Plain Vegetables About seventy varieties of vegetables have been mentioned
in this column during the last few months, as much as an incentive to the use of a little imagination in the kitchen garden as anything else; readers have shown great interest in most of them, and a good deal of mouth-watering was caused, for example, by the description of asparagus-peas. But the conservative gardener deserves a turn, and his book is Plain Vegetable Growing by George E. Whitehead (A. and C. Black, 2s. 6d.). This is one of Black's Kitchen Front series, in which incidentally Mr. Ambrose Heath's From Creel to Kitchen is an eye-opener on the cooking of fresh-water fish. Plain Vegetable Growing is a slightly misleading title, and the conservative may be astonished to discover at first sight that there are between thirty and forty vegetables which may be considered plain. Mr. Whitehead saves himself, however, by classing such things as seakale, asparagus, sweet-corn and artichokes as luxuries. The book is simple and straightforward, yet remote from that depressing class of work in which ghastly working illustrations stare woodenly from every page. Neat hints on pests, fertilisers and seasonal jobs take their place. and of the vast spring catch-crop of cheap gardening books, some very dubious and shoddy, I should say Plain Vegetable Growing goes into the first half dozen.
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