Winner of the Guild of Food Writers Food Book of the Year Award 2011. Life is too short to grow ordinary food. Why bother spending time, effort and money growing the typical varieties of fruit and vegetables that you can easily buy locally and cheaply and which, crucially, taste pretty much the same whether home grown or shop bought? In A Taste of the Unexpected, River Cottage head gardener Mark Diacono reveals that it is no harder to grow the unusual and utterly delicious than it is the entirely ordinary. On his farm in Devon, Mark grows virtually nothing that you can buy in the supermarkets. There, instead of potatoes, onions and carrots you'll find gourmet delights such as kai lan, salsify, Chilean guava, day lilies and Szechuan pepper. Filled with practical growing advice and mouthwatering recipes, this inspirational book will encourage you to share Mark's sense of culinary adventure - introducing you to the finest forgotten flavours, fabulous lesser-known harvests, the tastiest varieties of familiar crops, and the exotic foreign fruit that our changing climate now allows us to grow for ourselves. None of these requires any extra effort to grow than the usual suspects and all of them will bring new flavours and experiences into your garden and kitchen. Exciting and inspirational, A Taste of the Unexpected will redefine your approach to growing your own for good.