for resilience and flavor.

Recipes are easily adapted depending on how much you harvest and range from dishes to eat right away, such as a root vegetable tartiflette, and preserves to enjoy later, like a tomato sauce to add to pastas and stews.

So if you’re motivated by food and flavor, The Homegrower’s Companion has everything you need to grow, harvest, store, and cook the tastiest fresh produce.

Huw Richards is a permaculturalist and digital creator based in midwest Wales. His YouTube channel has over 850,000 subscribers and over 100 million views. Huw has written five books with DK: Veg in One Bed (2019), Grow Food For Free (2020), The Vegetable Grower's Handbook (2022), The Self-Sufficiency Garden, and The Permaculture Garden (2025).

Sam Cooper originally trained as a chef before meeting Huw. As @chef.sam.black on Instagram, he shares videos using homegrown produce with his 550,000 followers. Sam has written the "In the Kitchen" chapter of The Self-Sufficiency Garden (2024) and published his own title The Fermentation Kitchen with DK (2024).