Your Farm in the City: An Urban Gardener's Guide to Growing Food and Raising Animals

This upbeat manual for aspiring urban gardeners features a gritty but whimsical, graphic-heavy, reader-friendly layout and a 21st-century attitude that will appeal to a younger generation of gardeners intrigued by the idea of growing their own food while living in the city. Chapters on planning a city "farm" (which Taylor likens to the more modestly titled kitchen and victory gardens), intensive growing with vertical plantings, and seed starting lay out the basics in a welcoming, unintimidating manner. Discussions of preserving food and urban farm husbandry, from chickens to bees, as well as detailed information on growing a wide variety of vegetables, fruits, edible flowers, and herbs, are thorough enough to be useful and realistic. Numerous sidebars and boxes feature supplementary information as diverse as designing with children's propensity for jumping over plant beds in mind (make them narrow so the kids won't land in the middle of the bed) and recipes for exotic treats like green tomato muffins and calendula salve. Abundant, clear drawings, from oversized illustrations of insects to plans for hoop houses and beehives, make up for the lack of photographs. (Mar.)