Rebel Gardening: A beginner’s handbook to organic urban gardening

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This is the ultimate beginner’s guide to establishing and tending an organic kitchen garden in any urban space, no matter how small, written by the YouTuber and TikToker known as Spicy Moustache. Organic gardening expert Alessandro Vitale wants you to embrace the living soil and establish your own city eden where creatures and plants can coexist, in harmony with our modern lives. As our high streets wither in the shadow of recession, radical gardeners are reimagining our shared social spaces as green ones. We'll meet the people following in the muddy bootprints of Ebenezer Howard, creator of the original garden city, Letchworth: like the team behind Cardiff's vertical gardening project, How Green Is Your Alley? Or Elephant and Castle's original guerilla gardening Richard Reynolds, currently busy with his Mobile Gardeners project. Rebel Gardening is full of vital information to give your garden its own spotlight. The education and knowledge shared are impressive, there is no gatekeeping, only useful information.

Do you live in the city and yearn for the space and time to grow your own food and live more connected with nature and the seasons? Rebel Gardening shows that anyone can grow a garden of delicious organic fruit and vegetables, wildlife-friendly wildflowers and abundant herbs in absolutely any urban space with a bit of know-how. Do you know a gardener, greener, community gardener or adopter of feral lands who's digging for a better society? Perhaps there's someone in your life who's on a mission to change the world one vegetable patch at a time? Let us know below about the projects you find inspiring and perhaps we'll feature them here. You don’t need a big garden to reconnect with nature. Grow and eat fresh, organic food using nature’s own principles as your guide:

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We'll meet Wayward Plants, masters of temporary conceptual gardens. In the past they've brought us the Urban Physic Garden in Southwark, the Union Street Orchard also in South London and Algaegarden, a garden planted with pond grasses and hung with plastic tubes filled with different coloured algae that appeared at the 2011 Metis International Garden Festival in Quebec. Rebel Gardening is a great book for beginners, or children to start gardening for themselves.There’s ample examples and the language is easy to understand with illustrations, photos and room to make notes as you pull the book out every year and increase your knowledge as your enthusiasm grows.Yielding a crop of home grown food is completely different to buying even organic food, and being able to cook straight from your garden is a real treat. If you are excited to learn all about organic gardening, then it is the must have book of this year for you to read. They are the kind of activists who carry farming equipment not to symbolise the proletariat, but because they've got some serious hoeing to do. They're not mild-mannered; they're angry. And while they may be patient when it comes to buds flowering, when it comes to urban wastelands, unsustainable town planning, the food industry, unemployment, social exclusion and the relentless grey, grey, grey of our towns and cities they are extraordinarily feisty. I’m Alessandro Vitale also known as “Spicymoustache”. I’m based in London and I have been an Urban farmer for 7+ years and content creator for the past 1 year, producing educational content about gardening and maximising the production of food in a small space (i grow my own food in 8×5 metres of space), foraging wild food, natural remedies and how to use every part of your fruit and vegetables with a zero waste approach for a more sustainable life even in the middle of the city. My goal is to educate people not only to grow their own food and re-create the missing link with nature but also reduce their impact on the environment by lowering their carbon footprint. The main point is to create digestible content in the most authentic way so anyone could do the same at home.

Many gardeners struggle with growing lettuce in the middle of summer; sitting in direct sunlight causes it to bolt and go into flower. Thanks to your small space, you can succeed with plants that people with larger gardens will struggle to grow. You just have to be mindful of how the sun moves. Never create food waste again by creating compost in an odourless composting system that can be kept inside. Recycle and reuse everything! Turn a plastic bottle into a vertical hanging garden, a self-watering pot, a mini greenhouse or a DIY irrigation system.Do you live in the city and yearn for the space and time to grow your own food and live more connected with nature and the seasons? One great advantage of growing in small spaces is that you can use the shade to your advantage. If you grow cucumbers vertically up a trellis, like I have, you can move your pots around on hot summer days so your lettuces can follow their shade. This is a bit like people sitting around the pool on holiday, chasing the sun or the shade as the sun moves. Rebel Gardening shows that anyone can grow a garden of delicious organic fruit and vegetables, wildlife-friendly wildflowers and abundant herbs in absolutely any urban space with a bit of know-how. The one area that didn’t work for me is that in his quest for sustainability he uses quite a lot of containers I wouldn’t consider optimal, especially for organic gardening. Not only does he use lots of plastic containers with no talk about how plastics degrade and are taken up in the soil, but he recommends planting food crops in old tires (lined with plastic). I commend him for reusing materials and caring for the environment, but I personally would not feel great about using those materials to grow food and wish he’d at least discussed the topic for new gardeners who might not know about potential health risks. Those of us growing for children or pregnant women need to be especially mindful of the risks. We'll visit radical socialist gardeners like those in Incredible Edible Todmorden. This Yorkshire town is planting every available surface with veggies. They are on a mission to reject the global food industry and become the UK's first food self-sustaining town. We'll drop in on The Plant in Chicago where rebels are transforming a disused industrial building into a zero emission farm.

For now I shall leave you with this: the word "radical", whether you take it to mean reformist in the political sense, or unconventional in the cultural sense or just plain awesome in the 1970s teenage sense, derives from the Latin word "radix", meaning "root". Radish is also derived from radix. So gardening and revolution, not such unlikely allotment-mates after all. Understand how microorganisms do all the work of feeding your plants and keeping pests and diseases away. Learn how to encourage the natural networks that make a growing space thrive.From techniques to the tools you need, and any other things you might need to build it is all explained. For every item you will need, the diagrams show just how to do things. From your own irrigation system to saving seeds. Alessandro Vitale has taken the time to motivate you into having your own organic urban garden. If you think you don’t have the space, he will help you realize you can still have your own garden. Worried you don’t have a green thumb on you, the guidance provided will get you to see that you do. Do you live in the city and yearn for the space and time to grow your own food and live more connected with nature and the seasons? Rebel Gardening shows that anyone can grow a garden of delicious organic fruit and vegetables, wildlife-friendly wildflowers and abundant herbsin absolutely any urban space with a bit of know-how.

Disclaimer – We received this item free for the purpose of this review/feature but all words and opinions are our own.

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Organic gardening expert Alessandro Vitale wants you to embrace the living soil and establish your own city eden where creatures and plants can coexist, in harmony with our modern lives. He shares his low-cost and organic approach with all the essential guidance you will need, including his top 50 plants for beginner gardeners, with a plethora of information on how to plant and look after them and how to make the most of all your produce. Learn how to make vegan honey with dandelions, establish a micro-orchard, or brew a natural antibiotic from garlic. Organic gardening expert Alessandro Vitale wants you to embrace the living soil and establish your own city eden where creatures and plants can coexist, in harmony with our modern lives. He shares his low-cost and organic approach with all the essential guidance you will need, including his top 50 plants for beginner gardeners, with a plethora of information on how to plant and look after them and how to make the most of all your produce. Learn how to make vegan honey with dandelions, establish a micro-orchard, or brew a natural antibiotic from garlic.