Book review: Kids in the Garden

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Last year I contributed to Black Dog Publishing’s rather ground-breaking book project – Growing Stuff, which pulled together a selection of bloggers to write most of the content.

This year its editor, Elizabeth McCorquodale, has produced her own book with Black Dog – Kids in the Garden – and they’ve very kindly sent me a copy to review.

The book is divided into three sections. The ‘Introduction’ section has a lot of information about gardening techniques and science – everything from composting and plant propagation through to photosynthesis and the carbon cycle.

The ‘Projects’ section is where you get into growing the plants, mainly in containers. There’s the usual suspects thought suitable for kids to grow (including broad beans, with their nice big seeds and sunflowers to see who can grow the tallest one), but there’s more, too. There’s even some fruits, with gooseberries and raspberries making an appearance. Perhaps the only real disappointment here is that herbs get relegated to two pages, all lumped in together.

The final section is ‘Recipes’, and there’s plenty here to ignite a passion for food, although I can’t be the only person who would be wary of kids deep-frying courgette (called zucchini throughout the book) fritters.

Right at the back you’ve got a glossary and the answers to the quiz questions posed throughout the book, which is also filled with lots of colour photos, cartoons and silly jokes.

The blurb says that this is a book “for kids of all ages”, but I think it has too much in it to be good for young children and is really aimed at school-age kids. For a child with an interest in gardening I can see this becoming a firm favourite and much-thumbed as they grow up and need less supervision.

Posted 8 March 2010, 09:06.   Posted in .
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1 Comments for Book review: Kids in the Garden

  1. Sounds like an interesting book, I’d like to enter the competition. I’m hoping to start Ashley growing sunflowers this year and I’m sure he’ll grow into the book even if he is a little young at the moment.

    Rachel · Mar 8, 09:34 AM

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