Producing a beautiful and fruitful garden from scratch
Charles Dowding draws on his years of experience, to show how easy it is to start a new vegetable garden. Any plot -- whether a building site, overgrown with weeds or unwanted lawn -- can be turned into a beautiful and productive vegetable area. Charles's no-nonsense and straightforward advice is the perfect starting point for the beginner or experienced gardener.
The book takes you step-by-step through:
* Planning and early stages
* Clearing the ground
* Mulch - what, why, how?
* Minimizing digging
* Sowing and planting across the seasons
* Growing in polytunnels and greenhouses
It is filled with labour-saving ideas and the techniques that Charles uses to garden so successfully, and is illustrated throughout with photos and tales from Charles's first year in his new vegetable garden.
Charles Dowding
Charles Dowding is an internationally recognized organic gardening expert and winner of the 2014 Garden Media Guild Practical Journalist of the Year award. He talks on radio and television and contributes articles to many magazines, including Gardeners’ World, Gardens llustrated and Grow It! He gives regular talks, runs courses and advises many gardeners on best practice, including the National Trust in the UK.
He is a veteran organic grower, having practised no-dig gardening for many years. In his gardens over the years he has run experiments to compare differences in growth between vegetables on dug and undug soil. He has discovered different patterns of growth in most seasons, with slightly lower yields, more weeds and slugs found on the dug beds. He is currently establishing a new garden to illustrate no-dig practice and form the basis for a new experiment.
He says: "I have always been interested in lookiing 'behind the scenes' and asking why things are as they are, questioning practices that are taken for granted. This led me to grow organically, at a time when the chemical approach was rarely challenged."
