The Complete Kitchen Garden

The Complete Kitchen Garden sets down fifteen years of Hannah Reyes’s work in full: how to plan a garden and build its soil, how to sow, plant and tend it through the year, and how to grow, harvest and store 80 vegetables and herbs. Three clothbound volumes, 912 pages, in a linen slipcase, signed and numbered by Hannah in an edition of 500 copies.

Volume I covers the ground: reading a site, laying out beds and paths, testing and building soil, compost and mulch. Volume II follows the garden year: seed starting, sowing and transplanting, watering, rotation and succession, pests, season extension and a month-by-month calendar for USDA zones 3⁠–⁠10. Volume III holds the 80 crop profiles, from artichokes to zucchini, each with sowing dates keyed to frost, spacing, days to harvest, common problems and storage life, followed by chapters on curing, storing and saving seed. There are more than 600 photographs and 150 drawn bed plans, and each volume is Smyth-sewn to lie flat on a potting bench.

It’s a reference to keep for decades, not a weekend read. The method is the same as in The Kitchen Garden Masterclass, which shows the builds and techniques on video; the books go much further on individual crops, varieties and storage. Everything assumes in-ground or raised beds. For balconies and patios, The Small-Space Harvest is the better fit.