If the garden were to bear fruit...ideas galore

Homegrown Pantry: A Gardener's Guide to Selecting the Best Varieties & Planting the Perfect Amounts for What You Want to Eat Year-Round

by Barbara Pleasant

If you're looking for a single book to tell you how to select, grow, prepare and preserve vegetables and fruits, this could be it.  The selection parts were mostly useless to me--they didn't reflect the tremendous variation in climate and growing space of different parts of the country. Saying that "sweet banana," "lipstick," and "early jalapeno" are good varieties of pepper is pretty much useless to me--I couldn't find peppers under those names and even if I did, are they good for the Pacific Northwest or for South-Central Texas?

She did much better when she steered away from specific varieties to general characteristics, such as her descriptions of the varieties of carrots or kale. Very helpful to know that Tuscan kales grow slowly, curly kales perform much better in the fall, and flat-leafed Russian kales are fast growing and very cold-hardy.

The growing hints were better, but nothing much I didn't already know.  But on preservation and storage, she knows her stuff!  I never thought of drying potatoes--the idea sounded too much like those boxes of flakes that make totally textureless mashed potatoes" Tasteless, too.  To a Tee.

But doing it myself might be a great idea--if I could just find the dehydrator.  Flipping back through the book, I see there was a lot of stuff I missed. I'll give it a re-read and just might put it on my "to-own" list.