Niki Jabbour's Veggie Garden Remix

November 20, 2017
Gardener Jabbour (The Year-Round Vegetable Gardener) enthusiastically encourages readers to explore international vegetable and herb varieties as she tours her own “global” garden that contains crops from India, Italy, Lebanon, and Mexico, among other places. She organizes her book into a “if you like this, try... ” structure, so cabbage lovers, for instance, are encouraged to try komatsuna, an Asian green that tastes similar to cabbage with mustard overtones, and people who are fond of cucumbers are introduced to cucamelons, which have the crisp and crunchy taste as cucumbers plus a citrus twist. For each new variety, the book includes directions for growing and eating and, importantly, a paragraph selling readers on the variety. “Have I got the broccoli for you!” Jabbour jokes while introducing Piracicaba broccoli. Loaded with lush photos throughout, this attractive book will appeal to gardeners and gourmands alike. Color photos.

December 1, 2017
This is a wonderful surprise of a book from the author of Groundbreaking Food Gardens (2014). Jabbour shakes up gardeners' assumptions on how our conventional vegetables should look or tastefrom tomatoes to potatoes, onions to summer squash. So she switches out a zucchini squash for, say, the long, striped snake gourd ( spectacular when pickled or chopped into chutney or curry ). Instead of snap beans, there are chickpeas ( consumed fresh like petit pois, shelled and eaten immediately ). And for romaine lettuce, there is minutina, Tokyo bekana, and mache ( a perfect bite ). Jabbour gives excellent support, from clear color photos showing size, color, and texture to customized growing tips for each vegetable featured. Hardiness zones are not listed, but, since the author grows nearly all of these veggies in Nova Scotia's short growing season, most zones in the U.S. should work fine, too. Nor is a source list for seeds appended, but most gardeners are internet-savvy enough now to source their own seeds. An otherwise excellent addition to any gardening collection.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2017, American Library Association.)

Starred review from January 1, 2018

Author (The Year-Round Vegetable Gardener) and blogger Jabbour is also a Halifax, Nova Scotia-based radio host of Weekend Gardener. Her lively on-air voice carries over into her writing. She's clearly hip to food gardening trends: a big one, of course, is our increased vegetable consumption and inclination to grow our own; another is the quest for different flavors and high nutritional value; yet another, our low-waste, "top-to-tail" eating habits. Jabbour champions vegetables with global origins: e.g., Central and South America, Asia, Europe, and the Mediterranean; cultivars and varieties of common plants are also explored. She forages, too, for hosta shoots and day lily parts. Readers will relish the usual Storey design flair--numerous inset boxes provide growing and food preparation tips and preferred varieties; many full-page color photographs emphasize the plants' characteristics (root veggies that look like they've just been pulled) and seem also to indulge the author's penchant for fun (chalk squiggles frame featured choices). Seed sources are occasionally cited in the text, but a full tabular appendix with this information would have been more helpful. VERDICT This is a winner. It may be the perfect tonic for winter-weary gardeners.--Robert Eagan, Windsor P.L., Ont.

Copyright 2018 Library Journal, LLC Used with permission.