For anyone starting out on the grow-your-own route it can all seem like hard labour with very little pleasure. To find out what joys are to come, New Urban Farmer is recommended as a first-class introduction to the delights of growing to eat. It’s a journey through the growing year, partly a diary, partly a manual and very much to do with eating with delicious recipes to follow. A visual treat, the photographs are superb, the advice good and inspiration on every page for both lucky allotment holders and tremulous beginners with just a window box and a few pots.
Growing your own vegetables and fruit has never been a more popular pastime, but it is far more than a fashionable whim. People are digging up their gardens to grow their own and taking on allotments; the National Trust is creating 1,000 new plots in the next three years to provide for the number of growing fans. These days we want to eat organically and we need to eat economically, so growing your own makes perfect sense. From her North London allotment, Celia Brooks Brown brings real-life tales of her adventures in vegetable growing, such as the joy of spotting the first emerging spears of asparagus in spring, the battles with snails and slugs over the brassicas and what to plant to help fill The Hungry Gap in the late winter months. As the New Urban Farmer, Celia shares her gardening expertise, picked up since taking on her allotment plot in November 2005 and learnt through a combination of hard graft, trial and error, and shared tips from the other allotmenteers. This knowledge has been distilled into a year-round gardening book that is part-journal, part-gardening manual and part-recipe book with one aim: to inspire you to cultivate and enjoy your own delicious homegrown produce. The New Urban Farmer is divided into four main sections - one for each of the seasons - and within those seasons it is further divided into individual months. For each month of the year Celia starts with a rundown of what is both good to sow and good to eat. Moving through each month, Celia highlights the key jobs for that period along with the main stars of the vegetable plot, finishing up with mouth-watering recipes that will put that month's harvest to best use. For keen growers without an allotment, Celia also gives advice throughout on raising crops in pots, growbags and window boxes. Urban, edgy, green and honest, this is the ultimate book for beginner gardeners.
As the New Urban Farmer, Celia Brooks Brown has been detailing the day-to-day goings on at her North London allotment since April 2007 through her blog for the Times Online and March 2010 sees the launch of her monthly column, 'Grow to Eat', in BBC Good Food Magazine. Having previously published six books on vergetarian cooking, she has also made countless appearances on TV, including Saturday Kitchen and Market Kitchen, In addition, Celia runs her own business conducting gastranomic tours of London's culinary hotspots.
