What I want to do is say that I think this book is great, but that also it's flawed in a few ways. I really think this book was on the very cusp of greatness, it could have been one that is alongside some of my favourites and then it didn't quite nail it. Which is a real shame as I think it does a few things so differently.
The main thing it does is put it's money where its mouth is. Rather than reading about a theoretical garden and what could be done in it, Huw created a garden 10m X 12.5m, laid it out with raised beds, a small polytunnel and covered beds. He used hot beds to extend his season (something I'm really going to have to try again) and got multiple crops from each bed. He shows how the beds are built and has plans of things you can build.
As well as this he creates his own compost, and makes sure each scrap of space is used. In the book he takes you through a year in this garden, show when he sowed the seeds, when he harvests it and the overall yields he gets from it.
Then I have to talk about the bits I thought were a little lacking. The "In The Kitchen" section is where the book doesn't feel right. the book is written with another guy called Sam Cooper and I feel they haven't let him have enough space. Like there's a section on curry where he talks about it over three pages with a few quick recipes, or a few pages on pastry or No-knead focaccia which has two pages. It just seems a little bit chucked together and random and not really in line with the rest of the book.
With the book only being 200 hundred pages it just feels like a waste of the page count to dip into these things, especially when it's obvious the other author (Sam Cooper) knows their subject, but not give them enough space to show this properly. If they had limited it to just one subject, like preserving, it would have been far better in my opinion.
Maybe it's a reflection of what people want from books these days, a magazine style book. Snippets that can be read easily. I wish this was two books really, both of them having more space to share the knowledge, The Self Sufficiency Garden could have become a bit of a bible for growing food like this if it had.
I still think it's an amazing book and I love what Huw has done with that garden. He writes brilliantly and clearly, the book is beautiful throughout, with thick high quality pages and great pictures and plans. It's truly worth buying for the middle section of the garden month by month alone. It will on the shelf rather than being passed on and has given me a few ideas of things I'd like to try.
I've given up with books, they never hit the spot for me, I'm back to basics with the added cramping everything in.
ReplyDeleteI find I really have to find books about a specific subject now for it to hold my attention. I did really enjoy the middle section of this book though, I liked the fact he had grown it, not just talked about it.
DeleteI watch his and Charles Dowding You Tube videos all the time and I admire his organic gardening methods. I have so many half read books, gardening ones in particular. I seem to en joy reading blogs and watching You Tube videos more these days along with writing mine most days. I think years of Internet surfing gives us a magazine reading mind. Sounds a good book.
ReplyDeleteYeah I know what you mean. I tend to watch a few YouTube videos each day. Huw's is one I enjoy quite a bit.
DeleteI spent parts of this month sorting gently used books for a large book fundraiser our town does for the city library. My main job it to sort the books into about 25 categories so that the day before the sale, we can easily put them on the correct tables for people to look through and buy. All this is to say that books like this are very few compared to what people leave us and judging by how many are left post-sale, the interested audience is a very select group of people. If we get rid of 10% of a very small pile of this sort of book, it has been a good sale. Mostly we sale a lot of romance and novels. Probably says a lot about the state of the world.
ReplyDeleteI struggle with the concept of the expenditure required for raised beds. They have their place if the substrate is rocks, pure sand, toxic, or the gardener has physical need of a raised work place, but for an inexperienced person who might try to grow a few lettuces, say, believing that that they have to make an investment in the materials to build and fill raised beds without knowing whether they will ever get their money's worth of lettuces out of it must be very off-putting. It seems to me that Huw is not inviting new gardeners so much as suggesting possibilities for experienced ones.
ReplyDeleteI think with the raisd beds he's trying to give it a level playing field, so you're not limited by the soil you have in the garden (which in Wales can be pretty thin).
DeleteI'm very tempted to put some raised beds in my veg garden as it's just so wet I'm struggling to keep anything alive over winter down the bottom end.
I'm sure that I have seen something else about this book and the story of the 10m x 12.5m garden and what crops it produced over the course of a year. If it's the same then the costs were also indicated, and it was not an unreasonable investment - Tigger's Mum - for the level of produce (I recall a figure of 600kg over the year).
ReplyDeleteYeah, I'm going to price some p for my garden, I've put it off for a long time, but my beds have got so full and some parts are so wet that I think I need to do it in some areas.
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