The Self-Sufficiency Garden - Book Review

My wife got me this book for my birthday and as she handed it to me she said "I feel this is the book you probably should have written." 

She also said that she knows I'm not the target audience, and as I write this review please bare in mind that I'm not the target audience. I've also met Huw once, a few years back, he's a lovely guy and I love his YouTube channel and what he's been doing. 

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. 

This section is incredible, it really quantifies what a space like this can produce, and it's brilliant to see the cropping and successional sowing he uses to maximise the beds. There's great information there, but I wish he'd included the variety of the veg he was growing - especially the tree cabbage he mentions quite a few times. It's laid out really well and broken down month to month. 

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.

Sowing Seeds And Potting On

With a break in the weather at the weekend I managed to catch up on a bit of gardening. First job was to pot on a good quantity of chillies and tomatoes. 

Some of these haven't grown at a rate I'd expect. And I think the compost is to blame, bought in, but it's so unpredictable. I'm going to start adding a bit of seaweed feed to the watering can, not something I'd normally do this early on, but I feel they all need a bit of a boost. I don't normally buy liquid feed to be honest but the comfrey won't take kindly to being chopped already. 

Wood Fired Pizza

 Saturday there was that yellow orb in the sky that we haven't seen for months. I decided to seize the opportunity, I got up early and set to making bread, then did my chores and lit the earth oven. 

I then tended it as I went about getting some gardening jobs (potting on far too many tomatoes and peppers), and invited some friends for lunch. Not much notice but it felt like we needed to grab this opportunity to worship the sun for a few hours. 

Make A Wooden Wheelbarrow

I managed to get a project I've been thinking about for many years done the other day - I made a wooden wheelbarrow!

Now this isn't a typical wheelbarrow, it's more of a flat one. I wanted one I could move seedlings about with, or other jobs around the smallholding. 

Insulin Pump

So we're over a year into our diabetes journey and our eldest has made the very big decision to switch from MDI (Multiple Daily Injections) for a pump on a closed loop system.  

So yesterday we went into hospital to go through loading a pod with insulin and fitting it, connecting it all up and working out the levels everything needs to be (this is after a visit to hospital last week to change the sensors over to a different type - dexicom). 

So as I type this, the pump is upstairs on my daughters leg slowly clicking insulin in at different interval. We're watching her CGM as her blood glucose find their levels in this new system. 

Wish her luck! I'll keep you posted on how it goes.