Title: GIY’s Know-It-Allmanac: The Ultimate Family Guide to Growing and Cooking Food Throughout The Year
Authors: Michael Kelly and Muireann Ní Chíobháin
Illustrator: Fatti Burke
What’s This Book All About?
GIY’s Know-It-Allmanac is a book on a mission to help kids grow and cook their own food. It gives straightforward and humourous advice from the point of view of the fictitious Monty Sheddington-Potts; he’s quite the character!
Who Is This Book For?
It labels itself as the “Ultimate Family Guide to Growing and Cooking Food Throughout the Year”.
This book really is one for all the family. Even though the text is aimed at a child towards the upper end of primary school, the beautiful illustrations and humourous observations mean it can be enjoyed by anyone from toddler to grandparent.
In particular, this book would be really great for your family if you want to:
- start growing your own food
- do more cooking from scratch together
- spend more time outdoors
- become more environmentally aware
It’s also important to note that the Know-It-Allmanac doesn’t expect you to live out in the countryside with acres of land at your disposal. It’s realistic about the resources most families have, and even has a special topic about container gardening and growing in small spaces.
Even if your family are city dwellers, this is for you!
What Can I Expect?
First of all, you can expect to thoroughly enjoy the book itself. And yes, I do mean the actual, physical book.
It’s a large hardback which catches the eye immediately. Bursting with bright colours and amusing illustrations, it’s a feast for the eyes, let alone the stomach.
Secondly, you can expect to be entertained. The authors and illustrator have pulled out all the stops to make this an amusing and enticing read. It almost feels like you’re devouring a comic book.
Once you get down to the nitty gritty, you’ll be following a month-by-month breakdown of exactly what to do and expect in the garden.
Just some of the recurring features of each chapter include:
- Hero of the month (A detailed overview of a particular vegetable. In January, when you might be harvesting carrots, you’ll learn that the Greeks thought they were a love charm. You’ll also see a cute picture of baby carrots dressed in nappies. Why not?!)
- Jobs of the month
- Craft (Making something useful for gardening)
- Recipe (Using Hero of the Month)
- Basics (Essential gardening topics)
Is There Anything Else I Should Know?
There are two things I think it’s good to be aware of before you dive in.
1. Think About Where You Live
This book is mainly aimed at an Irish audience since it focuses on our seasonal and weather conditions.
This is great for us here on the Emerald Isle, as many books about growing fruit and vegetables don’t really take our particular climate into account.
But if you live in Australia, for example, it’s probably not going to be the most useful investment for your family!
If you live in the UK though, you’re close enough for this to still be of really good value.
2. Read Right Through Before You Start The Plan
Here at Memory Mum HQ, we plan on following the book month by month in 2021 to grow, harvest and cook our first crop of vegetables. We’re going to start by growing in containers; if all goes well we might scale up the following year.
If you plan to follow along too, I recommend reading the book through in its entirety first. This will help you to get a good overview of what’s going to be involved and when.
Otherwise it might be easy to miss some useful information that you might benefit from earlier than the book presents it.
I especially recommend reading all twelve of the “Basics” pages in advance.
Do You Recommend It?
Yes! It’s the perfect book for your family to have on your bookshelf (not to stay there of course!).
However, as I’ve said already, if you live in a very different climate to Ireland, you might want to think twice.
Even so, if you have friends or relatives in Ireland or the UK you could always gift them a copy!
What next?
If you’d like to purchase a copy, Liber Bookshop, my local independent bookshop in Sligo town, can look after you.
And if you’ve read and enjoyed GIY’s Know-It-Allmanac, please leave a comment and let me know what you thought!