Kitchen garden – food growing, gardening with children. The Family Kitchen Garden provides clear instruction on growing vegetables, fruit, herbs, and cutting flowers, including an A-Z of plants and month-by-month advice on what to do when. It is especially intended for anyone who may be daunted by the idea of gardening with children.
This book is the fruit of the authors’ experience of working with hundreds of local schoolchildren on the restoration of the walled gardens at Chiswick House in West London as a productive and beautiful kitchen garden.
Reviews
An indispensable handbook.
Alice Waters
Quite simply, this is a brilliant, inspiring and heartening gardening book.
Families Magazine September 2009
Fabulous… different, quirky, educational.
BBC TV’s Gardeners World
This book is a cornucopia of ideas to get the family gardening, with everything from planting adventures to healthy eating. The material is ideal for novice gardeners but has challenges enough for seasoned green fingers. Above all, it looks like fun – the best way to educate.
Books Quarterly May 2009
…beautiful, inspirational, witty …. Simple, sage reminders, along with beautiful photographs, fill this practical, delightful book.
Molly Dannenmaier Author of A Child’s Garden
This wonderfully illustrated and highly informative book is based on the authors’ experience gained over the past five years restoring a neglected seventeenth-century kitchen garden at Chiswick House in West London (an FCFCG member project). They have created a beautiful, productive and educational space with the help of hundreds of school children who have come to the garden to work, learn, garden and eat. .The authors’ first hand experience with so many children is what makes this book stand out above others that attempt to encourage adults to garden with children and help them to cook and eat what they grow. It is full of tried and tested growing methods, child-relevant tips, recipes and projects. And it doesn’t skimp on detail. It really does cover all you need to know about how to garden with children so that you all enjoy it and are able to reap the benefits of all your hard work.
Federation of City Farms & Community Gardens
International Editions
Anyone who has fallen in love with Frances Hodgson Burnett’s The Secret Garden, or Mr. McGregor’s kitchen garden in Beatrix Potter’s The Tale of Peter Rabbit, will also be inspired by the power of the forgotten English walled garden in this book. The opportunity for urban children everywhere to witness and partake in the pleasures of planting, nurturing, tending, and harvesting food for the table cannot be underestimated.
Three women from London, endowed with remarkable good sense and thrift, have created a small miracle within the old walls of Chiswick House, in central London. With the help of school children from all over the city, they have renovated this centuries-old garden, brought it back to life, and in the process, have invested in the lives of these kids.
At the heart of this story is every child’s desire to engage with the real world through authentic work and good old-fashioned sweat and dirty fingernails. As Americans, so many of us have strayed from the pleasure of honest labor, drawn to the siren songs of technology, the ease of industrial food, and the continuous strain of doing more. We have forgotten the perfume of freshly dug earth, the outrageous biology of a compost pile, the pleasures of creating a garden oasis, and sharing it with other creatures on this earth. This book shows us how to reengage with this world.
The Family Kitchen Garden reminds us that children are great workers and capable of amazing tasks when we let them. This un-fussy and informative book, with a distinctly British view of the world, provides us with a kid’s-eye view of a great garden project. The common-sense advice and step-by-step instructions will help anyone interested in digging in. So get out your secateurs (pruning shears), hook up your water butts (rainwater barrels), slip into your Wellies (rubber boots), and get started!
Arden Bucklin and Rachel Pringle, San Francisco Green Schoolyard Alliance.
Published in 2012, and the number one gardening bestseller in Germany since 2013 and still going strong!
Other Information
Here’s something we sowed earlier. Growing your own food is the best way to interest children in eating healthily – if you let them help, say Karen Liebreich, Jutta Wagner and Annette Wendland.
We couldn’t squeeze all the fruit and veg into our book, so some of the less common varieties didn’t make the final cut. For the most popular things to grow, you’ll have to buy the book, but for some of the others, download them free here:
All books
