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.

A variety of practical gardening topics in handy small-format books that can be kept by one’s side while working in the garden.

The series was inspired by the author’s numerous visits and lecture tours to gardening clubs across the country. With South Africa’s variable climate and topography, each region presents its own set of unique challenges that make gardening a truly specialist hobby. But in spite of these problems, almost every South African town boasts exquisite gardens. This series aims to inspire and equip gardeners across the country with the knowledge and know-how to create a beautiful garden of their own.

In each book the secrets of successful gardening are summarised in ten key concepts.

Planned topics in the series include:

• Planning the garden
• Choosing plants for the garden
• Preparing the garden for planting
• Irrigation systems
• Composting and other types of nourishment
• Pests and diseases
• Water features and ponds
• Creating focal points in the garden
• Lighting for the garden
• Pruning
• Bulbs
• The winter garden
• And many more

Companion planting is the age-old practice of planting different plants in close proximity so that they can help one another in some way. These plants complement each other by giving off scent or chemicals that repel insects, or they may attract beneficial insects that are predators to harmful insects. Some plants return micro-nutrients to the soil that can be used by other plants. The author has practised companion planting for many decades and in this title she shares her vast knowledge of the topic, gleaned from years of practical experience. She describes more than 100 herbs, food plants and medicinal plants and their companions, with information on how, when and where to plant, harvest and use them. Interspersed with the text are recipes for natural fertilisers and insect sprays and snippets of advice on how to use plants medicinally and in the home. In an age where global warming and climate change are no longer distant warnings, this title urges a return to gardening practices that will help heal our broken planet.

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.

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.

This book provides an overview of the extent to which the 18th-century English Landscape Garden spread through Europe and Russia. While this type of garden acted widely as an inspiration, it was not slavishly copied but adapted to local conditions, circumstances and agendas. A garden 'in the English style' is commonly used to denote a landscape garden in Europe, while the term 'landscape garden' is used for layouts that are naturalistic in plan and resemble natural scenery, though they might be highly contrived and usually large in scale. The landscape garden took hold in mainland Europe from about 1760. Due to the differing geopolitical character of several of the countries, and a distinct division between Catholic and Protestant, the notion of the landscape garden held different significance and was interpreted and applied variously in those countries: in other words, they found it a very flexible medium. Each country is considered individually, with a special chapter devoted to 'Le Jardin Anglo-Chinois', since that constitutes a major issue of its own. The gardens have been chosen to illustrate the range and variety of applications of the landscape garden, though they are also those about which most is known in English.