The Edible Heirloom Garden

The Edible Heirloom Garden by Rosalind Creasy is a more of a journal about her family and seed scavenging with family recipes and canning recipes than a book on heirloom gardening.

2 out of 10 stars.  The only reason I gave this two stars was for the German potato salad recipe and the carrot pie recipe.  The rest of the book is really pointless.

The author starts out talking about her family and heirloom gardening which is basically gardening from old heirloom seeds.  The photos are all of people dressed in Amish clothing and the writing is very stiff.  Then the author has a chapter written by a friend about the seed exchange.  The middle section has pages of photos of vegetables with a handful of heirloom seed varieties for each vegetable, but by no means is this section extensive at all.  There weren’t that many vegetables covered.  There were also notes in each section saying that these seeds were extremely difficult to find because they were circa 1800s.  The next section was on canning and pickling and then there were a handful of recipes.  That was the entire book.  It is not very big.

I would like to mention that the author also makes a big deal out of botulism from canning in the canning section, so much so that I would not follow her instructions at all.  If you’re going to warn people ahead of time that they may die from your recipes, then you shouldn’t be writing a book.

2 out of 10 stars.  I can’t imagine who I would recommend a book like this to.  It was obviously compiled from the author’s gardening journal and she wasted precious space on kudos to her friends and family instead of talking about what she should have–collecting and using heirloom vegetable seeds.  Duh.

Reviewed by Betsy.