Hmm well I forked out 3.25 for the first issue, which is a bit steep
considering it's supposed to be about 'Fresh food from your garden' and
not likely to appeal the more profligate of gardeners! It's in a silly
size, large and almost square 230 x 300, about the same size as the
Photoshop magazines. Terribly, terribly glossy and artfully designed,
with upmarket 'shiny' paper and four colour work throughout. (There
that's a printer talking) A sort of coffee table vegetable magazine if
that's not an anachronism

Has free seeds on cover, Romanesco and globe carrots which suit a
container. Lots of full colour very chic adverts about chicken arks and
Hartley Botanic greenhouses, log splitters and 'Eglus' (a very
futuristic shaped hen house). I realise people who grow vegetables can
also be very upmarket but it just doesn't gel.....
Recipes galore for very useful mid week meals such as 'tear and share
venison with salsa Verde' and 'cockle chowder'. Yeah right
...............

It has an immense amount of cooking articles and news about the new
reality/gardening show where families have to grow their own food for a
year.

On the plus side it has some interesting and, probably to a lot of
readers, useful stuff on varieties of Italian tomatoes (with recipes),
Parmex carrots (with recipes), keeping chickens with the doyen of
smallholding Katie Thear (with recipes), starting with cows, goats and
pigs (recipes probably to come), topical cooking (with recipes), ground
elder with a large glossy photo of hand weeding out ........
chickweed,

The magazine is a good sized 98 pages in all, with some heavyweight
contributors such as Jekka McVicar and Hugh Fearnley-Whittingstall.

Maybe it's just me being old and picky, but somehow glossy gives me the
impression that the information is tempered by (god forbid) design
criteria. The size and shape of the magazine would mean that useful
stuff will be difficult to store. Even their special offer strawberry
plants have pink flowers albeit from Browns!
Not sure that people who commit to livestock and allotments and growing
sensible stuff such as vegetables would pay this much money for this
amount of art work and style.
Might get the next one to see if it continues to give good advice, if I
feel wealthy.

One thing did amaze me, a letters page contributed by people who obvious
have second sight as the magazine only launched with this issue so how
did they know about the letters page?
Silly remark typical of the magazine, someone maintained two secrets to
allotments, digging and manure but the comment was that Grow Your Own
may be the third but that they were biased (what? After one issue?)

Good ploy, You can't look inside it in the shop as it comes in a plastic
cover. Will now pass it on and keep Garden News and Garden Answers for
the next few issues at least

Janet
--
Janet Tweedy
Dalmatian Telegraph
http://www.lancedal.demon.co.uk