The Thrifty Gardener

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Introduction 6 From the ground up 10 12 16 17 20 24 26 28 30 32 36

Inheriting a garden Where are you going to garden?

What can grow in it, what do you want to grow in it?

No garden, no worries – how about containers.

Desktop gardening Ways of working your soil Feeding Your Soil for Free How to build a compost bin Keeping worms Weeds and weeding

How does your garden grow 40 42 48 51 54 60 64 68 70 72

Structure and planning, how to make a small space work.

The renter’s garden: a stylish garden in a season How to make window boxes How to make your own fire pit How does your garden grow?

Indoors: the no-garden gardening guide Growing houseplants from your store cupboards Using houseplants as free air conditioning.

Basement kitchen veg garden – how to grow mushrooms, bean shoots

Sowing, planting and protecting 74 Seeds and plugs: seeds, sowing and ways to cheat 78 Garlic and basil from the supermarket, using existing self seeders, from trees to annuals 82 How to build a cold frame 84 How to build a container veg garden: 86 What to plant 100 The directory: cheap and easy vegetables, flowers and herbs

Propagating and pruning 104 106 Defending your bounty: pest control 110 Plant manipulation to extend your garden’s colour (perennials and annual) 112 The what, when and why of pruning, pinching, thinning and deadheading.

114 How to become a propagating genius – plants you can’t fail to multiply.

116 Dividing/cuttings 120 How to use your pruning to make edging and fencing

The harvest 126 128 131 136 148

Seed saving Picking and storing for your kitchen Cut flowers from your garden as gifts Harvesting and making herbal tea

Under the radar: the sourcebook 150 151 152 154 155

Tips and tools How to survive the garden centre Scrap craft: the very best of tatting Where and how to get really good finds for next to nothing: Seed swapping events, allotment and community garden support, garden classes for free, freecycling for gardeners, eBay, dumpster diving communities and much more

156 Index 160 Acknowledgements

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SpecificationPublication date: September 2008 Format: 240 x 210mm, pb with flaps Extent: 160 pages Word count: 45,000 Photographs: 130 colour ISBN 978-1-85626-777-9 Price: £16.99 Rights: World, Kyle Cathie

Kyle Cathie Ltd 122 Arlington Road London NW1 7HP general.enquiries@kyle-cathie.com www.kylecathie.com

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A stylish compost bin I painted the entire box with primer paint before finishing it off with blackboard paint. I did this for two reasons: I want the bin to stand on its own aesthetically and by painting it, I’ve extended its life. As its essentially made from bathroom flooring and some very old skirting board, neither of which wasn’t meant to live outside, the paint will protect it from the worst of the weather.

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Tools An electric or hand drill with a 3mm drill bit (either be a wood or HSS bit). You will save your wrists if you also have a screwdriver head on your electric drill.

Materials

2

21 boards of equal length (60cm makes a good small box, 80cm for a larger space)

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18 batons with length equal to the width of boards 60 x 15cm wood screws 1 tin of external timber paint (optional) Wood saw (8 teeth) Electric drill with 3mm wood or HSS bit and

How to make the boxes If the wood has come from a skip, it may need cleaning up. Remove any old nails or screws, plaster, glue or other material.

1.This is the inspiration for my compost bin and shows how each box is constructed.

2. Cut the wood into equal lengths (60cm makes a good smaller-sized composter. I wouldn’t go much larger than 80cm). All your wood needs to be of the same length, but each box can be of different widths, allowing you to use what’s available.

3.You will need to make three boxes. Each corner needs to be a proper right angle.Take your first board and place a baton at either end, making sure all sides are flush. Drill the holes first and screw the batons to the boards. Repeat this process.

4. Now attach the remaining two boards to make a box.

It’s easiest if you clamp these boards before you drill. If you don’t have a clamp, here’s where the spare pair of hands come in. Make sure all the ends are flush. Repeat this until you have three boxes

Philips screwdriver head 2 G-clamps or workbench. If you don’t have these you’ll need a spare pair of hands at some point.

You need two batons for each box to keep them in place.

These need to be roughly 12cm long. Drill two holes per baton from the outside of the box.These will hold the

How to build a compost bin

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Feeding your soil for free The secret to a lush, bountiful garden is good soil. Most gardens do not start life with good soil. It is something that is worked at, maintained and loved – in short, a relationship. It is not a high maintenance one though, and it’s very simple to feed.

All good soil needs good compost and perhaps the best supply of this is your own scraps. Compost is the most low-key recycling you will ever do: no miles, little processing and no packaging. Home compost is the best, certainly the cheapest, soil improver you will ever have. Having a compost pile is one of the wildlife friendly Big Five (the others are ponds, a variety of different plants, hedges and walls (ahh walls, insects love ‘em). A compost pile in its own right is a unique wildlife habitat. Even if all your garden is concreted over, having a compost pile will make it still make it a wildlife-friendly place.

How to make compost The very simplest way to make compost is to copy the forest floor.The waste that accumulates on the forest floor is a mixture of animal and vegetable matter: leaves, twigs, branches, fruit, seeds, needles, insect and mammal poop and eventually their bodies. All this is washed and sieved by rain, yet more insects, bacteria and with time nature has turned all of this into the finest quality soil.

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From the ground up

The Essential Guide to Compost There are two myths about

straw, cardboard and roots; green

compost that stop many people

equals nitrogen found in leaves,

becoming master composters.

grass, flowers, weeds, etc.

Firstly, that compost smells

Therefore if you chop your

bad. Not true: good compost

branches up, put a thin layers of

smells rich and healthy.

grass (never more that 30cm

And secondly, that good

depth at a time) add some

compost takes years to make. In

vegetable scraps, the odd pizza

fact,itcan be made in less than

box, rip up those old jeans

four months in the summer, over

(cotton only), add some plant

the winter it will take six.

prunings, mix it around, voilá. You

The key to compost is to

get a great rich fruit cake. All you

understand that it is just like

have to do is spread this across

baking a cake. You need the right

the top of your soil, the worms

ingredients and that they have to

will dig it in for you. The sum total

be mixed together in the right

of your expenditure will have

amounts. If you put only grass

been to walk to your compost bin

clippings in your pile it will never

with vegetable scraps, to turn

rot down (well, not for a very, very

your compost (at least once in its

long time), it will just turn into a

lifetime) and then to spread it.

slimy green mess. If all you put in is huge branches or roots, this

From kitchen to garden

too will take years to move. The

You can buy compost caddies

key is to create a balance based

with filters to stop them smelling.

on a carbon/nitrogen ratio. There

I did have one, but I became lazy

needs to be about two-thirds

because, as it didn’t smell, I let it

carbon source to one-third

sit until it became an exploding

nitrogen. This is often called the

mass of fruit flies. Now I use a

brown/green ratio. Brown

white ceramic chicken. The lid

represents carbon found in

keeps the flies out and it holds a

fibrous material such as stems,

week’s worth of peelings.

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Four things you need to know about seeds Seeds are tiny packages of promise, sometimes free, often cheap, and the building blocks to a thrifty gardener’s paradise. Once you have mastered seed sowing you’ll soon realise how is easy it is to create a paradise even from peanuts (make sure they’re unroasted).

Seeds need four things to germinate and grow: water, light, temperature and oxygen. By their very nature, seed are in a state of dormancy and it’s your job to unlock them. By providing soil that is wet and warm enough, off your seeds will go.

Warmth is perhaps more important than any thing else. If it too cold for you to be out there its probably too cold for the seeds. As the joke goes, the soil isn’t warm enough for sowing unless you can sit on it with your bare bum.

The no-space solution One solution for the studio apartment

dweller is to germinate on a micro scale and then prick out into modules – this way you can get several crops into one module.You can germinate your seed in mostly vermiculite with some multipurpose compost in saucers (hummus pots and takeaway trays work best).

Poke some holes in the pot with a fork (heat the fork up first and you’ll melt perfect holes into the plastic) and then place it on a saucer. If you’re using a takeaway tray you can use the lid as the saucer. Next, fill it to almost the top of the tray with vermiculite/compost and pour water into the pot until you start to see water in the saucer.

Now it’s time to sow.You just need a pinch of seeds, nothing more as you don’t want to end up with lots of seedlings. As

long as your pot is not sitting over a radiator, it’s not necessary to water until you see the first sign of something green, then if the pot has dried out, water again.

Once the seedlings are big enough to handle, you can prick them out into a module.You can’t wait around at this point, as the vermiculite has no food in it and the seedlings will quickly exhaust themselves.

If you seeds don’t germinate It could be one of three things.

1.You buried them too deep and then over watered them. If you dig around you find them rotting. If the conditions are right, you don’t need to water your seed trays until the first seedling leaves appear.

2. It’s too cold or too hot: seeds will stay locked in germination until the right temperature. (See the temperature chart overleaf). Buy a soil thermometer (if you can’t find them in your garden centre, use a human one). I became a much, much better gardener once I knew the temperature of my soil.

3. Or you are just being impatient. Some seeds take less than a week to start life others, such as trees, can take over a year.

How to water your seedlings

Seedlings need gentle watering. Great gushes of water from a watering can will disturb the soil and roots and knock the seedlings over. One solution, if you don’t have a watering can with a rose, is to use an old bottle. Poke small holes concentrically around the lid of the bottle a wide-mouthed bottle works best) and fill with water. If you keep it

Opposite: Melt drainage holes into a take-away tray

on the windowsill with the trays, then it will be

with something suitably pointy. Fill the tray with good seed

sun-warmed when you come to use it and your

compost and sow away. Gently firm seed into new home

seedlings will love you for it.

and water.

Four things you need to know about seeds

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How to be a propagating genius The cheapest way to bulk up a flower garden is to learn how to propagate.You can turn the one plant you could afford at the garden centre into seven.You can take cuttings of things you like from friends‚ gardens, soon you’ll be able to start swapping around and before you know you’ll have a garden full of wonderful things.

Division Division is the easiest form of propagation.You take one plant and pull it apart (or slice it) into several selfsupporting ones. Mostly you can divide herbaceous perennials with fibrous roots such as geraniums and hostas. Apart from a few exceptions (see next page), you can’t divide woody plants.

You can split a plant up many times, but each section must have at least one bud or shoot and its own roots.You can tease the plant apart, by holding the sections just below the bud and pulling gently.This is quick, easy and will yield many small plants.This is one way to bulk up shop-bought plants.Take a perennial, divide and repot each section and wait till they all get to a decent size to be planted in your garden However it’s generally more useful to divide a plant when it is much larger so that each section is of a decent size. Nearly all perennials need dividing at some point in their life in order to keep their growth vigorous.The rule of thumb is to divide every five years or so.

You can divide at any of time of year, but if you choose the hottest months, you have more work to do. For this reason most people choose to divide in autumn or spring when the plants is dormant and soil still workable. Plants such as irises and spring-flowering plants divide in early summer, early to mid summer plants are divided in autumn. Late summer- to early autumn-flowering plants are best divided in early spring.

Opposite: Some growers plant lots of young plants together in a 5-litre pot to make it look like one, more mature plant (top right). If you gently tease them apart (bottom right) you can often get three or more smaller plants (top left).

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Propagating and pruning

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Scrap craft When I was 19 I moved to New York to work at the New York Botanical Gardens. I’d never lived in a city before and I was at once entranced and yet terrified. After what at the time I considered a dull country upbringing, this city pulsed with a strange excitement.Yet I couldn’t quite accept that I wouldn’t have a green place of my own and I searched that city for somewhere to live. And when I had almost given up, I wandered into a neighbourhood where every second block seemed to be a garden. I didn’t really know where I was, except that I had to stay there, so I rented a room from a friendly hippie with a top-floor window that looked out over all these lovely gardens.

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Under the radar: the sourcebook

One of those gardens was to become my home for that year. I found a community that was making beautiful gardens literally from the street.

This period was perhaps more influential than much of my formal training as a horticulturalist.

I fell in love the ethic, thrift and spirit that thrives in such settings. But mostly I learnt to scrap craft.

New from old Scrap craft is when you reuse or recycle unwanted items into something useful. It starts with ‘I wonder what would happen if you…’‚ and the end result is cool stuff for your garden.

Floorboards turn into compost bins, a chest of

drawers into your new container garden and unwanted furniture becomes your new patio table.

It’s a way to personalise your own environment without costing the earth. By being practical and having a set of skills you can make your world around you, rather than buying someone else’s bland version. It’s very addictive, partly because there is nothing more satisfying. that being able to say, ‘I did that’.

You start to make stuff that suits your home and the way you actually live. And instead of the impersonal elegance or, worse still, the mass ugliness of manufactured things you get something that says and has spirit and personality of its maker.

Opposite page: Reclaim the street: this New York garden may be small and a little rough around the edges, but it softens the street with its basil-filled windows and climbers and rusty reclaimed planter. This page: Beautiful scrap magic: born out of reclaimed timber, old bricks and friends' cuttings, this is salvage at its best. Even the soil is home made (see compost bin, far right) This garden stands – all 25 years’ worth – to the testament that great gardens don’t have to cost the earth

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Dumpster diving The street is a truly amazing resource for

If you are confronted, walk away.

material. I’ve found tools, soil, plants, arbors, watering cans, wheelbarrows, seed tins, not to

Never trespass, it’s just not worth it. There’ll be

mention floorboards, skirting boards, gravel

another skip somewhere else. This means skips

boards and all sorts of wood to make things for

on people’s drive are out of bounds unless they

my garden. It’s about seeing beyond the current

are at home.

state of the object and imagining something new.

People throw out the most amazing stuff and it’s

Always wear gloves, sturdy shoes and long

a shame to let any of it go to the landfill

trousers (particularly if you’re actually going to

mountain. By using stuff from the streets you

dive) skips are full of broken glass and rusty nails.

lessen not only your global footprint but also that of those around you. And it’s a very thrifty way to

Having a screwdriver or a multi-tool in your bag

get a lovely garden.

means that wherever you are, you can increase your potential finds. Brass hinges, bolts and

However, there are rules for getting stuff for free.

screws are really worth taking.

Skip diving (dumpster diving in the USA) sits in a murky world of legal issues. Yes, people are

Some people swear by diving only at night or

throwing this stuff out and therefore don’t want

early morning partly because you won’t run into

it, but they still have legal rights to it.

anyone. But this can make you look suspicious. I dive at anytime, I always leave the skip tidier than

Always ask permission for two reasons: it keeps

when I left it and I’ve yet to get into trouble.

you the right side of the law and it’s polite. Many people are little afraid of skip divers. In their

Keep looking. It’s rare to find what you want

eyes you’re doing something very subversive.

immediately, it’s an endlessly, addictive trawl.

Mostly they are just worried that you are dumping stuff in rather than taking it out. If you

Keep karma on your side. Do not take for the sake

politely explain what you want and why, it put

of it, there might be someone else desperate for

people’s mind at rest. And often you’ll find

that find that’s just going to sit in your garage.

people will save you stuff.

Let people know that you’re on the look out for If you can’t find anyone to ask permission from,

wood, planters, window frames, etc. Word of

leave a note. ‘Is this wood being thrown out and

mouth and tip offs lead to the best finds.

can I have it? Tick Yes or No’ works wonders.