The untold story of how our national obsession with gardening came to be.

The Alternative Kitchen Garden is an evolving idea of what a kitchen garden could be in the twenty-first century: organic, environmentally sustainable, resilient, and about localizing at least some of our food production. It's also a place not only for learning and practicing growing skills but also for enjoying ourselves and having fun. The Alternative Kitchen Garden is the ideal companion for anyone getting dirt under their fingernails for the first time and full of fascinating ideas and experiments for the adventurous gardener. A self-confessed "cyber geek," Emma documents the transformation of her "ropey old lawn with potholes and brambles" into a fertile and abundant permaculture plot via Internet radio and a popular blog site. Eight years of her postings and stories have been collected in here, illustrated with beautiful color photographs and arranged into easily accessible alphabetical order. The Alternative Kitchen Garden: An A-Z covers subjects as diverse as growing achocha (a forgotten Incan crop) to zucchinis. Emma's style, is light and friendly, yet at the same time informative and based on personal experience--you feel you could actually be sitting in the garden chatting face to face as she shares her knowledge and experience.

As their father becomes more absorbed in his work, Matthew and his sister Hannah come to terms with their mother's death in very unusual ways.