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If there’s one lesson you remember from Carol Deppe’s book The Resilient Gardener*, it’s don’t judge a fruit, nut or vegetable by what you’ve brought home from the grocery store. Sometimes grocery store produce gives us an unfairly bad impression of that food because it’s the wrong variety or it was picked long before it was ripe. As a result, we mistakenly decide we don’t like the food and rule it out for our garden.

Another important lesson from the The Resilient Gardener is that hard times and eating delicious, healthy food don’t have to be mutually exclusive. You still can garden when there’s not much money or time, in good health or in bad, and the food can be positively delicious. Deppe shows you how.

Gourmet kitchen gardener or homesteader

Other reviews of this book portray it as for the homesteader. But the gourmet kitchen gardener, whose primary concern is growing delicious, interesting food, will enjoy Deppe’s book just as much as the homesteader interested in saving money and feeding a family. There’s plenty in it for both. Here are just a few of the pointers that I found helpful:

• Mulch has many benefits, but there’s one that’s not normally discussed: Mulch lets plants take advantage of the top two to four inches of topsoil, which normally gets too dry to support roots.
• Special varieties of corn produce flour that is able to make tasty breads and cakes with a texture just like wheat flour.
• Potatoes enjoy cold, wet weather. Now I know why my potatoes thrive until the heat of summer and then go downhill.
• Plant spacing is key to growing in dry conditions. If you want to grow vegetables with little or no irrigation, you should space them much more generously.
• Duck eggs must be cooked differently from chicken eggs if you want to get the best flavor.

If there’s one group of folks that absolutely must read this book, it’s gardeners in the Pacific Northwest of the United States. Much of the advice (although not all) is geared towards gardeners in this area.

Five foods

Deppe spends an entire chapter on each of these five foods: potatoes, duck eggs, squash, beans and corn. With the exception of potatoes, these are not prominent foods in my garden, so I was concerned that I may not enjoy reading the book. But not to worry, it’s packed with information on all kinds of kitchen gardening and growing a variety of vegetables, fruits and nuts.

I was surprised and pleased that Deppe, A Harvard PhD in biology, has put her education and smarts to work writing a book about small-scale farming. Clearly her life is “unconventional” and the book leaves the reader wanting to know more. She frequently mentions her gardening partner Nate in the book. From the pictures in the book, he seems to be quite a bit younger than Deppe. I find it intriguing that she’s found a gardening partner that’s so much younger and would like to understand more about how they got together.

Personal lives aside, anyone who wants to know more about growing delicious food, in good times and in bad, should read this book about how to grow most of your own food as a small-scale farmer.

Have you read The Resilient Gardener? What did you think? Let us know by commenting below.

Related articles:

1. Top Five Vegetable Gardening Books
2. Book Review: Felder Rushing’s Slow Gardening
3. Book Review: Eliot Coleman’s Winter Harvest Handbook

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