Charles Dowding's Vegetable Garden Diary by Charles Dowding

Charles Dowding's Vegetable Garden Diary by Charles Dowding

An updated 3rd edition of Dowding's full-color gardener's journal with perpetual diary--75% advice on how to grow great crops, 25% writing space for each day of the year--a manual to inform and inspire, from a no-dig pioneer and one of Britain's most trusted vegetable gardeners

Use this journal year after year to make the best decisions, with your notes alongside Charles Dowding's suggestions for future reference. Advice in the diary section is linked to each week of the season, and takes you through the annual cycle, from clearing weeds, feeding soil, and sowing to harvesting and storing vegetables.

• Advice on sowing and planting methods, plus raising plants at home
• Best sowing dates: seeds neither fail in cold nor start too late
• Advantages of no dig: saving time, fewer weeds and bigger crops
• How to maintain control of weeds through timely mulching and hoeing
• How to feed soil just once a year, for strong and healthy growth
• When and how to make all the harvests, with advice on storing produce too

Charles' garden beds grow two crops a year, are cheap to establish and easy to maintain. His growing methods are easy to understand and work on small areas as well as large ones.

Charles' gardens are famous for the absence of weeds, and it's a fact that untilled soil, with a humus-rich surface, germinates fewer pioneer weed seeds. By feeding and favouring the life in your soil and working in sympathy with how nature runs things, you create a clear path to bigger harvests with less effort.

The diary explains these methods and weaves them into a timeline of action, to increase your success rate. Good timing is good gardening Book is most appropriate for zones 8/9, for other zones the dates need adapting: for example he has great feedback from zone 6 gardeners using his methods. And readers can flesh out the detail with his You Tube videos, where over half the audience is North American.

CHARLES DOWDING grew up on a dairy farm in Somerset. After graduating from Cambridge he worked for a hotel in the Inner Hebrides before starting to grow organic vegetables commercially on the family farm in the early 1980s. In 1990 he left behind what was by then a large market garden to live in France and Zambia. Returning to Somerset in the mid 1990s, he established a bed and breakfast and vegetable growing business at Lower Farm in Shepton Montague, Somerset. There, Charles's salad bags were the main output from his two-acre garden of permanent raised beds and fruit trees. Charles runs vegetable-growing courses and lectures and writes books on his unique growing techniques. Since 2012 Charles has begun a new garden at Shepton Mallet in Somerset which he has designed using no-dig principles.