Gardening Tips For Smarter Growing

In our time poor, cash strapped times, advice on better ways of growing are always welcome and two new books from DK offer some great gardening tips to do just that.

Between them, Grow Food Anywhere by Lucy Chamberlain and The Money-Saving Garden Year by Anya Lautenbach cover everything from getting the best vegetables with the least effort to filling your garden with plants on the cheap.

(I was given review copies but am not paid for the reviews.)

In Grow Food Anywhere, Lucy starts from the premise that all too often the care we take about placing ornamental plants in spots that suit them is not extended to our vegetable garden.

“. . . perhaps we should be more mindful that edibles have specific growing needs too,” she tells us before going on to explore what those needs might be – think sun or shade, the moisture levels in the ground, temperature, soil type and wind levels.

The book goes on to explain how to ‘read your plot’ be it mapping sun and shade or deciding where any ‘wind tunnels’ are.

Lucy is particularly keen to emphasise that “shade isn’t a disadvantage” and that some crops positively revel in it.

If we understand our crops and their needs, they will need less cossetting in terms of watering and feeding meaning less work and better yields. It’s also a plus for helping the environment.

Having decided what the various areas of your veg garden provide in terms of growing conditions, you then need to match those conditions to the right crops and the book has lots of suggestions. Each has not only names of varieties but also cultivation notes and gardening tips for ensuring success. There are also ideas for those who don’t have an outside space.

Summer purslane, for example, is perfect for the dry conditions of my garden – and is, Lucy, observes “a crop for our climate’s future” thanks to its ability to cope with drought.

Projects, such as training fruit trees and planting an edible wind break, are woven through and there’s a useful troubleshooter section.

It’s good to see growing vegetables being given the sort of attention often reserved for flower borders.

Anya Lautenbach’s The Money-Saving Garden Year is mainly concerned with how to create a flower garden, although there are plenty of mentions of herbs.

Following on from her successful debut book, The Money-Saving Gardener (reviewed here), she now takes us through a year of gardening tips designed to save you money.

Each month opens with some thoughts about its highlights, before moving on to what’s in bloom, wildlife to watch out for and what to grow. There’s a consideration of how to be mindful in the garden during the month – Anya has ADHD and uses her garden to “focus and stay connected to the world around me.”

The monthly cultivation gardening tips cover both indoor and outdoor seed sowing along with cultivation be it cuttings or division.

Gardening tips include hunting out seedlings, repurposing old baking trays as planters and rooting pieces of shop bought herbs in water.

There are ‘masterclasses’ on dividing bulbs or sowing harvested seeds among others, projects that range from making an alpine planter to planting up a mixed herb hanging basket, and spotlights on specific plants, including lavender and hydrangeas.

Particularly useful are the step-by-step guides to taking all sorts of cuttings and the spreadsheet style propagation guide that ends the book.

We’re told that rather than simply working to a budget we should be working with nature to “produce spectacular, magical gardens and breath-taking outdoor spaces, all at a fraction of the usual cost.”

Grow Food Anywhere by Lucy Chamberlain is published by Dorling Kindersley in association with the Royal Horticultural Society. It has an RRP of £20. You can buy it here for £16.83. (If you buy via this link, I receive a small commission. The price you pay is not affected.) Alternatively, you may wish to buy from an independent bookseller here. All prices correct at time of publication of this post.

The Money-Saving Garden Year by Anya Lautenbach is published by Dorling Kindersley with an RRP of £16.99. You can buy it here for £13.45. (If you buy via this link, I receive a small commission. The price you pay is not affected.) Alternatively, you may wish to buy from an independent bookseller here. All prices correct at time of publication of this post.

Enjoyed this? You can read more of my gardening and garden related book reviews here.

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