Otto standing in a walled kitchen garden holding a seedling in a clay pot
A gardening book by Otto

Old ways, written down properly.

Otto Grows is where fifty years in the garden gets written down properly. Otto has grown food for half a century, and he has very little patience for advice that has never been tested.

Discover the handbook 50 plants. No myths. No guesswork.
The cover of Otto’s Garden Handbook
The Otto Grows Garden Series

Otto’s Garden Handbook

50 plants you can grow from your kitchen bin, and the honest truth about every one.

A great deal of what sits in your kitchen bin will grow. Rather less of it will give you anything to eat, and the difference between the two is not a matter of luck or technique.

Otto goes through fifty of them one at a time. What genuinely produces another crop, what gives you useful leaves and nothing more, what takes years, and what will never become the thing the photograph implies.

A week of ordinary shopping laid out on a garden bench
The point of the book

The internet will tell you almost anything will regrow. Otto won’t.

There is a difference between a plant that grows and a plant that feeds you, and almost nothing online draws it. The handbook sorts all fifty into four honest groups.

A real crop Potato in seven or eight weeks. Garlic on a fixed date. Ginger from a supermarket shelf. These genuinely feed you.
Useful leaves, and nothing more Carrot, beetroot and turnip tops give you good leaves. They will never give you another root.
Years, if ever An apple pip grows. It may bear fruit on the far side of a decade, and it will not be the apple you ate.
Honestly, nobody knows Where no reputable source has documented something, the handbook says so rather than inventing an answer.
Otto in his garden, holding a seedling in a clay pot
Everything in this book started on a bench like this one.
Meet Otto

Fifty years in the garden. Very little patience for nonsense.

Otto has been growing things for fifty years, and for most of that time he would have told you there was nothing new to say about it. Then he started reading what people write online about growing food from kitchen scraps, and he changed his mind. There was a great deal to say, and most of it was corrections.

What decided him was the carrot top. Somewhere there is a photograph of one in a saucer with a fine head of green leaves, copied ten thousand times, and every time it is copied somebody looks at it and believes a carrot is forming underneath. It is not, and it never will be. That is anatomy, not technique.

So somebody plants a carrot top, waits, gets leaves, and quietly concludes they are no good at growing things. They were told something untrue, and then they blamed themselves. That is the thing he actually minds about it.

Where I could not find an authority, this book gives you nothing rather than something invented.

Otto
The cover of Otto’s Garden Handbook
Otto’s Garden Handbook

Start with what’s already in your kitchen.

Fifty plants from the kitchen. What works, what doesn’t, and exactly what to do about each one.

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