My vegetable garden full of wonder - Nina Nijland

Nina Nijland is a photographer, stylist and designer. For her thirtieth birthday, she received an allotment from her great love. Not knowing that there, on that then bare patch of land, she would soon discover another great love: vegetable gardening. The miraculous powers of nature and the simplicity of vegetable gardening amazed her. 'Anyone can do this', she thought. All you need is time, attention, a pair of eyes to read the back of the seed packets and nature does the rest. Her garden has now become her greatest teacher: by moving with the seasons, she learned that there may also be seasons in her own life. To slow down and to look at her surroundings with even more attention. Nina feels like a creative jack-of-all-trades in her vegetable garden full of wonder. She has now trained as a herbalist (herbal healer) and she still learns new things in and from her garden every season. Living with nature, instead of from nature: that should be the standard as far as Nina is concerned.

In this book, Nina takes you into her garden and teaches you how to create your own vegetable garden in an accessible way (whether in pots on your balcony or in the open ground), but also what you can make for or with things from your garden. Per season, she explains what you can do, make, eat and experience in your vegetable garden during that period (from making your own calendula facial oil and stimulating your senses during garden meditations, to stringing flower garlands and making pesto from 'weeds'). Starting with the season in which everything slowly comes back to life - spring, followed by summer and autumn, and then with the season in which (almost) everything quietly falls asleep again - winter. This way, you can read the book again and again all year round and use it as a guideline. That is Nina's dream for this book, by the way: that you, year after year, take it into the garden with you, make it dirty, put notes with notes in it, that it comes to life. Hopefully you will create your own vegetable garden full of wonder in this way.