"We new old-fashioned gardeners are stingy, stubborn, sceptical, curious and don’t really care very much about what others think of us. We grow things to eat so that we can feel independent, but also because vegetables are fascinating and beautiful, and to draw an adamant boundary between the beautiful and the functional is anyway of no interest, since most flowers are edible and besides have medicinal properties."
Elin Unnes

Once you’ve become interested in growing things – which happens,
without exception, the first time a seed you’ve pushed into the soil
actually sprouts – then there is no way back. You are hooked!
But what happens next? Which problems does an urban new gardener meet with when he or she becomes fascinated by self-sufficiency? How do you best store your harvest and how do you make sure your vegetables taste their best? Can you really pick fresh rhubarb in the middle of winter? And why should you never ever sprout linseed?
With the help of four ancient techniques: drying, fermenting, preserving and pickling in alcohol, you can find the way from the most effective vegetable garden and tips about the weirdest of veggies to the very tastiest food and remedies for both hay fever and a fear of sheets!

Elin Unnes is the rock-music journalist who started to live a double life as a vegetable grower. She has been the editor of magazines like Darling, Vice and Bon, and she regularly writes about music in the major Swedish daily Svenska Dagbladet. When she acquired an allotment just outside Stockholm she was struck by a violent interest for gardening, and she started blogging under the pseudonym ‘The Secret Gardener’ [thesecretgardener. norrlage.se]. Now she writes for the popular gardening magazine Allt om Trädgård and sees a super early potato crop as one of her greatest achievements!