ESTHER DEANS' GARDEN COOKBOOK

from garden to kitchen

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Used hardcover book with dustjacket, 56 pages, published 1978, inscription on first page.

Since 1975, Esther Deans' classic books No-Dig Gardening ( aka Growing Without Digging) and Leaves of Life have inspired thousands of people to grow their own vegetables and flowers at home.

Esther Deans is famous throughout Australia for her extraordinary and productive techniques of gardening without diggins. Esther Dean's Gardening Book showed how effective and easy it was for city dwellers to cultivate a health-giving garden using a method of layering newspaper, lucerne hay, straw and compost.

This delightful and informative sequel shows how to benefit from all the homegrown nourishment of garden produce through the different seasons of the year.

Esther Deans' Garden Cookbook includes a range of inviting recipes using beans, carrots, cauliflowers, celery, chokos, eggplant, mushroons, peas, pumpkin, zucchinis and a host of other nourishing vegetables. But there are other special features too, like the vegetable sowing and harvesting guide, a list of herbs for seasoning and an unusual section on cooking with flowers. Esther Deans also offers suggestions on drinks that can be produced from the garden harvest and, for those with a sweet tooth, some delicious recipes for desserts from the garden.

Esther Deans' Garden Cookbook holds the key to good growing and healthy eating.

About the author

Esther Deans, poet, writer, gardener, conservationist, became famous in the 1970-1980s for her books which developed a no dig method of gardening by covering her lifeless soil (you can also cover the lawn) with newspaper and then wads of weed-free straw. She did this inside a garden border.

She recommends layers of: (1) of newspaper (2), lucerne hay (3), organic fertilizer (4), loose straw (5), another sprinkle of organic fertilizer (6) compost (7). You can also use little pockets of good compost and seedlings in a top layer of loose straw, or browned grass clippings and rotten straw, which is fertilised by the ducks bathing water or some other organic fertiliser

Esther is still alive in 2008 aged 97 in October. She lives in Waitara, a northern Sydney suburb in Australia. She influenced the work of Bill Mollison and A Sampson-Kelly in Permaculture.

Her original book, Esther Dean's Gardening Book: Growing Without Digging has sold over 130,000 copies.

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Esther Deans' Garden Cookbook