A New Cookbook Saved My New Kitchen Garden This Year

This year marked my return to large-scale vegetable gardening after a three-year renovation project of my kitchen garden.  However, due to a severe drought and only nine water barrels with which to face its demands, it also marked a desire to immediately leave it. 

Thankfully, in the early hours of the morning, when the day still feels promising, the birds are at the feeder, and my phone is charging somewhere I can’t lazily grab it, there are books.  And fortuitously for my kitchen garden, a review copy of Sarah Raven’s Garden Cookbook sat at the top of the pile.

If you’re growing veg, you’re cooking veg

Sarah Raven is an established garden/lifestyle guru in the UK.  Our American audience may know her from her first book The Cutting Garden, or her 2021 Sunday Times bestseller A Year Full of Flowers. Others might pick up a packet or two from her seed line in a garden gift shop if touring the UK. 

Her ‘brand’ is an intensely colorful and more garden-focused version of Martha Stewart’s in this country. She has ties by marriage to the legacy and connections of Sissinghurst, yet has proven herself over the years to garden much and garden well, and to share that love through her writing and teaching.

Her newest book is not a comprehensive growing manual of the vegetables she grows.  Many of the recipes are generously credited to other cooks, and it will be obvious to the seasoned domestic god/goddess/entrepreneur who knows what it takes to grow, manage, cook, entertain, and run a business, that despite all those candid shots of roughened gardener hands braiding garlic and serving cherry clafoutis, she’s not doing this all herself.

Photo credit: Jonathan Buckley (Sarah Raven’s Garden Cookbook. Bloomsbury)

That’s okay. Because, as my struggling kitchen garden can attest, it is the best kind of motivating book: A weighty volume filled with big juicy photos (by Jonathan Buckley), interesting recipes, growing tips, and a compelling monthly narrative that keeps you reading and marking recipes for crops yet to come.

There are extrapolations to be made as an American gardener; and timing to be adjusted; and envy to be swallowed; but gardeners with an understanding of their climate will still find it extremely useful and inspirational.

I certainly did this summer, and I needed all the help I could get.

My kitchen garden background: big ambitions

For the last three years we’ve been working to make our kitchen garden more manageable and useable – not only as a garden for vegetables, trial plants, and cutting flowers, but as a place to sit and experience it after a long day.

A rough space in 2020, but better than a field – which it was back in 2013.

The project involved tearing down [now] rotten raised beds built eight years ago, leveling much of the 40×60 foot site surrounded by a picket fence, constructing a pre-fab greenhouse, building a retaining wall and rectangular pond, re-constructing raised beds with 4×4 posts, and building a 12×14 foot platform to sit within, but slightly above the scene.

Stone dust would make up the pathways, with more expensive pea gravel or granite dust to come along in perhaps a few years. And everything (including the fence) had to be painstakingly stained.

Much better, but not planted – early spring of this year.

My kitchen garden reality: you’re on your own

Apart from a fantastic day when friends came to help put up the greenhouse and a couple friends helped to run my first axis lines, we did this work ourselves, in a wildly fluctuating lumber market, and with wildly fluctuating schedules – which is why it took so long, and why other projects like my Piet-ish perennial garden design were put on hold.

I still remember how overwhelming it felt, but how good it also felt to start laying out lines.

To add more torture and time to the project, a flood in 2021 submerged the greenhouse panels (sitting on a pallet) in river water and greasy silt.  I had to clean every 1cm channel of the double walled polycarbonate with tiny bits of terry cloth shoved down the channels with a coat hanger, followed up with a stream from the power washer.

Thousands of them.

The last big push of construction happened in November by my husband while I was at a Great Dixter symposium in the UK and couldn’t object to the swearing coming, full-throated, from that part of the garden.

All that profanity culminated in a garden that was fully ready to plant this spring. An intoxicating feeling.

Thus I planted with gusto. Arugula, kale, lettuces, broccoli, snap peas, spinach, mustards, and radishes emerged, filled our plates, filled our egos, and went over as the heat built.

Seed-reared summer vegetables like tomatoes, peppers, eggplant, carrots, beets, chard, beans, sour leaf, Malabar spinach, ginger, and summer squash took their place and quickly shifted into high gear as the temps continued to rise.

And of course there were the cutting flowers, such as lilies, dahlias, sunflowers, and daisies, whose past decimation by deer had been the final straw in building the fence in 2018.

My kitchen garden angst: severe drought

But temperatures built. And rain, it did not come.  And a garden that fully relies on hand watering with collected water started to suffer. 

As I mentioned in my last post, drought hitting so early in the season made me and other gardeners give up on the idea of a gorgeous ornamental garden and instead we turned our thoughts (and notes) to what was surviving and how well.

You can’t do that in a vegetable garden.  A) You’re planting to eat what comes out of it; and, B) There are few perennial vegetables in a cold climate that are happy to go dormant and try it all again next year – and certainly not so early in the season. 

And in new raised beds where soil beneath the bed is still compacted and untouched by years of pioneering tap roots, a tomato plant will dry up before you can say ‘Heinz.’

Sunset Torch tomato, an All-America Selections Winner, was the first tomato to ripen and is a bountiful producer of fruit.

I admit, I wanted to walk away.  But in the mornings, I would leaf through this sumptuous, beautifully produced book and read recipes that turned my eggplants into baba ghanoush, and my chard into gratin. And I would find myself walking down to the kitchen garden, dipping a watering can into a dwindling supply and doling out precious water to precious vegetables.

And we continued to eat.

Same spot this summer (2024)

My kitchen garden future: there is one

So, thank you Sarah Raven. And thank you Jonathan Buckley who brought her words to life.

But perhaps even more importantly, thank you Bloomsbury for continuing to publish books that buck the trend of blog-like, graphics-heavy gardening guides for a concentration-compromised population; and instead exemplify the reasons that in a digital world we still buy good books on gardening.

For quiet mornings without screens; for time-tested expertise we can trust; and for the rich, evocative images and information that keep us going out there and picking up the watering can one more time. – MW

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Sarah Raven’s Garden Cookbook. Hardcover. Bloomsbury Publishing. July 2024. ISBN 978-1526640130.