“Our Wartime Kitchen Garden” is a 1917 guide to kitchen gardening and cooking on a budget. Written during World War II, it is aims to provide simple instructions and fantastic money-saving tips for surviving during food shortages and rationing. Cover-to-cover with ingenious ideas, this vintage cookbook will appeal to modern readers with an interest in saving money or being more self-sufficient when it comes to food preparation. Contents include: “Vegetables and Animal Diet”, “Asparagus”, “Culinary Preparation”, “Beans”, “ Culinary Preparation”, “Brassica”, “Culinary Preparation”, “Beetroot”, “Culinary Preparation”, “Carrot”, “Culinary Preparation”, “Celery”, “Culinary Preparation”, “Watercress”, “Culinary Preparation”, etc. Many vintage books such as this are increasingly scarce and expensive. It is with this in mind that we are republishing this volume now in an affordable, modern, high-quality edition complete with a specially-commissioned new introduction on growing vegetables at home.

While the country’s soldiers were fighting in World War II, the women who stayed behind were making their own courageous—and delicious—contributions. Across the nation, women learned to do jobs formerly held by men while their husbands and sons served overseas. But on top of the extra responsibilities, they were still expected to cook hearty meals, set an attractive table and appear perfectly coiffed for dinner. “In essence, women were asked to work harder and harder, and they rose to the challenge,” author Joanne Lamb Hayes writes in this fascinating book. Grandma’s Wartime Kitchen shows us how our mothers and grandmothers coped with shortages and strict rationing of meat, sugar, butter, cheese and canned foods—all without electric dishwaters and other appliances we take for granted today. Quotes and reminiscences reveal a wartime world where families scrimped, adapted recipes, and even foraged for food. Part cookbook, part fascinating history, this collection contains more than 150 classic recipes that have been updated for today’s kitchens, as well as plenty of anecdotes, advertisements and advice from the time. You’ll find: · Recipes for Monday Meatloaf, Victory Pudding, Mother’s Fried Chicken, Apple Dumplings and more. · The U.S. government’s food rules and ration books. · Substitutes for rationed sugar and the recipes they inspired. Social life during wartime, including Defense Parties and a Thanksgiving dinner made with only wartime commodities. Lovers of traditional American fare will also want to check out Joanne Lamb Hayes' companion cookbook, Grandma's Wartime Baking Book.

Enter a realm of ancient herbal wisdom with The Herb Grower's Grimoire, and discover the transformative power of the Earth's most enchanting plants. Journey back in time as you explore the magical virtues of thirty garden herbs in a collection of herbal legends, charms, recipes, and hands-on growing advice. This beautifully illustrated volume reveals the botanical magic of herbs and will allow you to deepen your connection with nature. Curated from vintage herbals and trusted writings, The Herb Grower's Grimoire transcends time by bringing centuries of herbal knowledge to your fingertips. Unearthing wisdom from the ancient writings of Pliny the Elder as well as the esteemed works of John Gerard and Nicholas Culpeper, this anthology provides insight into the rich history of herbalist practice. This unique book will enchant and inform, serving as both a practical guide and a doorway to the world of herbalism.

How do poets, writers and cultural critics contend with and represent the garden or their own gardening as they are changed by austerity? Gardening under austerity encompasses a diversity of places, spaces, practices, and actors: suburban allotments and zoological gardens, Victory diggers and urban foragers, human gardeners and the unruly more-than-human world. Theorizing the politics, poetics and practices of austerity gardening in twentieth and twenty-first century Anglophone cultural texts, The Poetics and Politics of Gardening in Hard Times explores the variegated impact of austerity in conjunction with the representation of the garden in the national context of England in the mid-century, and how garden imagery is embedded within and illuminates the political, economic, and social contexts of literary production.

Our Frugal Summer in Charente: An Expat's Kitchen Garden Journal Meet Sarah Jane, a woman with a reputation for culinary catastrophe who tries to keep her family fed in challenging circumstances in rural France. Frugal living was not part of the plan when they arrived from Australia to undertake the renovation of a quaint cottage in the Charente. However, when life throws them a curve-ball the challenge was set. How to survive in France with very little money and two Australian cattle dogs. The answer came in the form of 5 chickens, 4 ducks and a vegetable garden! The frugal plan was to save money by any means possible, to enable any money they could earn to be invested into continuing the renovation of the cottage. In true 'Good Life' style Sarah Jane attacks this challenge head on by keeping some small livestock and converting a garden, that resembled a meadow, into a French 'potager' or kitchen garden.The French tradition of using produce from their 'potagers' is renowned for enabling families to create meals that are healthy, cost effective and simple. There are 31 recipes for a variety of food and drinks, included in a month by month account, of how they transformed a neglected garden into a frugal yet productive expat kitchen garden.

The little-known history of the “Garden Front”—Britain’s wildly successful vegetable-growing campaign during WWII: “A fascinating story.” —Northern Echo After food rationing was introduced in 1940, and German U-boats began threatening merchant shipping bringing in essential foodstuffs, the Ministry of Agriculture decided something had to be done to make the kitchens of Britain more self-sufficient. The result was an amazingly effective campaign—Dig for Victory—encouraging every man and woman to turn their garden, or even the grass verge in their street, over to cultivating vegetables. By 1942 half the population were taking part, and even the Royal Family had sacrificed their rose beds for growing onions. Now, Daniel Smith tells the full story of this remarkable wartime episode when spades, forks, and bean canes became weapons the ordinary citizen could take up against the enemy. It had tangible benefits for the war effort in that shipping could be reallocated for munitions instead of food imports, as well as for the health of the nation in encouraging a diet of fresh fruit and veg. The campaign also created unexpected celebrities like C.H. Middleton, whose wartime BBC radio talks on gardening reached a vast audience, and even sowed the seeds for the modern allotment movement. Ultimately it is a war story without fighting or killing, one that shows how even The Little Man with the Spade, in the words of the Minister for Agriculture at the time, did his bit for Victory. “Engaging.” —The Sunday Times “An inspirational account.” —Lancashire Evening Post

People are becoming more aware of the environment and their impact on it. Over the past decades we have become an increasingly consumerist based society. From a world in which recycling was common, single use became the norm. This throwaway society is unsustainable. Sustainable gardening results in the creation of an environmentally friendly area in which natural predators thrive and soils are naturally replenished. Discover innovative and simple ways of recycling everything from water to materials in the garden. Practical examples show recycling in action turning unwanted items into useful features such as bottle edging, footpaths made from tyres, garden forks into table lamps, broken pottery to mosaics and tree roots into lush garden stumperies. Recycling, reusing and upcycling in the garden can make a difference helping you save money by using less water, making your own compost, choosing energy efficient equipment and by giving everyday items a totally new function. Instead of a throwaway society, we are increasingly looking at ways of reducing our use of increasingly scarce resources, turning plastic into paths, using solar energy and conserving water. Natural recycling of plant material and sustainable gardening is increasingly popular. This book helps search for creative ideas that can conserve resources, and save you money. Water is no longer cheap, so the book suggests many ways that you can re-use water and get free rainwater. The book helps you with places you may not think of looking for free and cheap material, such as reclamation yards, factories, restaurants and hospitals. Let your imagination run free without needing much skill and without breaking the bank.

A Polish writer's experience of wartime France, a cosmopolitan outsider's perspective on politics, culture, and life under duress When the aspiring young writer Andrzej Bobkowski, a self-styled cosmopolitan Pole, found himself caught in occupied France in 1940, he recorded his reflections on culture, politics, history, and everyday life. Published after the war, his notebooks offer an outsider's perspective on the hardships and ironies of the Occupation. In the face of war, Bobkowski celebrates the value of freedom and human life through the evocation--in a daringly untragic mode--of ordinary existence, the taste of simple food, the beauty of the French countryside. Resisting intellectual abstractions, his notes exude a young man's pleasure in physical movement--miles clocked on country roads and Parisian streets on his trusty bike--and they reveal the emergence of an original literary voice. Bobkowski was recognized in his homeland as a master of modern Polish prose only after Communism ended. He remains to be discovered in the English-speaking world.