Publisher's Synopsis
The General Introduction. This compendium presents standardized information on approximately 150 edible horticultural crops. It has been designed principally to help with the task of fitting crops to land, but it can also be used for a variety of other purposes. The information contained in the compendium is intended to serve exploratory thinking. Such thinking attempts to review all the cropping possibilities, exclude those which are obviously unsuitable, and identify those worth considering further using detailed information and different methods of thought and analysis. The compendium has been produced because using books, reviews and abstracts for such exploratory thinking can be extremely time-consuming and frustrating. What has been attempted here is to compile information in a consistent form and present it so that it can be searched quickly. Users will find that not only can they rapidly review the basic characteristics of crops they are interested in, but they can also compare them quickly, something rarely possible with conventional crop descriptions. To obtain the information for the compendium, a data-handbook (the Compiler's Handbook) was designed.;Persons were found who were willing to compile data for individual crops, and the editors collected the entries. Data-sets were obtained for all the major crops and for a wide range of minor and rare crops. The information is presented under approximately 70 headings covering the botany, ecology, husbandry, storage and uses of the crops. It was found to be sufficient to concentrate attention largely on the species level, but the range of characteristics exhibited by commercial and domestic cultivars is also indicated for some crop attributes.
