- Hardcover: 224 pages
- Publisher: Henry Holt & Company (April 1999)
- Language English
- ISBN-10: 0805047867
- ISBN-13: 978-0805047868
- Product Dimensions: 26.2 x 19.8 x 1.8 cm
- Average Customer Review: 5.0 out of 5 stars See all reviews (1 customer review)
- Amazon Bestsellers Rank: 3,790,668 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)
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Amazon.co.uk Review
After 20-plus years of tutelage at the feet of Vermont's seasons, landscape designers and authors Joe Eck and Wayne Winterrowd have mastered the art of living in tune with the seasons. This means eating what's ripe in the garden--there's no freezing and very little canning at North Hill--when it's ripe. The meditative, ardent Living Seasonally: The Kitchen Garden and the Table at North Hill describes this life hitched to the wax and wane of the seasons.
Eck and Winterrowd go into luxurious detail on the tiniest aspects of horticultural and barnyard life. These two are passionate and effective teachers--so much so that, by page 43, the reader fully understands their characterisation of pumpkin vines as "as wayward as vegetable guineas," a reference to the hen with a mind of its own. We--even those of us who've never sprouted a seed or hoed a row--get it. But some of the most rewarding passages in Living Seasonally are those that ruminate on the inevitable blending of the spiritual with the prosaic, as in this reflection on Vermont pumpkin pie, made with maple syrup from their own trees:
We begin our syruping when the buds of the maples are tight-furled, hardly more than sharp, dull- green points along the bare stems ... By the time the pumpkins have been selected and sown, the leaves of the maples will have hardened into the thick shade of summer ... When the maple leaves have turned transparent again, all into orange and tawny yellow, the pumpkins must be gathered to cure in the warmth of the house. As they lie in heaps and piles, their colours reflect the autumn garden and are a fit emblem of the season. An emblem, too, is the pie they make, where beginning and end and all the processes in between are caught up in a perfect round.This book will captivate both the avid gardener-cook with its recipes and techniques for planting and seed selection, and the city-dweller searching for the answer to why it's impossible to find tomatoes that taste like tomatoes in January. --Stefanie Durbin
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Most Helpful Customer Reviews
5.0 out of 5 stars
Quietly beautiful, useful,
By A Customer
This review is from: Living Seasonally: The Kitchen Garden and the Table at North Hill (Hardcover)
Although I enjoyed their first book, this one kindled my gardening fires. As always, their writing is top notch -- polished and seamless. I cannot detect whether it is one writing about pumpkins ("as wayward as vegetable guineas") and the other about onions ("connecting us to all that has gone on before"). It doesn't matter. What does matter is that once started I had no choice but to slow down and savor every page, every wonderful photograph. Yet for all its beauty, I also had to fight a compulsion to underline portions, to write notes in the margins. I can't recall the last time a gardening book made me feel so inclined. I appreciated their candor as well, especially about raising livestock for food (they do -- I couldn't), their diet (they confess to eating red meat) and even an "occasional smoke." I hope I have the good sense to return to "Living Seasonally" not just when I'm thinking about new tomato varieties but also when my harried pace has my priorities out of kilter. For in these calm and gentle pages I found reminders about why I garden and the affinities I share with those who delight in growing plants.
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Most Helpful Customer Reviews on Amazon.com (beta) Amazon.com:
4.7 out of 5 stars (3 customer reviews) 31 of 31 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
Quietly beautiful, useful,
By Dennis Pierson - Published on Amazon.com
This review is from: Living Seasonally: The Kitchen Garden and the Table at North Hill (Hardcover)
Although I enjoyed their first book, this one kindled my gardening fires. As always, their writing is top notch -- polished and seamless. I cannot detect whether it is one writing about pumpkins ("as wayward as vegetable guineas") and the other about onions ("connecting us to all that has gone on before"). It doesn't matter. What does matter is that once started I had no choice but to slow down and savor every page, every wonderful photograph. Yet for all its beauty, I also had to fight a compulsion to underline portions, to write notes in the margins. I can't recall the last time a gardening book made me feel so inclined. I appreciated their candor as well, especially about raising livestock for food (they do -- I couldn't), their diet (they confess to eating red meat) and even an "occasional smoke." I hope I have the good sense to return to "Living Seasonally" not just when I'm thinking about new tomato varieties but also when my harried pace has my priorities out of kilter. For in these calm and gentle pages I found reminders about why I garden and the affinities I share with those who delight in growing plants.
19 of 19 people found the following review helpful:
4.0 out of 5 stars
Living well...,
By Dianne Foster "Di" - Published on Amazon.com
This review is from: Living Seasonally: The Kitchen Garden and the Table at North Hill (Hardcover)
For a number of years, I attended gardening workshops sponsored by the National Wildlife Federation and Brooklyn Botanical Garden held at the NWF Headquarters in Vienna Virginia. These workshops were always thematic, covering topics such as 'growing perennials' or 'regional gardening'. On more than one occasion I heard Joe Eck or Wayne Winterrowd speak about their home and garden at North Hill Vermont. Their talks reflected the various stages of change they experienced as they renovated their old house and developed their grounds. I particularly remember the oohs and ahs when they showed us slides of their perennial beds. "Living Seasonally" continues the story first described in their book "A Year at North Hill: Four Seasons in a Vermont Garden." In this book they leave the perennials for the vegetable patch. Eck and Winterrowd are now working in patch number five. "Living Seasonally" is a cross between a coffee table book and a garden guide, though for practical purposes the book is more the former than the latter. Much can be gleaned from the book as it is filled with all sorts of useful tidbits and wonderful photographs, but it is not a "how-to garden" book per se. Also, it covers life in a Vermont garden which is not like life in any other part of the U.S. The authors point this out over and over, but some will forget. For one thing, the growing season is short in Vermont (about two months before global warming) and much of the garden work is done in frozen ground or under grow lights in the green house. For another, some plants that thrive in the cool Vermont summers, don't thrive elsewhere in the U.S. and vice versa. Growing vegetables is tricky. Planting dates must be attended to with rigor and special consideration must be given the "ground" work. The reason Eck and Winterrowd are working in vegetable patch number five is because the other four patches did not work out. They are quite forthcoming in the reasons why the other patches were best abandoned for other types of vegetation. This is an intersting book with lots of anecdotal material that may or may not prove relevant to gardeners outside Vermont. I read from mere curiostity more than anything. Much of what they describe for their garden in Zone 4 or 5 will not work in my Virginia patch in Zone 7. I do like their photographs of garden designs and fixtures as well as farm animals. However, I think the animals are mostly ornate creatures kept for show. This is a very picturesque book. 7 of 7 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
Time to feel what it is really about,
By Andrea - Published on Amazon.com
This review is from: Living Seasonally: The Kitchen Garden and the Table at North Hill (Hardcover)
Every time I pick up a book I am about to read,I first weigh it in my hands.The feel of it is as important as the touch and sound of every page I turn.In this book I could feel the authors,as if they were right there still on that very page.They seemed so close.It is apparent that descriptions as just and as appetizing as the ones in this beautiful work of art,could only come from very passionate gardeners.But Joe Eck and Wayne Winterrowd are not only gardeners.They are also gourmets in every aspect of life. Taking time to smell a wonderfully scented flower,or staying up all night to assist their favorite cow giving birth to her offspring every single season,well I think that says it all. Hours are long when one chooses to farm.But real happiness lays in having dirty fingernails.I say "Bravo" to Eck and Winterrowd.May there me many more books from these two very talented and gifted authors. |
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