New Vegetable Garden Techniques: Essential skills and projects for tastier, healthier crops

Description

This book is ideal for beginners, improvers and those serious about growing tasty, healthy organic fruit and vegetables. It will empower readers to grow food for a family, and help work out how to get the best results. Many books give sowing and growing instructions for a multitude of crops, but few give space to the techniques and tips that make gardening easier and that help anyone to grow healthy, sustainable food. Some of the techniques are developed from Joyce's own trials and observations; others are classic techniques that are still useful now. With a bit more detail, and a step-by-step project, a technique becomes much easier to follow and understand. There's something here for everyone: whether you grow in a small back yard and want to know how to raise salad in buckets, or if you have a large allotment where you want to improve pollination, or make your own liquid feeds. The book makes several promises to its readers. Firstly, by following its advice you will grow great fruit and vegetables. Next, the knowledge you gain will save you time as well as money. Third, you'll enjoy the gardening journey and the discoveries made along the way. Fourth, you'll find greener and cleaner ways of doing things, and you'll improve your skills, methods and habits. Find out how to rotate your vegetables so they stay healthy and well-fed, to preserve choice crops for the freshest taste, to improve the soil organically and sustainably, and to produce home made fertiliser from the leaves of your comfrey crop.

Joyce Russell has thirty years of practical experience of fruit and vegetable growing, while feeding a family from the garden. She writes each month for Kitchen Garden Magazine, as well as regular contributions to other magazines and newspapers. She wrote for Organic Gardening magazine for ten years. Ben Russell is a skilled craftsman, photographer and journalist. He has written more than a 100 step-by-step making articles for woodworking magazines and had over 6,000 photographs published in books and magazines. Joyce and Ben's first book, The Polytunnel Book: Fruit and Vegetable all Year Round is a perennial best-seller. Their second book, Build a Better Vegetable Garden was also published to great acclaim.

'A hugely useful, hands-on guide to creating a properly productive, sustainably-managed kitchen garden.' * Irish Times * 'If you're planning on growing your own food for 2020, this book is a great investment. Russell's advice based on decades of experience, covers all the basics from preparing the soil to storing crops. I am a DIY dunce, but the projects here are straightforward enough that even I want to give them a go.' * Financial Times * 'A supremely practical, user-friendly guide to creating a properly productive, sustainably-managed kitchen garden, handsomely illustrated with over 400 photographs by her husband Ben Russell.' * Irish Times - Best Gardening Books * 'The best guide for the keen beginner that I've seen in a while. Terrifically practical and full of money and time-saving methods, it's also attractively laid out with with exceptionally helpful photographs making it easy to follow.' * Morning Star - Best Gardening Books of 2019 *