Grow Your Own (Self-Sufficiency)

The simple, systematic guide to growing the tastiest fruit and vegetables!

• Get started with consideration of allotments, containers, small spaces, tools, equipment, storage, and a quick start guide
• Learn the basics of soil types, how to cultivate it, how to keep plants well-fed and watered, composting, digging, and pH balance
• How to grow vegetables including cabbage, kale, Brussels sprouts, beans, peas, carrots, onions, beets, potatoes, lettuce, corn, chard, and more
• How to grow fruits including apples, pears, plums, cherries, peaches, strawberries, raspberries, blackberries, currants, and gooseberries
• Pests and diseases like slugs, snails, aphids, mites, flies, weevils, mold, and mildew, and how to deal with them, including companion planting and biological control
• Greenhouse management from heating and equipment to plant production of greenhouse tomatoes and cucumbers

As our interest in eating fresh, locally sourced food increases, growing our own fruit and vegetables has become an excellent option!

When you grow your own, you can be sure how your produce has been cultivated, crops can be picked and eaten at their freshest all year round, and you can experiment with varieties otherwise hard to come by. It's satisfying, economical and delicious.

Beginner-friendly and easy to use, the aim of this book is to start you off with some easy-to-grow produce such as carrots, onions, radishes, tomatoes, and strawberries. Once you have the confidence of the first growing season behind you, you can then progress to crops requiring slightly more labor, such as peas, beans, and raspberries.

The first chapters inside Self-Sufficiency: Grow Your Own include a quick-start guide to get you going with a few fast-growing crops, then guide you through the basics of choosing a site, growing in small spaces, tools and equipment, soils, fertilizers, cultivation, harvesting, storage, and how to deal with pests and diseases, including tips on biological control and companion planting.

Once you've learned all the basics, you can refer again and again to the directories of vegetables and fruit, which include information on sowing, cultivation, harvesting, and pests and diseases for each crop and also recommend specific varieties. In the vegetable section, you'll find information on growing cauliflower, broccoli, turnips, Savoy cabbage, runner beans, French beans, broad beans, garlic, leeks, endive, chicory, corn, mustard greens, watercress, squash, celery, spinach, asparagus, and many more. The fruits section covers tree fruits like apples and pears, stone fruits like apricots, peaches, nectarines, and cherries, and soft fruits like blackcurrants, loganberries, strawberries, gooseberries, and more. All this, along with a chapter on using greenhouses and polythene tunnels, makes this your one-stop guide to growing your own!

Growing your own produce, you can be confident that everything has been organically cared for and you can grow just the varieties you like. You can pick the fruit and vegetables at their freshest without a tiresome journey to the grocery store, create a little homestead in your backyard, and become more self-sufficient.

Get started growing your own produce with Self-Sufficiency: Grow Your Own!