Grow & Cook
An A–Z of what to grow all through the year at home
Mark Diacono · Headline, 2020
The A–Z that the month-by-month books don't give you: look up a crop, get sowing, growing, problems and harvesting on one page.
Despite "& Cook", this is not a recipe book. There are no recipes in it. It's a growing directory, and an excellent one — but buy it knowing that.
What's actually in it
- Three alphabetical directories: Vegetables, Fruit & Nuts, and Herbs & Spices.
- Every entry follows the same template — when to sow, growing tips, potential problems, harvesting — plus variety recommendations.
- Scope runs from a window box to a full plot.
- Diacono's distinguishing angle is the unusual alongside the standard: agretti, chocolate vine, callaloo and mashua sit next to tomatoes.
What it actually says
Specifics from inside the book — so you can judge whether it's telling you anything you don't already know.
- It doesn't sort crops by family or season — it sorts them by what they do for you. His categories include "unbuyables" (things you simply can't buy, so grow them), "faders" (things that lose flavour within hours of picking), "taste transformers", "multi-harvesting crops" and "challengers". That framework is the book's real contribution.
- The unusual edibles are genuinely there, not just namechecked: agretti, chocolate vine, callaloo, mashua, salsify, oca and yacon all get entries, alongside the borlotti bean 'Lingua di Fuoco'.
- A stated organising principle that isn't yield or self-sufficiency, but flavour. He urges readers to "uncurl your fingers from accepted approaches" and not to grow commonplace plants simply because that's the norm. His test for whether a kitchen garden is working: whether you walk from garden to kitchen with any anticipation.
- Every entry follows the same shape — when to sow, growing tips, potential problems, harvesting — across roughly 200 entries in three alphabetical sections.
Buy it if
You want a lookup book at a sane price. This is the one on our whole grow-your-own shelf that answers "how do I grow X" fastest.
Don't buy it if
Anyone who wants to be taught how to make and run a kitchen garden — that's the parent book, not this.
Where it falls short
It is the directory extracted from Diacono's fuller The New Kitchen Garden (2015) and sold at half the price — the publisher confirms the content originally appeared there, so check you don't already own it. What's been dropped: the framework for choosing what to grow, the practical chapters on creating and maintaining a kitchen garden, and twelve edible-garden case studies. The pocket format also means no reference photography. If you want Diacono's thinking rather than his plant list, you want the hardback — though it's currently hard to buy new.
Who wrote it
Diacono created Otter Farm in East Devon from 2004 — seventeen acres deliberately planted with crops outside the British norm, pecans, Asian pears, Chilean guava, olives. He led the garden team at River Cottage, and has won the André Simon Food Book of the Year and the Guild of Food Writers' Food Book of the Year. His degree is an MSc in environmental management, not horticulture — the expertise is experiential. Disclose this if you follow his recommendations: the Otter Farm shop sells several of the unusual edibles he champions.
Where it was written
Written from Otter Farm in Devon — the mild end of UK conditions, so timings run early for the north.
The facts
- AuthorMark Diacono
- PublisherHeadline
- Published2020
- FormatPaperback, 272 pages
- ISBN-13
9781472265463 - LevelBeginner to improver
Checked against publisher listings, UK retailers and library records in August 2026. If any of this is wrong, tell us and we'll fix it.
Where to get it
Buying secondhand? Match the ISBN above — several books on this shelf have editions that look identical but aren't.