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Books > Health, Home & Family > Gardening > Specialized gardening methods
Known as the guru of no-dig, Charles Dowding has updated his
definitive book on salad-growing in this beautifully illustrated
new edition: how to have tasty salad leaves all year round in a
garden, balcony or windowsill; how to grow micro leaves and how to
serve them in delicious recipes, all using organic or permaculture
principles. Great for food lovers keen to eat tasty food with a low
carbon footprint. This compendium of practical methods for growing
a wide variety of salads throughout the year, will inspire you to
grow your own, whether on a windowsill, in your garden or on the
allotment. Here is all the information you need for productive,
healthy and tasty salads. Learn the subtleties of salad seasons and
virtues of different leaves throughout the year. And when your
table is groaning with the abundance of your harvests, there are
delicious and imaginative recipes by Stephanie Hafferty, exploiting
the fantastic flavours, colour and vitality of home grown salad
leaves.
There is something uplifting about having butterflies in your
flowerbeds, frogs in your water feature and birds in your bushes,
and knowing they're there because of you. Rich in detail and
accessible in style, Gardening for Wildlife is the crucial
companion to novices and expert gardeners alike. Adrian Thomas
dispels myths and offers new insights and ideas, helping everyone
understand what to do so gardens, large or small, can become ideal
homes for wildlife. Building on the success of the award-winning
first edition, this expanded and updated edition reflects the
latest research and developments in nature-friendly gardening. The
book serves as an expert guide to the practical aspects of this
rewarding pastime and educates readers about the ecological
principles involved, while exploding commonly held misconceptions
that often deter people from pursuing a kinder approach to
gardening. Adrian Thomas provides a detailed guide to the many and
varied species that can contribute to a natural and healthy garden.
Practical sections help you create entire habitats, such as
woodland and meadow gardens, in your garden. And the massively
expanded catalogue of the top 500 best garden flowers, shrubs and
trees for wildlife, now includes colour photos of every species. If
you love wildlife and want to encourage more to visit your garden,
this inspirational book will help you sow the seeds and reap the
rewards.
Delicious Italian-inspired recipes from a New Zealand home garden
Nostrana means homegrown, ours; growing food with the intent of
sharing it. Inspired by the abundant lemon trees and trellised
tomato vines of her Italian grandparents' vegetable garden, Bri
DiMattina started her own edible pantry in her back garden and
discovered the joys of bringing food from seed to table. Organised
seasonally, and with growing guides for each ingredient, Nostrana
shares simple, gorgeous and delicious recipes with fresh vegetables
and fruits you can easily grow and harvest yourself. Just a taste
of the mouth-watering, Stromboli-inspired recipes in Nostrana
includes: fried artichokes with caper mayonnaise strawberry and
amaretto slushies green bean panzanella bottled spaghetti zucchini
arancini rhubarb and custard tortes BBQ parmigiana and limoncello.
A journal with a perpetual diary, a manual of gardening to inform
and inspire, packed with illustrations and an introduction by
Darina Allen of Ballymaloe Cookery School Three quarters Charles's
advice on how to grow great crops, one quarter writing space for
each day. Use it year after year to make the best decisions, with
your notes alongside Charles's suggestions, for future reference.
Advice in the diary section is linked to each week of the season
and takes you through the whole process, from clearing weeds,
feeding soil and sowing to harvests and storing vegetables. *
Advice on sowing and planting methods, plus raising plants at home
* Best sowing dates - seeds neither fail in cold nor start too late
* Advantages of no dig, saving time, giving fewer weeds and bigger
crops * How to maintain control of weeds through timely mulching
and hoeing * How to feed soil just once a year, for strong and
healthy growth * When and how to make all the harvests, with advice
on storing produce too.
This guide from the experts of Kew Royal Botanical Gardens is
filled with tips and advice to help you grow your best vegetable
garden ever! In this book Kew's Kitchen Gardener, Helena Dove,
combines practical elements with inspiration and beauty to make a
comprehensive and informative guide with all you need to know to
master theart of growing vegetables. She shows how to grow some of
the most popular staple crops such as tomatoes, potatoes, radishes
and rocket, and also some more unusual and exciting choices such as
oca, tomatillo, seakale and yacon. She gives easy to follow
instructions on how to be a successful vegetable gardener, plus 12
exciting projects to try throughout the year including forcing
rhubarb, creating an asparagus border and growing in raised beds.
From sowing, to planting young plants, to hardening off and
harvesting, find out what you need to do and when, to produce the
most magnificent harvests. All the advice is underpinned by the
expertise and authority of the Royal Botanic Gardens, Kew and
illustrated from Kew's world-famous botanical collection. With this
book, you wil be able to reap a rich bounty of delicious vegetables
from just a few packets of seed and some fertile ground! This book
is from the Kew Experts series, in which the top gardeners and
botanical scientists from Royal Botanic Kew Gardens offer up advice
and information as well as suggesting handy projects on a range of
gardening topics. Other titles include: Companion to Medicinal
Plants, Guide to Growing Bulbs, Guide to Growing Fruit, Guide to
Growing Orchids, Guide to Growing Roses, Guide to Growing
Succulents and Cacti, Guide to Growing Trees, Guide to Growing
Herbs and Guide to Growing House Plants.
A wildlife-friendly garden provides year round entertainment whilst
providing food, drink and shelter for a range of species. This
volume gives clear and practical advice on how to create a wildlife
haven in your back garden and how to enjoy it through the changing
seasons.
This is an exciting introduction to the global seed-swapping and
grassroots gardening movement, exploring how we can rewild the
world around us with beautiful wildflowers. As seedbombing and seed
swapping become even more popular, passionate seed activist Josie
Jeffrey presents an invaluable handbook to the practices,
explaining how we can fill the world around us with beautiful
wildflower blooms, as well as why we should care about our plant
heritage. With an invaluable directory of all the best common seeds
to save and swap, alongside essential seedbomb recipes to transform
concrete oases into colourful wildlife havens, this timely handbook
provides all the tools you need to start your very own green
revolution. Endorsed by Kew, the Soil Association, Seedy Sunday UK,
Dr Vandana Shiva, Satish Kumar and The Heritage Seed Library, these
practices will transform any space into a riot of colour, and at
the same time help enrich the environment around where they are
growing. With essential husbandry and harvesting techniques and a
step-by-step guide to creating your own seedbank, this is an
empowering call-to-action every environmentalist or gardener will
dig into.
Forest Gardening (or agroforestry) is a way of growing edible crops
with nature doing most of the work. A forest garden imitates young
natural woodland, with a wide range of crops grown in vertical
layers. Species are chosen for their beneficial effects on each
other, creating a healthy system that maintains its own fertility,
with little need for digging, weeding or pest control. The result
of this largely perennial planting is a tranquil, beautiful and
productive space. This book is a bible for permaculture and forest
gardening, with practical advice on how to create a forest garden,
from planning and design to planting and maintenance. It explains
how a forest garden is designed from the top down: the canopy layer
first, then the shrub layer, the perennial ground-cover layer, the
annuals & biennials next, the climbers and nitrogen fixers and
finally the clearings, living spaces and paths. Whether in a small
back garden or in a larger plot, the environmental benefits of
growing this way are great. Forest Gardens are a viable solution to
the challenge of a changing climate: we can grow food sustainably
in them without compromising soil health, food quality or
biodiversity. Forest gardens: store carbon dioxide in the soil and
in the woody biomass of the trees and shrubs. enable the soil to
store more water after heavy rains, minimizing flooding and
erosion. boost the health of the ecosystem, ensuring a balance of
predators and beneficial insects because mixed planting is crucial
to the scheme. allows the soil to thrive because it is covered with
plants all year round. Creating a Forest Garden includes a detailed
directory of over 500 trees, shrubs, herbaceous perennials,
annuals, root crops and climbers. As well as more familiar plants
such as fig and apple trees, blackcurrants and rosemary shrubs, you
can grow your own chokeberries, goji berries, yams, heartnuts,
bamboo shoots and buffalo currants. Forest gardens produce fruits,
nuts, vegetables, seeds, salads, herbs, spices, firewood,
mushrooms, medicinal herbs, dye plants, soap plants, and honey from
bees. This book tells you everything you need to create your own
forest garden with beautiful illustrations and helpful tips
throughout.
How clever would it be to grow all the ingredients for an entire
tasty dish in one garden pot? Well now you can, with The One-Pot
Gourmet Gardener, which takes 25 contemporary and classic recipes
and shows how to grow their ingredients in one chic container. Grow
each recipe in one pot and serve them in another! The container
recipes are arranged by eating event from picnics to snacks to main
courses and puddings, with drinks and dressings to accompany. Enjoy
refreshing chilled Gazpacho, followed by tasty Courgette and Fennel
Tart with healthy Micro-Veg Salad, topped off with delicious Summer
Pudding, and washed down with Pimms Jelly. The one-pot recipes are
for beginners and more experienced gardeners and cooks, and include
a full step by step masterclass to sowing, growing and harvesting.
Jason Ingram won Photographer of the Year at the Garden Media Guild
Awards, 2014
Engaging and quirky; full of ideas and inspiration for garden
projects that you'll be itching to try for yourself. Dave Goulson,
author of The Garden Jungle A thoughtful and practical guide
Country Life Design a garden for the future - because what we grow
matters. Transform your garden into a self-sustaining haven for
nature and wildlife. Ecological garden designer Matt Rees-Warren
shares inspirational design ideas and practical projects to help
you create a garden that is both beautiful today and sustainable
tomorrow. The Ecological Gardener will give you the tools to create
an abundant, healthy garden from the soil up - a garden that
welcomes birds and bees and allows native planting and wild flowers
to flourish, with minimal carbon impact or need for fresh water.
This book can guide both novice and experienced gardeners alike in
their journey to a more ecological approach, and is full of
practical projects and information, including: Finding the right
design for your space Creating a wildflower meadow Building
rainwater catchments and other tips for water conservation Making
compost from kitchen waste, leafmould, compost tea and more
Creating a space for wildlife such as hedgehogs, bees and other
pollinators Finding beauty in your garden during the winter Matt
will show you how to reimagine how you garden, working with nature
instead of controlling it, to create a space that promotes both
wildlife and beauty.
A comprehensive, single source of information on the plants and
animals that live alongside us. This updated edition features new
material on climate change, recycling and wild spaces in gardens.
This friendly handbook is full of practical advice on attracting
wildlife to your garden and encouraging creatures to stick around.
A helpful introductory section includes expert tips on green
gardening, seasonal planting, how to deal with garden predators and
how to get children involved in gardening. A DIY chapter, with a
step-by-step guide on creating projects for your garden - from
building nest, bat and hedgehog boxes to making your own pond - is
also included. From foxes to finches and from lizards to ladybirds,
colour photographs illustrate almost 400 garden species, including
mammals, birds, insects, invertebrates, reptiles and amphibians,
flowers, trees, shrubs and fungi, while the comprehensive text
explains everything you need to cultivate a haven for nature.
The story of how Francis Pryor created a haven for people, plants
and wildlife in a remote corner of the fens. A Fenland Garden is
the story of the creation of a garden in a complex and fragile
English landscape - the Fens of southern Lincolnshire - by a writer
who has a very particular relationship with landscape and the soil,
thanks to his distinguished career as an archaeologist and
discoverer of some of England's earliest field systems. It
describes the imagining, planning and building of a garden in an
unfamiliar and sometimes hostile place, and the challenges,
setbacks and joys these processes entail. This is a narrative of
the making of a garden, but it is also about reclaiming a patch of
ground for nature and wildlife - of repairing the damage done to a
small slice of Fenland landscape by decades of intensive farming. A
Fenland Garden is informed by the empirical wisdom of a practising
gardener (and archaeologist) and by his deep understanding of the
soil, landscape and weather of the region; Francis's account of the
development of the garden is counterpointed by fascinating nuggets
of Fenland lore and history, as well as by vignettes of the
plantsman's trials and tribulations as he works an exceptionally
demanding plot of land. Above all, this is the story of bringing
something beautiful into being; of embedding a garden in the local
landscape; and thereby of deepening and broadening the idea of
home.
It has long been observed, by farmers, gardeners and botanists
alike, that from time to time certain plants seem to affect certain
other plants growing their near them -- both favourably and
unfavourably. By taking account of these relationships, farmers and
gardeners can improve the quality of food and flowers, reduce
losses from pests and disease, drought and frost, and enhance both
satisfaction and pleasure in their work and financial profit. Years
of experimentation by Richard Gregg and subsequently Helen
Philbrick and others resulted in this unique reference book. It
offers a detailed and comprehensive A-Z of plants and how they
affect each other and their surrounding environment, including the
soil, insects and birds.
In this book, Sharon Amos explains how to design and create a
beautiful garden for little or no money, offering tips on bartering
for clippings, getting a bargain at garage sales or neighbourhood
fairs, digging up suckers or adapting wild species and controlling
them in a garden environment. She provides a comprehensive
directory of 80 plants including detailed advice on where and how
to grow a wide variety of garden favourites, from snowdrops to
poppies. With beautiful illustrations, Plants for Free is the
perfect gift book for cultivating your garden on a budget of
next-to-nothing.
No dig organic gardening saves time and work. It requires an annual
dressing of compost to help accelerate the improvement in soil
structure and leads to higher fertility and less weeds. No dig
experts, Charles Dowding and Stephanie Hafferty, explain how to set
up a no dig garden. They describe how to: Make compost, enrich
soil, harvest and prepare food and make natural beauty and clean
ing products and garden preparations. These approaches work as well
in small spaces as in large gardens. The Authors' combined
experience gives you ways of growing, preparing and storing the
plants you grow for many uses, including delicious vegetable feasts
and many recipes and ideas for increasing self reliance, saving
money, living sustainably and enjoying the pleasure of growing your
own food, year round. Charles' advice is distilled from 35 years of
growing vegetables intensively and efficiently; he is the
acknowledged no dig guru and salad expert both in the UK and
internationally. Stephanie, a kitchen gardener, grows in her small,
productive home garden and allotment, and creates no dig gardens
for restaurants and private estates.She presents truly delicious
seasonal recipes, made from the vegetables anyone can grow. She
also explains how to use common plants you can grow and forage for
to make handmade preparation for the home and garden.
Learn which orchid plants to choose, how to obtain them, and how to
cultivate them, either in a greenhouse or in the home.
This book offers everything readers need to know to grow tasty
organic fruit outdoors - whether in a garden, allotment or on their
window ledge! It is suitable for beginners and includes a
comprehensive directory. This latest title, from a growing and
successful series, is by an UK author. What could be better than
the enjoyment of tasting your own sweet, succulent, home-grown
fruit? Most people have got room to grow some kind of fruit -
whether it be a small apple tree in a front garden, a grape vine up
a trellis or strawberries in a window box. Gardeners seeking a
concise, easy-to-follow approach to fruit growing and maintenance
need look no further; this book will provide all the practical
advice and information that they need. With guidance on which
fruits to choose, when and how to plant, propagate, harvest and
store them, plus a comprehensive directory of popular varieties to
grow - it won't be long before readers are discovering the delights
of their own home-grown organic fruit.
The healthier your plants, the happier you'll feel! A Beginner's
Guide to House Plants teaches you how to bring your indoor spaces
alive with lovely and easy-to-maintain plants -- and how to keep
them healthy. It provides detailed instructions on how you can
unleash the power of plants to energize and relax you, and how to
promote well-being by greening your environment. In this book
you'll find hundreds of useful tips, including: How to select the
right plants for your spaces and lifestyle Practical advice on
purchasing, potting and styling your plants How to care for many
different types of plants--from succulents and ferns to exotics A
mini field guide to over 60 popular plants you should know about
And so much more! Cultivating house plants can be both creative and
fun! Plant expert Ryusuke Sakaino provides tips on how to use
colors, textures, patterns and shapes to create a lush living
space, with one plant or many. His gorgeous photos will inspire you
to add greenery to every room in your home and office. No longer
just a pandemic hobby, plants deserve to be a permanent part of
your lifestyle!
Britain's gardens are a vast, living landscape and the home to
hundreds of species of birds. Learn to pay attention to these
visitors to your own garden or local park and you'll have a
front-row seat to the unfolding drama that is the garden bird's
year. As dawn breaks across your back garden, if you were paying
attention, you would notice that the robin and the blackbird are
always the first birds to arrive. These ground hunters have large
eyes, so don't mind the dim light of the early morning. And that's
just the beginning of what you can learn watching your own back
garden. Ornithologist Mike Toms has spent a year avidly observing
his own garden, and the result is a comprehensive picture of the
lives of garden birds. From the crowded yet quiet January garden
populated by migratory fieldfares and bramblings, to the riotous
gardens of spring, filled with songbirds competing for mates, the
garden ecosystem changes throughout the year. Learn to spot these
changes, to greet the arrival of the swifts in May and the new crop
of fledgling goldfinches and blackbirds in June, and you'll find a
new world opening up to you. A Garden Bird's Year is the perfect
introduction to this world. Supremely readable, it explains biology
and behaviour to paint a picture of the lives of common bird
species, while also offering practical information for watching and
feeding the birds in your own backyard. Toms details birds'
preferences for particular plants, seeds and feeders, so you can
learn to attract different species to your own garden. He also
charts fascinating recent adaptations - urban birds sleep later
than their rural counterparts, probably because cities are on
average a few degrees warmer, and they sing either earlier or
later, to avoid competing with local traffic; and the balance of
migratory birds to Britain is being affected by the world's
changing climate. Many species of garden birds are threatened, but
there is much that each one of us can do to support them, to
attract them, and to help them thrive through the year.
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