My inspiration Mondays - Homegrown magazine

I love. Love. LOVE! NZ Gardener's special edition Homegrown magazines. My lovely friend Hannah Driver bought me the first Homegrown a couple of summers ago because she thought it would be up my alley. She was totally right and I've been buying them ever since.

Homegrown (as the title suggests) looks at growing edible produce at home, with each edition focusing on a different subject.

The most recent Homegrown (Edition 6) was dedicated to growing berries and fruiting vines for jams, jellies, drinks and desserts. It was enlightening to me because I've planted a number of berries around my property, with no real idea of how to care for them. This magazine has all the tricks for different berry types, as well as great recipe ideas for using up the produce. (Although, truth be told, my berries never make it that far; I tend to gobble them up as soon as I pick them.)

A neat feature of the magazine is its sticker inserts which can be used to label preserving jars. These are beautifully presented and I'm anticipating the day I use them - when I actually get up the courage to preserve.

The pictures in Homegrown are amazing. Before I read a word of text I flick through and absorb all the beautiful images. They get me dreaming about what I want my edible oasis to look like and what plants I want to add to my collection.

This year Homegrown produced a 2010 gardening diary which is also very nifty, with monthly gardening checklists and tips, places to fill in what crops have been sown, recipes for the produce you might be harvesting in a particular month, pages for notes and, again, beautiful imagery to get gardeners and cooks everywhere salivating.

If you've missed out on Homegrown, you can back order them from here. NZ Gardener subscribers can buy them for $11, otherwise they cost $14.90. This may seem a lot for a magazine, but they ares really more like glossy books. I plan to keep mine forever so I can refer back to them as needed. In fact when I recently planted some citrus trees in our yard, I kept the Homegrown fruit trees edition by my side so I could follow its instructions as I went.

If you'd prefer free inspiration, NZ Gardener produces a fantastic Get Growing e-newsletter which you can subscribe to. 

NZ Gardener itself is a fantastic magazine from what I've seen, although I don't buy it regularly so can't give it a comprehensive review. 

Is anyone else a Homegrown fan? I'd love to hear what you like about it and how it has inspired you in the garden.