VIBRANT HARVEST: Cultivating a Kaleidoscope of Colors in Your Vegetable Garden with Heirlooms, Modern Hybrids, and More

VIBRANT HARVEST: Cultivating a Kaleidoscope of Colors in Your Vegetable Garden with Heirlooms, Modern Hybrids, and More
SANDRA MAO
Cool Springs Press (non-affiliate Bookshop.org link)
$26.99 all editions, available now

Rating: 5* of five

The Publisher Says: Vibrant Harvest is the ultimate guide to bringing more color and diversity into your veggie garden (and your diet!) by growing the most colorful veggies on the planet. Fill your garden and plate with a rainbow of flavorful produce with this engaging and visually stunning guide to a Vibrant Harvest.

It’s easy to “eat the rainbow” when you’re growing one right in your own backyard! In Vibrant Harvest, you’ll meet some of the most colorful veggies on the planet and learn how to grow, harvest, and enjoy them. Author Sandra Mao (@sandra.urbangarden) and her color-infused garden hand you all the insight you need to grow a kaleidoscope of heirloom, hybrid, and ancestral vegetables that are not only a feast for the eyes but also nutritional powerhouses.

With this inspiring guide, bringing bright colors and rich flavors into your kitchen has never been simpler or more dynamic. From purple tomatoes, pink beans, yellow carrots, magenta potatoes, and black radishes, to speckled lettuces and orange cucumbers, you’ll find handy advice for growing them all. Plus, learn the best varieties to seek out.

The book is organized into four parts:

Choose Your Plants: First, meet these multihued dynamos via detailed plant profiles organized by both the growing season and the edible portion of each plant—stem, leaf, bud, fruit, pod, or root.

Plan & Start Your Garden: Next, gain insight into planning and installing your garden, from site selection and soil prep, to seed starting and transplanting.

Care for Your Garden: Then, learn the ins and outs of caring for your polychromatic garden and all the plants living in it, including watering, feeding, staking, pruning, and trellising.

Pick, Preserve & Prepare Your Harvest: Finally, discover how to harvest and enjoy your rainbow-hued garden through recipes and easy preservation techniques.

It’s a KALEidoscope of possibilities out there for modern gardeners! Meet dozens of vivid varieties and gain the expertise you need to plant and tend your own super-colorful garden in Vibrant Harvest.

I RECEIVED A DRC FROM THE PUBLISHER VIA EDELWEISS+. THANK YOU.

My Review: A book I thought I'd mildly snort at...colors matter! faugh!...when I got it, but it's about useful gardening as opposed to ornamental gardening, so I thought I'd give it a whirl.

"Eat the rainbow" is actual, serious food science; adding color to your diet has measurable health benefits. If you're going to garden,I say do it to enjoy really fresh foods you wouldn't otherwise have access to; adding the color factor also adds a certain pleasurable frisson to the work as well as the harvest.

two of my favorite veggies in a row!

It's a serious book, about a serious subject...food security, health and lifespan improvement...that people my age need to consider seriously because we didn't when we were younger. If you're under 40, first of all hello! how on earth did you get here of all places?, please learn from my mistake: eat carefully and intentionally as a habit. Go wild on holidays, take the occasional extra cookie, but as your baseline, be very intentional in your eating habits. It pays off in the medium and the long run.

Growing your own is a solid habit to form, as well. No ordinary grocery store will have anything as beautiful as these:

...and there's no sense looking at the pretties unless you know the problems you'll likely face in growing them:

All said and done, this is a great gift to the aspiring gardener, the new homeowner, and the flagging, bored plant butler. And/or yourself.