A Woman's Garden: Grow Beautiful Plants and Make Useful Things

My Favorite Farm Book So Far This Year

A Woman's Garden: Grow Beautiful Plants and Make Useful Things by Tanya Anderson

This turned out to be a delightful book.

Eight different woman owned farms are featured. Each farm has it's own specialty. Each farm is then followed with a project inline with the theme of the farm. The projects are beautiful & very useful. I also find the book to be incredibly inspirational. It is rare that I come across a book of this nature that I find so relatable & useful!

Chapter one is the kitchen garden. It features a farm in California. The book shows the basics of how to get your own Eco friendly garden started. The project is a pallet strawberry planter. Aside from growing plenty of crops, I too grow strawberries. I find them a royal pain in the butt thanks to their constant runners & the endless battle with weeds. This planter idea helps one deal with the weeds & makes harvesting easier. Note that it's not big enough for producing massive amounts of strawberries, but it is still worth trying. It appears to be a huge time & back saver.

Next is a garden in the UK (Devon). This farm is mainly focused on edible flowers which is always a lot of fun & beautiful to boot!  A list of popular edible flowers is provided along with when they bloom & what temperature they are hardy to. As with the previous section, plenty of inspirational photos & ideas are provided to enjoy your own edible flower garden. The projects are an edible flower planter (the planter isn't edible, the contents are), floral ice cubes, edible flower frittata, & lavender shortbread.

A garden in the UK (London) that focuses on herbs is featured next. As with the other farmers, this section provides a little background information on the farmer herself. A photo gallery of culinary herbs is provided followed by explaining how to grow culinary herbs. A chart is provided for classic Mediterranean culinary herbs, varieties to try, plant spacing & hardiness. Projects include a DIY Herb Spiral which lets you create a mini microclimate where you will plant various herbs in the spiral based on the herbs needs. How to create your own herb infused oils, growing & enjoying your own three mint Mojito, & herb embedded pasta, with you guessed it, your own, made from scratch, pasta.

Plants for skin care. This farm is based in the UK (Isle of Man). This farmer mainly grows  plants for their known skin benefits. How to grow plants for skin care is provided, plus a photo gallery & a chart on skin care plants & their uses. Projects include how to create botanical extracts, rose petal facial mist, herbal bath fizzies, & how to make your own lavender & alkanet soap. Hint: Once you make your own soap, you'll never want to buy the mass produced stuff in the store again.

Learn herbal medicine basics from a farm in Germany (Hamburg). This section provides relevant information regarding herbal medicine in the same vein as it does for the other cops/plants grown in the previous sections. Projects include growing chamomile for tea (& how to brew & enjoy it), chamomile tincture, calendula skin salve & lemon balm cold sore balm. I also make my own teas, tinctures, salves & balms. These are incredibly useful & I feel it is more important than ever to learn how to do these things ourselves & not be so dependent on outside sources as the most recent pandemic has shown us how quickly our supply chain can be disrupted.

Finally, back in the USA is a farm in North Carolina who focuses on herbs for the home. For example, preserves, home cleaners & skin care. As with the other farms the photos are gorgeous & inspirational. Guidance on how to grow your own home garden is provided with a basic chart & a cute example of drying your linens on blooming lavender & how you can bring sweet pea flowers into the home for a intense perfumed bouquet. Another chart lists plants with home uses, the plants growing preferences, etc. Projects include how to make your own raised garden bed, DIY rosemary & citrus kitchen spray (hint: this is so easy to make!), natural wood furniture polish, & soapwort multipurpose cleaner.

While I love every single farm (really, I do), Teresinha's garden in the UK (Birmingham) is one of my favorites because it's all about using natural dye plants. *Note: there is a small amount of misinformation in this section. Here you will learn the basics of how to grow your own dye garden. The main focus is on using these homegrown dyes on fibers. However, there is a fun example of how  certain plants can be used to dye foodstuffs. This is not only great for adults but also a great project to try with kids. How to use dye plants, a chart of the common dye plants & the colors you can expect to get from them is provided. Projects include preparing the fibers for dyeing, dying yarn with onion skins (the colors will amaze you) & naturally coloring handmade soap (as a soap maker, I can tell you this is a lot of fun). *The minor errors in the section are in listing the colors of animal fibers, stating they come in only white, grey, brown, & black. For some reason shades of red was left out. Not brick red or fire engine red, but more of a soft orangy fawn or buff color. Angora rabbits & angora goats can & do produce coats known as red along with the colors already mentioned. The other minor error is in listing that cotton only comes in creams & white. As a grower of organic heirloom cotton plants I want you to know that cotton comes in green as well. There are several shades of green depending on the type of cotton plant. There is also a rich brown that one would hardly refer to as cream.

The last garden is in Canada (Ontario). It features fun ways to upcycle & recycle goods giving them a new purpose in the garden, including making your own fall leaf garland. A photo gallery of creative garden ideas is provided. Some are more eco friendly than others. Some repurpose while others use nature; a woven unpainted basket. Guidance on how to create your own creative & low cost garden. Lists of plants you can propagate from cuttings & from divisions are included (rather than having to buy which gets expensive fast), how to create compost & how to craft with plants. Learn how to make your own fossil stepping stones, pressed flower candles & paper mache leaf lanterns.

From the farms above, you can clearly see that the majority of them are based in the UK. As a US farmer I would have loved to see at least one farm featured that was at least in the Midwest. The United States is huge & we have so many different growing climates. Often a growing climate in the UK, will not be suitable for those of us in the US. Be sure to pay attention to the growing requirements provided to see what works for you. To be fair to the author, in the back of the book the author explains how she first wrote this book during the first months of the China virus outbreak. This limited her ability to travel. I sincerely hope she creates another book featuring another handful of women farmers in the future as I will be sure to get it.