Customer Reviews

Vegetables, Herbs and Fruit: An Illustrated Encyclopedia

5 star:		(14)
4 star:		(2)
3 star:		(2)
2 star:		(0)
1 star:		(0)

 

 

This book is wonderful! Every section gives you a in-depth overview of the vegetable, herb or fruit; detailing different varieties and how they rank in terms of taste and/or hardiness, how to propagate, grow, maintain, harvest and store. Plus gives tips of typical pests/diseases and how to avoid them. Very helpful are the "companion planting" paragraphs, explaining which plants do best next to each other. And to top it all off, each section includes a "culinary" and "medicinal" section, informing you of the best ways to use your crops once harvested. The pictures are beautiful and the wording is easy to understand and to the point. This is a great book for any gardener's reference shelf. Fun to read cover-to-cover, but set up so that you can dip in and out as you choose.

This book has the most readable practicle information on every vegetable, herb or fruit I would ever grow plus many others. It covers some history of origin, varieties, cultivation, propagation, container and garden growing, harvesting & storage as well as uses both medicinal and culinary and also some recipies. I have not come across a more extensive book. My son & daughter both in their early 20's and just starting vege gardening use this as their bible. Well worth owning.

PRO

- Extensive coverage of fruit, vegetable and herbs.
The book says it covers 100 fruits, 70 vegetables and 100 herbs.
Each subject has Cultivation, Companion planting, and Culinary sections. If it's a herb, it also has Medicinal section.

One day I bought a bag of Macadamias nuts from my local grocery store. The label said they were grown in Australia, Hawaii and Africa. I wanted to know more about them. I opened this book to page 555 and voila! I found all the interesting information about them. There were 3 beautiful photos of the nuts, the tree and the dish made from the nuts. It's informative and mouth watering.

- Very well illustrated.
Each fruit, tree, or vegetable has at least 3 pictures. They're beautiful. The Culianry section always has a picture of the dish made with the fruit, herb or vegetable. It's so colorful and lively that it makes me hungry!

- It's hard covered. So, it will last a long time.

CONS

- It uses the term "Long", "Short", "Medium" to describe the life span of the trees without giving a range in years. This is frustrating because I am not sure approximate how long they live. But I can easily find this information from somewhere else. No book is perfect.

In short, it's definitely worth buying. I use it almost daily for cooking recipes and for general information. Together with Gernot Katzer's Spice Pages http://www.uni-graz.at/~katzer/engl/, it makes a complete reference. You can find any information on these subject with these 2 resources.

Book combines gardening knowledge with a little herbology and provides culinary recipes to bring garden to table. I found the gardening info to be interesting and informative- and I have been gardening for 2 decades! Beautiful pictures were a definite bonus! My copy is now dogeared and well worn from much use.

This book is very comprehensive. I loved it so much I purchased a copy for my brother and sister-in-law. I especially appreciate the details regarding each plant including season to plant, what to plant with, recipes examples and medical explanations. There are sufficient pictures and there is also a brief history of the fruit or vegetable.

Honestly growing up i had a brown thumb but I really wanted to grow a garden and so I checked this book out from the library and just kept renewing it for a year before buying my own copy. It taught me a ton of tips and tricks that seed packets and other gardeners wouldn't tell me. Probably because what I needed were bare bone basics about specific plants that a gardener with experience wouldn't think about it [it'd be second nature]. The sections are clear and understandable, well organized, there are recipes for after you harvest, and even a plant killer like me has successfully grown a small vegetable garden. I recommend this to everyone who wants to learn more about plants; and even successful gardeners would benefit from this encyclopedia. I recommend this in combination with square foot gardening as it becomes fun and easy to grow your own food or flowers.

I love this book. I just started our eatable garden this year and have used this book a lot as a tool.

I gave this to my brother who is a chef as a gift and he absolutely loves it. It has a ton of interesting facts including recipes for the foods.

While this encyclopedia is in-depth and informational, it is not arranged alphabetically by vegetable, fruit, or herb, so we found it rather difficult to navigate.

This book is useful and beautiful; I have barely begun to plunge into its lush images and instructional content. Many of the images are of the cutout on white images familiar from Eyewitness Books, and these are particularly informative as one is not distracted by backgrounds (although the full images are wonderful too). Information wise these are very good. For instance, Plums get three chapters, one for basic plums, one for Japanese plums, and one for greengages. Very good to have.
In all, a worthwhile book to have.