Spring onion
Green tops within a week. A few months, then it is finished. The best value on the list.
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.
Ninety-nine pages on what actually happens when you plant the things you would otherwise throw away. Every plant carries a blunt verdict, the steps that work, the mistakes that stop it working, and an honest answer about how long you will be waiting.
- 50 plants
- 99 beautifully designed pages
- Step-by-step growing instructions
- An honest verdict on every plant
- The mistakes that stop it working
- Realistic growing timelines
- Instant digital PDF
Launch offerCHF 24.99
Regular price CHF 24.99.CHF 14.99Save CHF 10
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Instant digital access • Read on phone, tablet or computer
Digital product — no physical book will be shipped
Why this book exists
Your kitchen bin is full of things that can grow. The problem is, the internet gets half of them wrong.
Somewhere there is a photograph of a carrot top in a saucer with a fine head of green leaves. It has been copied ten thousand times, and every time it is copied somebody looks at it and assumes a carrot is forming underneath.
It is not. Once the taproot has been cut off, the plant cannot grow another one. What you have is a leaf bud, and a leaf bud makes leaves. They are worth eating. They are not a carrot, and no amount of patience or the right sort of saucer will change that.
So somebody plants one, 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 Otto actually minds about it.
What is in the book
50 plants. 50 honest answers.
Every plant in the handbook opens with a verdict in one line, before any instructions. A few of them are below.
Ginger
Young ginger in four months. The best crop from a supermarket shelf.
Turmeric
It works, and nobody expects it to. Eight to ten months, indoors.
Garlic
It works, and it is the one thing here with a fixed date. Plant in autumn, harvest in July.
Potato
A real crop, in seven or eight weeks. But read the warning first.
Sweet potato
A real crop, and the most demanding thing in the book. Four to six months.
Carrot top
Leaves. Good ones. Never a carrot — and that is anatomy, not technique.
Mint
The single most reliable project in the book. A permanent, hardy plant from a sprig.
Tomato
Ripe fruit four to five months from sowing. It will not taste like its parent.
Avocado
A handsome houseplant. Never an avocado indoors.
And forty more, each one answered the same way.
Inside the handbook
Take a look inside.
Ninety-nine pages, typeset properly and photographed throughout. These are real pages from the book, not mock-ups.
How the book is built
Not another list of gardening hacks.
Every one of the fifty entries is laid out the same way, so you always know where to look.
01
The verdict
One blunt line at the top of every entry, so you know before you read any further whether the thing is worth your windowsill.
02
What to do
Numbered steps, each with a title and a plain explanation. Written for somebody who has never grown anything.
03
Where it goes wrong
The specific mistakes that stop each plant working, and what the symptom actually means when you see it.
04
The honest timeline
Days, months or years — stated plainly. More seeds are thrown away alive than ever die.
One entry, as it appears
This is how every plant is answered.
The verdict first. Then the steps, each with a title, so you can follow it standing at the kitchen counter.
Ginger
The verdictYoung ginger in four months, mature rhizomes in eight to ten. The best crop from a supermarket shelf.
What to do- Choose a good piece
- Divide it
- Wake it up
- Wait for roots
- Plant it
Followed in the book by where it goes wrong, and why.
Sixteen chapters
What you will learn.
The plants are the middle of the book. Around them is everything a beginner needs in order to keep what they have started alive.
- How to start plants from kitchen scraps
- Which scraps genuinely produce another crop
- Which popular regrowing tricks are misleading
- How to sow correctly, and how thinly
- How much water seedlings actually need
- How to avoid damping off
- When to prick out and pot seedlings on
- How to harden plants off before they go outside
- How and when to feed
- How to make your own compost
- How to recognise common plant problems
- How to deal with common pests, and which remedies do not work
- When to sow, plant and harvest through the year
Old advice. Proper sources.
No guesswork dressed up as fact.
The horticultural guidance in Otto’s Garden Handbook is drawn from university extension services and the Royal Horticultural Society. Every figure in the book comes from one of those sources.
Where they disagree, it says so
On how often to change the water, three services give three answers. The book prints all three and tells you which one Otto follows.
Where there is no authority, it says nothing
Nobody reputable has documented what a cut leek base does. Rather than invent an answer, the book admits it.
Hearth & Rue is an independent publisher. No university, extension service or horticultural society is affiliated with, sponsors or endorses this book; their published guidance is simply what Otto consulted and cited.
The gardener
The gardener behind the handbook.
Otto has been growing things for fifty years. He started reading what people write online about growing food from kitchen scraps, changed his mind about having nothing new to say, and wrote this instead.
He is not interested in tricks. He is interested in whether the thing on your windowsill is going to feed you, and in telling you the truth about it before you spend four months finding out.
Most of what is worth doing in a garden happens slowly, and knowing in advance which is which is the whole difference between patience and disappointment.
Otto
What you receive
Everything that comes with it.
Otto’s Garden Handbook
50 plants you can grow from your kitchen bin, and the honest truth about every one.
- A 99-page digital handbook
- 50 plants, each with its own entry
- Full-colour photography throughout
- Step-by-step growing instructions
- An honest verdict on every plant
- Troubleshooting for common problems and pests
- A month-by-month growing year
- A quick-reference summary index
- Instant PDF access after purchase
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Digital download. No physical product will be shipped.
Before you buy
Questions, answered plainly.
No. Otto’s Garden Handbook is a digital PDF. Nothing is posted to you.
Your download arrives by email as soon as your payment is confirmed, and the link is also shown on the order confirmation page. If it has not reached you within a few minutes, check your spam folder and then write to us and we will send it straight over.
It is written for beginners. The first nine chapters cover compost, sowing, watering, warmth and light, damping off, potting on, hardening off, feeding and making your own compost, so nothing in the plant entries assumes knowledge you have not been given.
Yes. It is an ordinary PDF and opens on phones, tablets and computers.
Yes, for your own use. The book is licensed for the personal use of the purchaser, so please do not redistribute, resell or reproduce it.
Timings, temperatures and frost dates vary enormously from one garden to the next, so the book does not work from calendar months. Everything counts from your own last and first frost dates, and the book teaches you to work from them. Treat every figure as a starting point for your own garden and keep your own notes.
No — and that is one of the main reasons the book exists. Some of these plants give you a real crop, some give you useful leaves and nothing more, some take years, and some will never produce what the photographs online imply. Each entry says plainly which it is.
The horticultural guidance is drawn from university extension services and the Royal Horticultural Society. Where those sources disagree, the book prints the disagreement. Where Otto could not find an authority, the book says so rather than inventing an answer. Hearth & Rue is independent, and no institution is affiliated with or endorses the book.
Stop guessing. Start growing.
Fifty plants from the kitchen. What works, what doesn’t, and exactly what to do.
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