Kentucky Dirt: A practical guide to vegetable gardening takes you through a year in the garden with tips and common sense advice on how to grow a garden and why the effort is worth it.
Kentucky Dirt offers an eclectic mix of folksy humor such as the directive that no vegetable is truly happy until it’s breaded and fried and pondering the purpose of the tomato in haiku form. Author Chris Houchens offers stern warnings with a playful wink of the dangers of putting sugar in cornbread or the problem with trying to emulate Martha Stewart.
Kentucky Dirt is not a comprehensive gardening manual; it’s a reminder of some of the traditional folk knowledge of gardening with recollections of how gardens have been raised in Kentucky and across the South for many years. While not a cookbook, there are also a few not-so-precise recipes in Kentucky Dirt to prepare and enjoy with your bountiful produce. There’s also a chapter on the joys of canning and preserving your garden work.
As trends have shifted in recent years with people wanting to get back in touch with the land and to know where their food comes from, Kentucky Dirt offers the simple solution that the best way to know for sure where your food comes from is to produce it yourself. If you already know there is a fundamental difference between a picked-green, trucked-in, gas-exposed, mealy-tasting, store-bought tomato and one that you’ve let ripen on the vine yourself, then this book will help inspire you to break up a little ground and get growing.
Kentucky Dirt is available exclusively through the Amazon Kindle platform for only 99 cents. It’s is free to borrow for Amazon Prime members.
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Chris Houchens 