For people who love to garden and love to eat, -- but don’t want their yards to look like Old MacDonald’s farm, The Beautiful Edible Garden is the book you’ve been waiting for.
It combines the principles that underpin visually pleasing and well-planned outdoor spaces with a thorough knowledge of organic fruits and vegetables, to create beautiful, productive gardens, to say nothing of the pleasure of gardening and the satisfaction of exquisite food, delivered trowel to table.
The authors, Leslie Bennett and Stefani Bittner, made a name for themselves as Star Apple Edible and Fine Gardening, a landscape design firm focused on aesthetic edible gardening. As they grew – and in fact, became quite well-known – within this specific type of landscape design, they realized that they could share the basic concepts that made their work so popular. Home gardeners could easily adapt Bennett and Bittner’s four basic principles into their own gardens. The Beautiful Edible Garden was born.
The principles – there are just four -- are easy, and Bittner and Bennett walk you through each of them, outlining ideas, suggesting styles, recommending plants, and offering caveats. After you’ve decided where you’re headed, follow-up chapters help you get it planted, plot out your harvest, and keep the garden productive and appealing year-round.
Not ready to make a commitment to redesign your yard? Don’t have a yard?
Not a problem, Bennett and Bittner devote a chapter to edible gardening in containers, window boxes, and other small spaces, including culinary herbs and salad greens, citrus trees, highly productive annual vegetables (including tomatoes and beans), and more.
Really, read this book before you go nuts at your local nursery, laying in plants for your yearly spring planting. With a slight pause and plan, your garden can become a retreat and a showcase-- and still provide food for the table.
At the very least go to one of their book events and hear them out before you make any commitments.
Leslie Bennett and Stefani Bittner will discuss their new book, The Beautiful Edible Garden at these Bay Area events:
Wednesday, February 26, 7:00 p.m.
- Storyteller – 30 Lafayette Circle, Lafayette, CA 94549
Friday, March 8 - 7:30 p.m.
Thursday, March 14 - 6:00 p.m.
- Omnivore Books on Food – 3885A Cesar Chavez Street, San Francisco CA 94131
Thursday, April 4 – 7:00 p.m.
- Books Inc. - 855 El Camino Real, Palo Alto CA 94301
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