Product Description

Learn all the tricks to grow vegetables from seed, maintain mature plants, keep the pests at bay and produce a sustainable crop in your vegetable garden. Includes: * A-Z of vegetables and herbs and how to grow and harvest them, * advice on feeding, watering and combating pests, weeds and diseases, * practical tips on preparing and improving soil, * how to manage your plot to ensure year-round produce. Alan Titchmarsh imparts a lifetime of expertise in these definitive guides for beginners and experienced gardeners. Step-by-step illustrations and easy-to-follow instructions guide you through the basic skills and on to the advanced techniques, providing everything you need to create and maintain your dream garden.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #17306 in Books
• Published on: 2009-04-02
• Original language: English
• Binding: Paperback
• 144 pages

About the Author
Originally trained at Hertfordshire College of Horticulture and Royal Botanic Gardens, Kew, Alan Titchmarsh is the author of over 40 books about gardening, including How to be a Gardener Book 1: Back to Basics, the fastest-selling of all time in the genre, and the bestselling The Kitchen Gardener: How to Grow Your Own Fruit and Veg. He writes for BBC Gardeners' World Magazine, and is gardening correspondent for the Daily Express and Sunday Express. He has presented Gardeners' World, the annual coverage of The Chelsea Flower Show and Nature of Britain, and has his own daily chatshow.

Customer Reviews

A good basic guide from a proper expert
Out of this new series featuring all different aspects of gardening, I imagine this will be one of the bestsellers. Growing your own is big news at the moment, and Alan Titchmarsh provides a gentle way in. It has a certain slickness: there are lots of photos of him sitting in his shed polishing his spade / holding a trug of suspiciously clean carrots...

But AT does have a good turn of phrase and he has clearly written the main text himself. "Power to your potager" surely has to be a Titchmarsh joke for example... He even has a good section on "reality check" where he points out that unless you really have a passion for growing, some things are always going to be better bought from the supermarket! An honest admission.

The book's simplicity is its strongest point, along with the price. And it still manages to cover the important aspects. For example on digging, he's pretty fair in his coverage of no-dig veg growing, though he's clearly a double-digging man himself. There's a detailed lot of info on site preparation, fertilisers and a step-by-step guide to making a compost bin (Alan does embrace chemicals so if you are committed to being organic, that's one thing to think of) And I think his list of six easy crops: courgettes, garlic, onions, rocket, salad and spinach - is really a good one. He even gives half a page's advice on how to leave your crops and go on holiday!

You are in safe hands with Alan Titchmarsh. The more I flicked through this book the better I realised it was. Very, very comprehensive, packing loads in without overwhelming you at all. And the A-Z guide to crops, pages 61-131, is encyclopedic: a whole page each on chicory, endive, kohl rabi, two on peas, and excellent "difficulty" ratings. A really good bargain I think.

Novice vegetable grower
Thought this year I would grow some veg on the patio in pots and grow bags. Was not really which ones and how to look after them. A friend has purchased this book and on reading it realised it was exactly what I needed to know. It gives advice on what to grow - which are easy veg - when to grow - how to grow them and how to look after them. The pictures are in colour and the book is just great. Forget the others - this is the one you want. Now have beans, peppers, courgettes and tomotoes all doing well!!

For the gardener
My son bought this for me, it's a very good book with lots of explanation and when to put your crop in well worth buying