The Family Kitchen Garden - Hardcover

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. || A soft back to set you and your children up nicely down at the allotment. If you're new to growing veg it will take you through all the basic information you'll need to know about soil, pest control and planting out. Month by month there's plenty of guidance about what to sow, plant, harvest and eat. Projects for kids (like building a ladybird nesting box) to recipes the whole family can enjoy, make this a really useful addition to the allotment shed bookshelf. || Emphasises the joy that can be found in growing your own with your family. || The ideas for seasonal recipes and creative crafts are wonderful, adding a sense of creativity and inspiration to our gardening chores throughout the year, while the quoted expressions of children's experiences in working in the kitchen garden at Chiswick House helps affirm the sense that this book is a gift for parents to encourage the blessing of garden involvement with their children. || An introduction to productive gardening that any novice could benefit from reading. || 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 cook what they grow. And it really doesn't skimp on detail. It really does cover all you need to know about how to garden with children so that you enjoy it and are able to reap the benefits of all your hard work. Highly recommended! || The perfect introduction for children to gardening and showcasing recipies for home grown fruit and veg. || Splendidly accessible || Quite simply, this is a brilliant, inspiring and heartening gardening book. || A lovely, invaluable resource, which, if implemented, could transform the way that we as families spend out time, eat our food and live our lives. Only good can come of this. || The first few pages of this book make you smile and realise how you need to change your thinking to garden successfully with kids. After that it is packed with clear growing advice, inspirational pictures and a monthly recipe and activity. It's my handbook!

Five years ago Karen Liebreich, Jutta Wagner, Annette Wendland and others began to restore the neglected seventeenth-century kitchen garden at Chiswick in west London, bringing in hundreds of local schoolchildren to work and learn and garden and eat. This book is the fruit of that experience.
With the emphasis on what will be fun to grow and useful for a family, it provides clear instructions on growing vegetables, fruit, herbs and cutting flowers, and month-by-month advice on what to do when. It notes 'child-friendly' vegetables such as potatoes (children enjoy searching in the soil for potato 'treasure') and peas (the seeds are large enough to handle easily) and gives tips on approaching gardening activities with children. There are also recipes using homegrown fruit and veg that kids (as well as adults) will want to make and eat - from oriental summer rolls and homemade ketchup to parsnip crisps and fruit ice lollies - and projects that are accessible to the whole family, such as building a ladybird nesting house and weaving a willow wigwam for climbing plants.