The Kitchen Garden - Lucy Mora

Fifty-five plants, and a straight answer for every single one of them.

The gap between wanting to grow broccoli and actually harvesting broccoli is a pile of small questions that nobody bothers to answer in the same place. Kitchen Garden by Lucy Mora closes it. Fifty-five plant profiles, each one handing over the whole picture: when to sow, when to harvest, how long the thing takes, how much room it needs, the soil pH it prefers, whether it will tolerate a pot or a frost, and which neighbours it gets on with.

The range runs from the obvious to the ambitious, broccoli through to cape gooseberries, and every profile carries its own hero illustration. Mora is an illustrator by trade who inherited a Victorian cottage garden in 2014 and got properly hooked, so the drawings are not decoration, they are how the information reaches you. There is a full planting chart to summarise the lot, plus a proper look at climate zones before you commit anything to soil.

Best of all, the timing runs by season rather than by month. Which means it was written for your hemisphere as well as the other one, and that is more than most of these books can say.