Four and a half stars. Full of information. This would be a superlative choice for public and school library acquisition, home use, allotments/gardening groups, smallholders (with or without urban locations), and similar. The language and spelling are UK English (marrow, aubergine, etc), but will pose no problems in context for readers elsewhere. Tutorial and recipe lists have measurements given in metric units with imperial (American) units in parentheses (yay!). Exploring questions about human entanglement with the 'more-than-human' Real change comes from within• Sat Nadar Vitale, who was by then working as a videographer, agreed to make videos for Dowding, never imagining for one second that just a year on he would be celebrating the publication of his own book, Rebel Gardening: A Beginner’s Handbook to Creating an Organic Urban Garden. 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.

The cardboard acts as light exclusion for weeds on the ground, which will slowly die. The weed will decompose in a few months and the roots of the plants planted over it will just penetrate the cardboard and feed on the nutrient-rich substrate underneath. When you apply the cardboard, if you add two pieces or more, make sure to overlap them so you don’t leave gaps. If you don’t have any weeds and your soil is almost clean, you don’t need cardboard! The first Rebel Gardeners project started at Pepper Middle School in Southwest Philadelphia through a partnership between the students, parents, teachers, and staff at the school, staff at the Agatston Urban Nutrition Initiative, and students and faculty at the University of Pennsylvania. The focus of the project was working with a nearby community garden that was threatened to be demolished. Young people were trained as ethnographers and documented the old gardeners stories, and in the process learned how to grow food, and why to grow food, themselves. I wish someone had told me sooner that gardening was a learning activity. Only by paying attention to how the plants behave under different conditions can you improve your gardening success rate. If you get into it, gardening is a deeply analytic activity. 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.

In modern society, I feel like growing your own food and trying to be self-sustaining is the ultimate act of rebellion!” Vitale writes—hence the book title. It’s also something that can be taken on by anyone, anywhere, he argues, including in a tiny front yard or on an apartment balcony. Vitale should know: His rental’s 26-by-16-foot garden produces enough fruits and vegetables that he doesn’t have to shop for them anymore, and that’s without the help of chemical fertilizers or tilling the soil. In reality, Vitale, who says he had originally dreamed of becoming a tattoo artist, was a long way from the nearest wild river, mountain or lake, never mind his home. He was renting a house with barely any outdoor space in North London, and so he started growing chillies in a pot on the windowsill.

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. Rebel Gardeners are students, teachers, parents, administrators, chefs, farmers, business people, artists, cookbook readers, food blog writers, and eaters. We each have a unique role to play in growing a healthy future for our community. Rebel Gardening should be considered the handbook for sustainable gardening. Alessandro teaches readers how to do everything necessary, including the reasons why it should be done that way. He teaches by example and shares his own successes and failures. I find him to be incredibly thorough in his explanations.

Guerilla gardens

Add the spices and massage the salt into the cabbage for about five minutes, then leave it to stand for a further five minutes. You should see a lot of brine start to come out of the cabbage and you can give it a helping hand by squeezing it. 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. And, of course or I wouldn’t be writing about it here, gardening offers a series of lessons for Rebels at Work. Being a Rebel at Work calls upon your analytic talents. And the more experience you have as a Rebel, the smarter you will be about advocating for change in organizations. But beyond that… He took me gardening but also foraging for white asparagus and apples. He taught me so much that I carried inside me even though once he passed I had nowhere to go and garden again.” 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.