welsh hills again

I have been looking forward to reading and reviewing this book for ages.  Mark Diacono is the head gardener at River Cottage and runs his own garden at Otter Farm where he grows all sorts of exotic and unusual things: apricots, Japanese wineberries, Szechuan pepper and kai-lan are just a handful.  He also writes for The English Garden (pause for small "what about my Welsh garden" rant) and his are always amongst the articles I really read rather than skip over.  This is a book both about growing unusual things to eat and also about cooking them.  I love growing food, I love cooking it, I love eating it.  When the book came in the post it felt like Christmas. I am a speed reader, a skipper and skitterer over things that bore me and an express train reader with things I like.  But I have taken my time with this.  It is a book so densely packed with ideas and information and written with so much knowledge and even love that it seemed wrong to take it at...

Last week another parcel arrived in my postbox with two books for review: First Time Veg Grower by Martyn Cox and Pests and Diseases by David Hurrion.  They are both BBC books under the banner of Gardeners' World magazine. There could be nothing better for a garden book addict like me than new gardening books.  I probably wouldn't buy either of these because I am not a first time veg grower and I take a fairly relaxed attitude to pests and diseases, but that doesn't mean I don't set right down to reading them.  They have sat by my bed for a week or so as I have worked my through what to think about before you start growing vegetables and how to cope with ants and codling moth.  I have to admit that ants and codling moths haven't been too riveting but I now know all sorts of things that I didn't know before. I suppose I thought a book on growing veg would feel very much like a reference book, something like The Vegetable Garden Displayed or the RHS book on g...