by Claire Ratinon
Book review
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I was lucky enough to have the chance to interview Claire Ratinon for the Gardens Weeds & Words podcast back in March, during which she mentioned the book she was working on at the time. Today sees the publication by Laurence King of How to grow your dinner without leaving the house, described in the blurb as “an accessible and joyful guide to growing your own food – even in the smallest of spaces”. In a moment, we’ll take a look at what lies between the covers, but first let’s take a look at the book itself.
It’s a flexibound volume, just a little wider than an A5 sheet and about the thickness of your little finger, with photographic front and back covers, the front displaying an image of a white plate with an arrangement of fresh vegetables on a blue-grey ground, a sans serif typeface picking out the title in white and copper foil. Somehow, the jacket design manages to pull of an unlikely marriage of cool and accessible, which promises well.
I’m usually not a huge fan of this kind of binding, but there’s something about its execution here that makes it feel substantial. Perhaps it’s to do with the weight of the textured flexible cover, or the way in which it stands a few millimetres proud of the insides, the welcome sight of pages thread-stitched into sections and bound traditionally into the spine, rather than being trimmed and glued as might be expected with a perfect bound volume. One practical advantage of this is that the book requires very little persuasion to lie flat on a table – no cracking of the spine or leaning on the opened spread to flatten it out – which makes it much easier to refer to while engaged in the business of vegetable growing.
Printed on a pleasant, medium weight uncoated paper stock, the text is set in a legible sans serif face at a sensible size, on a two-column grid with quite chunky, bold introductory paragraphs. Together with a generous use of mostly high-key photography (bleeding off to the edges almost exclusively on section openers), this makes for a very accessible layout that manages to pack the information in without requiring any squinting on the part of the reader.
It’s such a very tactile, attractive object that you could be forgiven on first impressions that it might be a little light on information. But it’s more than just a pretty book, as you might expect from a grower who’s provided vegetables for Ottolenghi’s restaurants, workshops to London school kids and gardening content for everything from Bloom magazine to radio’s Gardeners’ Question Time.
In the the Getting Started section, Ratinon gets straight down to earth. Gardening without access to soil is, perhaps unsurprisingly, usually seen as something of a disadvantage. Deprived of direct access to the ground, the grower needs to seek out alternative homes for each plant – but the author is keen to make a virtue of such restrictions, pointing out the choice this opens up when it comes to selecting an appropriate growing medium, whilst never ignoring the responsibility attendant upon having plants relying upon you entirely for their needs. It’s a factor fundamental to growing anything in containers, and so I was pleased to see the theme recurring on those pages dedicated to choosing compost, to watering and to feeding.
Perhaps more so than any other form of gardening, productive growing is highly dependent on good planning, and the inclusion of sections dealing not only on what crops to grow (it’s easy to fall into a trap of growing trouble-free, attractive or popular crops only to discover you don’t enjoy eating them), but on how to make the most of your space and, critically, your time, are of distinct value. Of equal use to the new grower will be the pages dedicated to tools and materials – a bewildering area to negotiate when faced with the wealth of available choice.
Throughout there’s an evident understanding of where the reader might be coming from, demonstrated both by clarity of explanation and a refreshing avoidance of gardening jargon. And so a section which might well have been entitled “pricking out and potting on” is headed “moving seedlings into containers”, and includes references to “transplanting”. Garden writers everywhere would do well to be so focussed on their audience.
So far, so instructive – an expert grower imparting her knowledge in an easy-to-follow and encouraging tone. But it’s the pages dedicated to plant profiles where this book really comes alive, and the love the author has for the delectability of veg shines through, nowhere more so when contrasting the uninspiring (and frankly quite off-putting) experience of eating supermarket beetroot with the earthy sweetness and bright colours of their homegrown counterparts. Each plant description includes details on timings, appropriate containers, cultural requirements and protection from pests and diseases. All the usual suspects are here, from potatoes, tomatoes and courgettes, to salad leaves and herbs (both annual and perennial), to edible flowers, micro-greens and mushrooms. The prospect of being able to grow any or all of these crops without a large garden or allotment is inspiring, but it’s the bite-sized chunks of practical advice that accompany every description that allow the book to be both beautiful and useful. William Morris would approve.
Those themes of space and time that were introduced at the beginning are returned to in the final section, Approaches to gardening, which explores ways in which you can make the most of every inch of the limited space you have. We’re shown how to fit quick growing catch crops around plants which require more of the season to mature for harvesting, as well as lending colour, interest and flavour to the growing space through companion planting. This kind of leitmotiv is a really neat touch which lends a coherence to the instructive narrative, rounding it out with a section on saving seed for next year’s veg garden.
This is a practical handbook for the spatially-challenged aspirant veg grower, where copy, photography and layout work hand in hand to present the information in a manner both highly accessible and engaging. If I have one minor niggle it’s that both glossary and index could work harder – there’s no glossary entry for either compost or vermiculite, for example, though they’re both explained comprehensively within the main body of the text, while the index entry for the latter is only partial. With only one spread allotted to both this would be tricky with the current pagination but I don’t see the harm in including page numbers in the glossary and filling out the index entries. Deeply nerdy stuff, perhaps, but helpful for those readers who like to read books of practical instruction from the back. Publishers please note.
Taken as a whole, How to grow your dinner without leaving the house is a thoughtfully written, beautifully produced guide that will introducing you to the joys of watching your food grow on your window ledge, balcony or small garden, while walking you through the business of making the most out of your space. At a time when we’ve never been more disconnected from the food on our plates, I can’t think of a better moment for this book to make an entrance.
How to grow your dinner without leaving the house by Claire Ratinon was published on 27 August 2020 by Laurence King, and is available at your local independent bookshop, or from Amazon here.
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