Old ways, written down properly.
Otto has grown food for half a century, and he has very little patience for advice that has never been tested. Otto Grows is where all of it gets written down.
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 and says plainly which is which: what genuinely produces another crop, what gives you useful leaves and nothing more, what takes years, and what will never become the plant the photographs online promise.
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 makes that distinction clear. The handbook sorts all fifty into four honest groups.
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. Once the carrot’s taproot has been cut off, it cannot grow another one — no amount of technique will change that.
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 part Otto really minds.
Where I could not find a reliable source, this book says so rather than inventing an answer.
Otto
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.
Instant digital PDF. No physical book will be shipped.