Kitchen Gardens

In the words of a local newspaper, grass is out and vegetables are in - even in the urban yard. KITCHEN GARDENS are the most "in" of all gardens and this handy little book by the Brooklyn Botanic Garden is a good place to start if you're thinking about growing your own vegetables at home. The book is small but loaded with information. Although some of the photographs show acreage not often found inside the city, many of the photos and suggestions are helpful for smaller patches. Topics such as optimizing space by rotating crops, sticking plants in unusual places (along the driveway), windowsill gardening, and the old standby container gardening are all discussed. You can dig up the back yard, the side yard, and the front yard and plant a mix of vegetables and flowers (which are often edible). KG provides lists of plants you might grow, including a variety of tomatoes. My new nursery catalogues have arrived and one of them (White Flower Farm) offers a package of three of the tomato plants recommended by this book. Tomatoes aren't the only things you can grow, however. Beans, eggplants, carrots, and peppers can all be found in the kitchen garden. Okra, squash, and other vining plants can be escorted up trellises and over fences. You might grow greens and other plants that require good drainage in raised beds. Nothing like a bowl of fresh mesclun salad or a pot of steamed baby pac choi you just picked. I like the book because it shows you how to get started with "environmentally friendly" kitchen gardening. The book is attractive to look at and pleasant to read, and it organizes many good ideas under one cover. This is a good buy for the beginner who might not want to invest a great deal of money in a bigger more expensive book but wants first-class information from the experts. About one-quarter of the book covers regional variations in kitchen gardening (about 6-7 pages per region). Given you probably live in one of the regions discussed, you should be able to use most of the book.