The Cook's Garden: Growing and Using the Best-Tasting Vegetable Varieties

Illustrates the rewards of growing vegetables, salad greens, and herbs at home, offers advice on ordering plants by mail, planting, and choosing the best time for harvesting the vegetables, and contains recipes using the finished products.

Even gardening is buffeted by the winds of fashion, and this compact guide to growing and cooking vegetable varieties in demand today successfully harnesses the current breezes. For example, the Ogdens discuss types of slender filet beans, weeds and lettuces suitable for mesclun salads. Also attentive to garden mainstays, they single out the tastiest kinds of carrots, corn and cabbage. Their goal throughout is superior flavor, which varies with the fate--fresh, cooked or stored--of the vegetable. Pursuing that end, the Ogdens provide instruction in how to germinate seeds and raise and harvest crops, solving the mysteries of floating row covers, many-celled seed germinating trays and other up-to-date methods. Intensively written--the yield per page of practical information is high--the book includes charts comparing varieties of each crop and dozens of inventive and uncomplicated recipes. Information is geared to gardening in New England, where the authors operate a mail-order seed company. Illustrations not seen by PW. Organic Gardening Book Club main selection.
Copyright 1989 Reed Business Information, Inc.

Basic gardening techniques for those who want to obtain fresh, flavorful produce quite unlike the varieties grown by commercial farms. The Ogdens discuss the major vegetables and herbs, using an alphabetical arrangement. They explain how to grow and harvest each type and give suggestions on the best-tasting varieties. They include over 50 recipes for soups, salads, appetizers, and main dishes, and also provide a useful varietal comparison chart that gives sources for seeds and offers comments on the different recommended varieties.
- Peter C. Leonard, Mt. Lebanon. P.L., Pa.
Copyright 1989 Reed Business Information, Inc.