Don't Throw It, Grow It!

Cute layout and easy to understand, but not as helpful as I'd like if your end goal is to produce food, or to do anything cheaply. As an apartment dweller, I'm very into vertical urban farming and container gardening, where you can usefully grow your own food worth eating in a small apartment using windowsills, balconies, and containers. Ideally, I do things cheaply, using DIY planters, seed starters, etc.This book does not cover that kind of gardening.I've been into this for several years and am pretty good at it by now: I already grow my own raspberries, beans, salad greens, hot chilis, and a lot of herbs in a very small Manhattan apartment. I have produced potatoes in a "potato condo" and was hoping this book would give me ideas for more varieties of things to grow from cuttings, seeds, etc, that I was currently wasting. In my head, I was going to maximize efficiency, cost, and non-waste by turning around my kitchen scraps into more food.This book does not help with that at all.It tells you, indeed, what food items you can regrow from a pit or a cutting, but it's laid out more like a child's science experiment with an avocado pit or half a potato in a glass of water, so you can see the roots sprout and understand for yourself how nature works and that plants are alive. The varieties of plants it suggests are almost always totally inefficient in an apartment building, and will produce almost no edible results in this small of a space. For example, the entire section on fruit trees. The title bills this as "windowsill plants" and almost no fruit tree is a "windowsill plant." At least, if you can get it to survive in a small pot on your windowsill, it certainly isn't ever going to produce fruit.It tells you a lot of the dead obvious: this thing is so easy to grow, if you just stick it in the ground it will work! That's true for onions and potatos certainly (both so determined to grow they start sprouting in the pantry and in the trash all the time, we've all seen it) but they all require *having ground to stick it in.* That's not a "windowsill plant." Why would a book mention things like citrus and pomegranate that are actually enormous trees and almost never bear fruit indoors? Figs actually grow very well in New York City--if you have a backyard. Cuttings from fig trees in Italy survived so well on ships hand-carried over in the Ellis Island days and thrive so easily if you just stick them in the ground here, there is now a fascinating diversity of fig trees planted all over the city by Italian immigrants. Great. Interesting. I already knew this. This book telling me to plant something so painfully easy is not new information, especially when it requires me to have a yard.For small plants that do succeed on windowsills, the book chooses ones that require lots of advanced and money-costing equipment like heating pads and sprouting trays. I have owned all these things before and I know how to use them--and they are not beginner items. They are for serious gardeners. The bright, playful font and short length implies that this will be easy-peasy for any old regular person in a city apartment who has never grown a plant in their life, and that's totally not true. It tells you to buy peat starter pellets (which will require a long and annoying trip to a specialty garden store on the outskirts, where people have yards and do things like gardening, if you live in the dense downtown area of any city) doesn't mention that you can start seedlings in old paper egg cartons, or any number of DIY urban farming hacks that are well-published in a lot of other books actually designed for poor people or those concerned about waste and ecology trying to grow their own food. What's the point in growing something from a "kitchen scrap" if I have to buy $50 worth of equipment to sprout it myself, and then it's going to produce like, maybe one fruit or a dozen nuts ever? Filling a book with advanced and specialty items that take a lot of fussing to start is a great way to turn people off of gardening or convince them it's hard. I personally could pull off almost everything in this book with the right equipment and space, but most beginners couldn't, and sometimes I'm not looking to challenge myself to something new and difficult.It's all summed up in this book's comical inclusion of a pineapple. They are adorable to watch and easy to start and a great project for kids to learn how to grow things (right up there after potato and avocado) but they are the epitome of painfully inefficient for city people who's end goal is cheap access to actual food. One pineapple crown makes one ENORMOUS plant that dominates your entire kitchen (can't put it outside unless you're in the tropics!) and after three years, eventually shoots up a stalk with a tiny baby pineapple on it. They're ridiculously cute and fun, but an utter waste of space, resources and time if you actually want to eat pineapple.This book is basically that: cute, fun, informative, educational about how "our food really does come from nature and is part of a biological cycle!" but totally irrelevant if you want to grow actual food indoors, cheaply, on your windowsill.

Book might have good info but most info on non local plants and kinda blahs! I need inspiration for what I use. Donated same week I got it.

I give this book to 20 year olds, they seem to enjoy growing for free

There are a few good ideas in this book but a lot of it is just obvious. The cover is also a little misleading. It says "68 windowsill plants from kitchen scraps". I thought it was going to be about things like sprouting new onions from the roots you cut off, but most of it is stuff more like buy a carrot, stick it in water, and it will sprout roots and leaves. Well, dough. There's really not much about using "scraps". I guess it's a great book for folks who have always lived in a big city and don't know much about plants or growing food. I mean who knew if you plant seeds and water them that plants will sprout from them? Really? There a few tidbits I got from the book, like how to start a pineapple plant, but most of it was really obvious. However, all that said, I would recommend it for kids to teach them about nature and where food comes from.

This is a fun little book that I enjoyed reading with my 5 and 8 year old sons. The concept of growing plants from seeds, stems or roots that you can buy at the grocery store or international market is intriguing. However, I had purchased the book thinking that it would give advice on growing edible plants inside. Instead, the majority of the 68 plants are being grown just for their ornamental value, which is not of much interest to my family. So, just a heads up. If you're in the same boat, you might consider buying this great book: http://www.amazon.com/Growing-Tasty-Tropical-Plants-Anywhere/dp/1603425772/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1438612089&sr=8-1&keywords=growing+tasty+tropical+plants+in+any+home+anywhere

This book is very knowledgeable about growing from plants from kitchen scraps. It does have a lot of vegetable and fruits that are foreign to North America and I would not try them. I've neve even seen this exotic fruits and vegetables in the grocery stores! But on the other hand, it does have the foods I enjoy the most, Onions, Sweet Potatoes, Celery, etc. If you want to grow foods a cheap or new way, I would get this book. It would be great for kids to try as experiments too.

I grew up in a house where my great-grandma had a slew of plants growing from bit of this and that. Sadly she died prior to me being able to get her secrets about kitchen scrap plants but this book fills in the gaps. I've given it a 4 because while the info is spot on the photos are ugly and no one has offered me a warm bowl of gumbo while I'm reading, like gran did.

I got this book for my husband for Valentine's day after we had great success with grocery store green onions, and the loss of almost everything else we tried to grow. I love the concept of this book because it is less commitment to use grocery store scraps than seeds or baby plants. It is also exceedingly helpful to know what will survive our Iowa winter north-facing windows. Indirect sunlight at best. I am hoping for a high success rate with our new batch of little plants! My husband has already started a ginger, pineapple, mango, garlic and potato and is hinting at wanting a pomegranate plant in the near future. We are having so much fun and learning lots!

Interesting to learn how to grow

Great book lots of ideas. It is American based but still appropriate for most things in the UK. Have started some things to grow but early days yet to know how successful they will be

A lot of ideas in this book are just traditional ways to grow something, not as much to learn as i had hoped. Great for novice or schools. Nice visual book.

Interesting book that could encourage anyone to try growing plants from saved exotic fruit seeds, and common vegetable cuttings.

lovely little book - although no photographs- it encourages anyone to start experimenting with seeds and pips from shop bought fruit and veg.