How to Grow Food

Gardener Huw Richards and chef Sam Cooper bridge the gap between the garden and kitchen, profiling the growing and cooking of 70 crops.

In this super practical companion for all kitchen gardeners, each crop has no-nonsense growing information on spacing, sowing, and harvesting accompanied by delicious and simple recipes for food made well.

Whether you’ve got containers on a balcony or acres of land, knowing how many plants can grow per square metre and the expected yield means you can easily work out how much food you can grow in your space. There are also suggestions for the best varieties to grow for resilience and flavour.

Recipes are easily adapted depending on how much you harvest and range from dishes to tuck into right away, such as a root vegetable tartiflette, to preserves to enjoy later, like a tomato sauce to add to pastas and stews.

So if you’re motivated by food and flavour, How to Grow Food has everything you need to grow, harvest, store, cook, and preserve the tastiest fresh produce.

Review

..a book for the modern gardener-cook who wants results on the plate as much as in the soil. ― Hort Week

About the Author

Huw Richards is a permaculturalist and bestselling author based in mid-west Wales. His YouTube channel has over 890,000 subscribers and over 100 million views. Huw has written five books with DK: Veg in One Bed (2019), Grow Food For Free (2020), The Vegetable Grower's Handbook (2022), The Self-Sufficiency Garden, and The Permaculture Garden (2025).

Sam Cooper is a chef who shares videos using homegrown produce with over 500,000 Instagram followers as @chef.sam.black. Sam is a bestselling author, having written the In the Kitchen chapter of The Self-Sufficiency Garden (2024) and published his own title The Fermentation Kitchen with DK (2024).