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

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Here, I show how to turn any disused space into a garden ready to thrive by first establishing weed-free pathways, then raised beds where you will grow your plants. Creating Weed-Free Pathways It was so busy and grey and cold compared to Italy, and I realised I really needed to find a way to be in some part of Nature to survive it,” he says. The soil will also increase the moisture retention capabilities so you won’t have to water as much as in normal garden beds. The beauty of this method is that you can start planting your plants straightaway and start growing your own food as soon as you make your garden bed.

One of my main inspirations and gardening heroes is Charles Dowding, who taught me all I know about a method called No-Dig Gardening, where the principles focus on not disrupting the life within the soil.Weigh the cabbage to work out how much salt you will need. It should be 2–5% of the weight of the cabbage. If you don’t have scales, don’t worry. The average cabbage will need about 3 tablespoons of salt, and happily you don’t have to be exact.

To apply this method to your growing space, if you have a lawn or weeds all over the ground, just put a layer of cardboard on top of it, making sure that the cardboard doesn’t have any tape on it (if you’ve reused a delivery box, like me, for example!). Ink should be fine, as in most cases it is vegetable ink on brown cardboard and not shiny as it often is with bits of plastic.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. 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. Some things just take time. Plants have to settle into their new environments. Weather varies year to year. My transplanted rose bush only gave one weak flower the first year in its new location. But now it’s a reliable producer, if still not as robust as its sun-blessed twin. And so it is with organizational change. Expecting immediate results should be a rookie mistake, and yet we see it everywhere. I often think the most successful change efforts are the ones that people don’t quite realize are happening. Tiny pivots accumulate and without sturm und drang the organization finds itself in a better place. Rebels who want instant ego gratification normally aren’t willing to take the tortoise approach. And so their garden doesn’t grow.