This book will find its readers. It is very smartly designed. It manages to be both broad and specific, covering all the major topics that comprise growing one's own food, providing sufficient detail to complete parts of the process, but not overwhelming the reader with innumerable variations and options.

With a lot of color photos, layout templates, a full year’s schedule, and some base recipes to boot this practical how-to guide is a winner among gardening books. The authors also go into detail on gardening space, harvesting, and practical advice on storing your produce. There’s a lot in here for the serious gardener.

I enjoyed this one and would recommend.


Thank you to DK and NetGalley for the PDF

While this definitely isn't a beginner book for aspiring gardeners, this book none-the-less provides a really informative and detailed plan for building and maintaining a self-sufficient garden. I plan to give this book as a gift to the gardeners in my life (with the space to implement the plans!) and I know that they will enjoy this book a lot. Personally, for me, I found that the kitchen section was the most directly relevant to my current lifestyle (apartment with limited production space for gardening) and I appreciated that the authors not only talked about setting up and building a garden, but the next steps with that as well including preserving and saving harvests as well as some recipes for using up produce. 4.5/5 stars

I have a California backyard garden and grow veggies year-round. If you are just starting a garden, it may be overwhelming to begin with a garden of their size, but the book offers some good basic how-tos that will be helpful to a gardener. For someone interested in expanding their garden and working their way to becoming self-sufficient, this book offers some good ideas on how to start.

This book covers creating the garden, what to grow, and tasks throughout the year. It also offers a few basic recipes and garden-growing skills.

I received an advanced copy of this book in exchange for my honest review.

The Self-Sufficiency Garden
Huw Richards, Sam Cooper
This is a very interesting book. I enjoyed it. I try to be as self-sufficient as possible. Each year we grow green beans, tomatoes, corn, potatoes, peppers as well as other vegetables. We eat well throughout the growing season and preserve as much as possible for the rest of the year. The author goes in great detail concerning growing spaces, hot beds and polytunnels. He discussed planting plans as well as what you need to accomplish throughout the year. He discusses how to store your garden produce, how to prepare it for preserving.