Don't like spending money in garden stores? Think you can make it yourself for a fraction of the price or find a cheaper option? Dave Hamilton shows you how. By recycling and reusing materials creatively and making the most of what you have, you can gather all you need to grow your food on a budget. Whether it's building your own shed from scrap, constructing a path out of recycled materials, or storing your harvest without a freezer, it's all here. This practical guide takes you on a frugal journey through the seasons, from planning your space and setting up a plot to raising, harvesting, and storing your plants. It offers money-saving tips every step of the way, and tips on the actual gardening. It's crammed full of satisfying projects, from seed saving and making your own plant feed to building a fence or garden shed and gives step-by-step instructions, with easy-to-follow diagrams.

Giant perennials are show-stoppers in the garden. There is something magical about the fact that starting from nothing in spring they rise to towering heights by midsummer only to disappear again for the winter. These are plants that make a statement and can be used to provide a backdrop to a herbaceous border or as specimens to draw the eye and amaze the visitor. From the astounding gunnera, 2.4m (8ft) with its leaves as big as the biggest golf umbrella, to the spectacular verbascum (giant mullein) as tall as a tree at 1.8-2.7m (6-9ft), or the socking great Eupatorium purpureum, with 2.1m (7ft) tall stems and cinnamon pink flowers. Quite simply these plants make us feel like Lilliputians. Covering a wide range of herbaceous perennials, including some biennials and bulbs, Giant Perennials provides at-a-glance information for everything you need to know about these amazing plants. In addition to design ideas and planting suggestions, Giant Perennials has an extensive directory of these majestic plants with easy-to-use symbols that show you size, spread, planting situation, cultivation needs and hardiness. Whether you have a large country garden or a small town plot, you can give you

Save vegetable seeds as you harvest so your favorite plants can grow again next season. In this Storey BASICS(R) guide, Fern Marshall Bradley covers everything you need to know to successfully save seeds from 20 popular garden vegetables, including beans, carrots, peas, peppers, and tomatoes. Learn how each plant is pollinated, where to store your collected seeds through the winter, and how to test their replanting viability in the spring. Now you can grow the delicious varieties you love year after year.

How to Read Gardens is the essential guide for garden lovers and visitors alike. Visiting gardens has never been more popular but not many of us understand what we are looking at when strolling through a beautiful garden - are we looking at an original landscaped site or a recreation? Is the planting matter authentic or made up of modern hybrids? Are the steps and terracing in the Italianate style or are they Arts and Crafts? The truth is that most gardens of any age are like a palimpsest: successive generations have changed and influenced the soft and hard fabric of the place over time. Inevitably many of the gardens we wander through today are an amalgam of changing fashions and circumstance. How to Read Gardens gives you all the knowledge you need to tease out the clues that will tell you the complete story of a garden's past. From the grandest estate to the smallest suburban plot, this book will enliven and inform every visit.

Grow your own is a comprehensive guide providing practical guidelines that will teach you how to fully utilise your garden (large or small) by means of alternative as well as traditional growing methods. The recommendations aren’t limited to the more ordinary plants, either. Grow any variation of vegetables, fruit, nuts or even herbs and spices. This guide is logically presented to discuss the respective plants along with brief, but thorough, guidelines detailing requirements for soil preparation, propagation, cultivation, harvest and storage. Enjoy additional tips about cultivating in containers, choosing the most suitable plants for different spaces, deterring pests, companion planting, and combatting diseases and other problems. A handy summary about each plant offers a quick reference with nifty textboxes that highlight other interesting facts about the plant species concerned, to gain some bonus insights.

'Poignant ... A meditation on life, love and the importance of nature' IRISH TIMES Thirty-four years ago, when they were in their twenties, Niall Williams and Christine Breen made the impulsive decision to leave their lives in New York City and move to Christine's ancestral home in the town of Kiltumper in rural Ireland. In the decades that followed, the pair dedicated themselves to writing, gardening and living a life that followed the rhythms of the earth. In 2019, with Christine in the final stages of recovery from cancer and the land itself threatened by the arrival of turbines just one farm over, Niall and Christine decided to document a year of living in their garden and in their small corner of a rapidly changing world. Proceeding month by month through the year, this is the story of a garden in all its many splendours, and a couple who have made their life observing its wonders.

Enabling you to make the best choice of trees and use them effectively as part of a successful garden design, this book offers ideas about how to place trees and how to use them creatively with other plants. It also explains how to plant trees and how to maintain them thereafter, and includes a directory of the best garden trees.