How to Create a New Vegetable Garden: Producing a beautiful and fruitful garden from scratch
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Overview
The UK’s leading no-dig gardening expert, 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 everything - from planning, clearing the ground and the early stages of starting a vegetable garden, to growing in polytunnels and greenhouses. There is also helpful guidance on how to use mulch, ways to minimise digging, and planting/sowing tips across the seasons.
Filled with labour-saving ideas and the techniques that Charles uses to garden so successfully, How to Create a Vegetable Garden is illustrated throughout with photos and tales from Charles’s first year in his new vegetable garden.
A step-by-step guide to creating a new vegetable garden from scratch - on any size of plot.
An essential guide to starting a vegetable garden and growing throughout the seasons.
Packed with easy-to-follow organic methods to help turn a space of any size into a productive vegetable garden.
Charles Dowding is the UK’s leading expert on no-dig gardening, he writes and gives regular talks and courses on the subject.
Foreword by Steve Mercer
Introduction
Part One: Clearing ground and preparing soil
1. Starting points
2. Beauty in the food garden
3. The setting
4. Clearing ground
5. Mulching
6. Building beds
7. Dig versus no-dig (with compost)
8. Dig versus no-dig (without compost)
Part Two: Sowing and growing
9. Raising plants under cover
10. Early sowing and plantings
11. Successional sowings and plantings
12. One bed, one year
13. Growing under cover
14. Hot beds
15. Perennial vegetables
Appendix: Seasons and climate zones
Glossary
Resources
Index
Another inspiring yet practical book from Charles Dowding.
It is impossible not to feel inspired by the unique combination of helpful guidance and enthusiastic encouragement of experimentation. As Charles proves, there is no plot of land too wild to tame, a building site too overgrown with weeds or an unwanted lawn that can’t be turned into a productive and beautiful garden area.
This is yet another book that will, as a manual, be on my bookshelf, but it will sure spend more in my hand than on the shelf.
How to Create a New Vegetable Garden is the best vegetable gardening book I have read for a long time.
If this doesn’t encourage more of us to turn our gardens into productive and beautiful spaces, I don’t know what will.
Whether you’re a dedicated gardener or a newcomer to the word of growing, take a look: Charles’s methods work beautifully.
How to clear weeds and grow great plants: Charles explains from a wealth of experience.
- Title: How to Create a New Vegetable Garden: Producing a beautiful and fruitful garden from scratch
- Author: Charles Dowding
- Publisher: Green Books
- Print Publication Date: 2015
- Logos Release Date: 2024
- Pages: 256
- Language: English
- Resources: 1
- Format: Digital › Ebook
- ISBNs: 9780857842459, 0857842455
- Resource ID: LLS:9780857842459
- Resource Type: Monograph
- Metadata Last Updated: 2025-04-22T12:28:46Z
Charles Dowding is a veteran organic grower and has written several books on vegetable gardening. He contributes articles to numerous magazines, including Gardeners' World, Gardens Illustrated and Grow It!, and gives regular talks and courses. Charles is an internationally recognised organic gardening expert and frequently appears on radio and television, including BBC Radio 4's The Long View and BBC's Gardeners' World.