The following 16 chapters each cover a specific aspect in detail and I found helpful wisdom and instruction in each but especially enjoyed the chapters on seeds and plants, shady gardening, slug controlling, perennial vegetables, pruning and building paths and steps.

Patrick taught many permaculture and other practical courses with his wife, Cathy, and was one of the first teachers in the world to develop an online Permaculture Design Course. This is low maintenance, year round, no dig gardening that provides your kitchen with delicious fresh food, whilst not breaking your back. His apparent excitement in showing off his splendid leeks, while casually grazing on some perennial broccoli was contagious, and the series of short films he made about growing vegetables leave one in no doubt of his passion for it. But unlike some allotmenteers who seem to delight in the graft of annual double-digging and love a good leaning-on-the-gate type grumble about the poor weather and the slugs, he was all for taking the grunt out of it and focusing on the joy of letting nature do the hard work while we enjoy the bounty.Through observing, season after season, he found the middle road, the sweet spot between productivity and ease. He mixes annual hybrids, heritage varieties and perennial vegetables and has a pragmatic approach to selecting seeds and seed saving. Patrick was born on 11th February 1949 in Devizes, Wiltshire and brought up on a smallholding in Somerset.

This section is particularly helpful when it’s time to to start planning (or revolutionising) your plot for the next year, it’s also reassuring to conventional gardeners that they can make gains just by tweaking their existing practices and they don’t have to completely redesign from scratch. They look as though they would just need a good scrubbing to prepare and are apparently very tasty, sweet and a good source of carbs cooked or raw. If you purchase an audiobook from our site, it will only be available through our partner, Glassboxx via the Glassboxx player for iOS, Android, Windows, or Mac.If you asked 100 gardeners the same series of questions about how to grow vegetables, or manage the soil, or make good compost, you would get 100 different sets of answers. He qualified in agriculture at Shuttleworth College, Bedfordshire and after several years working in agriculture in the Middle East and Africa, he settled in central Somerset. The best thing we can do as gardeners is to experiment, keep on watching and learning, and most of all enjoy the garden and the fruits of our labour. Full of practical, achievable real life examples and projects this book is a wonderfully comprehensive guide to growing a productive, low maintenance garden in a small space. While the home had a garden, since they were only staying a short time, not too much was done with it.

Discount Codes cannot be combined with any other offers (books on sale or multiple discount codes, for example). The articles have been edited and organised into a comprehensive guide for the domestic kitchen gardener, with top tips for all of the seasons, and guidance on design and the different methods you might use. If you love lawns then sweep away the flowerbeds that clutter up your precious gardening time and go, tend your lawn. There were plenty of other suggestions to try out as well including pink purslane, sea beet, and herb patience as well as more familiar perennial kales and broccoli. I found easy to understand instructions, examples, illustrations and loads of professional guidance passed down from Patrick’s long experience.Get yourself secateurs, a piece of hessian for collecting prunings and weeds, a spade and a fork, a hand trowel, some shears, a hoe and a scythe and a stone to sharpen it.

Patrick describes how to select plants based on what you like to eat and how to combine them in polycultures that confound would-be pests.Patrick Whitefield spent many years tending his vegetable garden and feeding himself and his wife Cathy with it’s produce. Patrick appeared in several BBC TV programmes, popular gardening videos, and taught many permaculture and other practical courses, throughout the UK.