How To Grow An Emergency Garden

For Every Month of the Year, A Practical Guide for Month-to-Month Planting & Harvesting

Grow your own seasonal food in a low maintenance, nature-friendly garden that feels like a woodland glade. Scottish plant expert Alan Carter shows you how to plan and plant a temperate forest garden for any sized plot--from a small terrace garden to an allotment or smallholding. Learn how to successfully layer root crops, fruit, perennial vegetables and edible shrubs below tree crops, cultivating an edible garden that doesn't look like a traditional vegetable plot. A forest garden is wildlife friendly, provides nutrient-dense and often unusual food through every season, and requires minimal work to maintain. The first part of this in-depth, practical guide explains how a forest garden works, how to map your climate and design your own plot, and how to manage it with mulching, weeding and pruning. What's not to like about Alan's motto of "the more you pick, the more you get," and intriguing concepts such as the Panda Principle? The second half of the book is a detailed directory of more than 170 plants and fungi suitable for a wide range of temperate climates, complete with growing, harvesting and cooking tips based on over a decade of Alan's own experience. Learn how to incorporate traditional fruit and vegetable crops, such as strawberries and beans, into your forest garden, and how to weave in more unusual crops, such as shiitake mushrooms and ferns. Techniques from agro-ecology bring regenerative farming into the backyard, helping you to work towards greater self-sufficiency. Useful tips on seed saving and propagation help keep plant costs low, and there is practical advice on soil health, compost--essential for all no dig, organic gardeners--and pests and disease. A Food Forest in Your Garden will help you create your own productive forest gardens even in cooler climates.

In this eloquent plea for compassion and respect for all species, journalist and gardener Nancy Lawson describes why and how to welcome wildlife to our backyards. Through engaging anecdotes and inspired advice, profiles of home gardeners throughout the country, and interviews with scientists and horticulturalists, Lawson applies the broader lessons of ecology to our own outdoor spaces. Detailed chapters address planting for wildlife by choosing native species; providing habitats that shelter baby animals, as well as birds, bees, and butterflies; creating safe zones in the garden; cohabiting with creatures often regarded as pests; letting nature be your garden designer; and encouraging natural processes and evolution in the garden. The Humane Gardener fills a unique niche in describing simple principles for both attracting wildlife and peacefully resolving conflicts with all the creatures that share our world.

Want to survive anything? Emergency preparedness is important and it starts with resolute gardening. This is the ultimate gardening guide for those who want to assess what is needed to survive. Arthur Fry has created a world-class preparedness guide for those wanting to start gardening. These gardening tricks are going to ensure you set up a world-class garden quickly. Use the magic of this gardening book to push forward now!

Scientist/gardener Carol Deppe combines her passion for organic gardening with newly emerging scientific information from many fields — resilience science, climatology, climate change, ecology, anthropology, paleontology, sustainable agriculture, nutrition, health, and medicine. In the last half of The Resilient Gardener, Deppe extends and illustrates these principles with detailed information about growing and using five key crops: potatoes, corn, beans, squash, and eggs. In this book you’ll learn how to: •Garden in an era of unpredictable weather and climate change •Grow, store, and use more of your own staple crops •Garden efficiently and comfortably (even if you have a bad back) •Grow, store, and cook different varieties of potatoes and save your own potato seed •Grow the right varieties of corn to make your own gourmet-quality fast-cooking polenta, cornbread, parched corn, corn cakes, pancakes and even savory corn gravy •Make whole-grain, corn-based breads and cakes using the author’s original gluten-free recipes involving no other grains, artificial binders, or dairy products •Grow and use popbeans and other grain legumes •Grow, store, and use summer, winter, and drying squash •Keep a home laying flock of ducks or chickens; integrate them with your gardening, and grow most of their feed. The Resilient Gardener is both a conceptual and a hands-on organic gardening book, and is suitable for vegetable gardeners at all levels of experience. Resilience here is broadly conceived and encompasses a full range of problems, from personal hard times such as injuries, family crises, financial problems, health problems, and special dietary needs (gluten intolerance, food allergies, carbohydrate sensitivity, and a need for weight control) to serious regional and global disasters and climate change. It is a supremely optimistic as well as realistic book about how resilient gardeners and their vegetable gardens can flourish even in challenging times and help their communities to survive and thrive through everything that comes their way — from tomorrow through the next thousand years. Organic gardening, vegetable gardening, self-sufficiency, subsistence gardening, gluten-free living.

This is not your grandmother's gardening book. You Grow Girl is a hip, humorous how-to for crafty gals everywhere who are discovering a passion for gardening but lack the know-how to turn their dreams of homegrown tomatoes and fresh-cut flowers into a reality. Gayla Trail, creator of YouGrowGirl.com, provides guidance for both beginning and intermediate gardeners with engaging tips, projects, and recipes -- whether you have access to a small backyard or merely to a fire escape. You Grow Girl eliminates the intimidation factor and reveals how easy and enjoyable it can be to cultivate plants and flowers even when resources and space are limited. Divided into accessible sections like Plan, Plant, and Grow, You Grow Girl takes readers through the entire gardening experience: Preparing soil Nurturing seedlings Fending off critters Reaping the bounty Readying plants for winter Preparing for the seasons ahead Gayla also includes a wealth of ingenious and creative projects, such as: Transforming your garden's harvest into lush bath and beauty products Converting household junk into canny containers Growing and bagging herbal tea Concocting homemade pest repellents ...and much, much more. Witty, wise, and as practical as it is stylish, You Grow Girl is guaranteed to show you how to get your garden on. All you need is a windowsill and a dream!

'Charming, inspiring, uplifting ... pure lovely,' - Marian Keyes 'Read Rhapsody in Green. A novelist's beautiful, useful essays about her tiny garden.' - India Knight 'Glorious...for anyone who loves fruit, vegetables, herbs and language. It makes you see them with new eyes.' - Diana Henry 'A witty account of 'extreme allotmenteering' for all obsessive gardeners' - Mail on Sunday 'An extremely entertaining and inspiring story of one woman's passionate transformation of a small, irregular shaped urban garden into a bountiful source of food.' - Woman & Home 'A gardening book like no other, this is the author's 'love letter' to her garden. She relays warm and witty stories about the trials and tribulations throughout her gardening year.' - Garden News '...this inspirational, funny book, written by someone who hankers after a homesteader's lifestyle, will make you look at even your window box in a new, more productive light.' - The Simple Things Gardening can be viewed as a largely pointless hobby, but the evangelical zeal and camaraderie it generates is unique. Charlotte Mendelson is perhaps unusually passionate about it. For despite her superficially normal existence, despite the fact that she has only six square metres of grotty urban soil and a few pots, she has a secret life. She is an extreme gardener, an obsessive, an addict. And like all addicts, she wants to spread the joy. Her garden may look like a nasty drunk old man's mini-allotment, chaotic, virtually flowerless, with weird recycling and nowhere to sit. When honoured friends are shown it, they tend to laugh. However, it is actually a tiny jungle, a minuscule farm, a wildly uneconomical experiment in intensive edible cultivation, on which she grows a taste of perhaps a hundred kinds of delicious fruits and odd vegetables. It is a source of infinite happiness and deep peace. It looks completely bonkers. Arguably, it's the most expensive, time-consuming, undecorative and self-indulgent way to grow a salad ever invented, but when tired or sad or cross it never fails to delight.