You don’t need a big garden to reconnect with nature. Grow and eat fresh, organic food using nature’s own principles as your guide: 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. The book also looks at composting, including composting indoors, and growing seasonally so that you have fresh food available when nature says it’s ready, not whenever food is flown in from other parts of the world.The focus on the book is to be healthy but to also be more sustainable for the planet and reduce CO2 emissions.

Many gardeners struggle with growing lettuce in the middle of summer; sitting in direct sunlight causes it to bolt and go into flower. Thanks to your small space, you can succeed with plants that people with larger gardens will struggle to grow. You just have to be mindful of how the sun moves.

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Rebel Gardening is full of vital information to give your garden its own spotlight. The education and knowledge shared are impressive, there is no gatekeeping, only useful information. 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. 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 Gardening is a great book for beginners, or children to start gardening for themselves.There’s ample examples and the language is easy to understand with illustrations, photos and room to make notes as you pull the book out every year and increase your knowledge as your enthusiasm grows.Yielding a crop of home grown food is completely different to buying even organic food, and being able to cook straight from your garden is a real treat. Do you know a gardener, greener, community gardener or adopter of feral lands who's digging for a better society? Perhaps there's someone in your life who's on a mission to change the world one vegetable patch at a time? Let us know below about the projects you find inspiring and perhaps we'll feature them here. They are the kind of activists who carry farming equipment not to symbolise the proletariat, but because they've got some serious hoeing to do. They're not mild-mannered; they're angry. And while they may be patient when it comes to buds flowering, when it comes to urban wastelands, unsustainable town planning, the food industry, unemployment, social exclusion and the relentless grey, grey, grey of our towns and cities they are extraordinarily feisty. One great advantage of growing in small spaces is that you can use the shade to your advantage. If you grow cucumbers vertically up a trellis, like I have, you can move your pots around on hot summer days so your lettuces can follow their shade. This is a bit like people sitting around the pool on holiday, chasing the sun or the shade as the sun moves. Disclaimer – We received this item free for the purpose of this review/feature but all words and opinions are our own.

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Depending on how historical we're feeling we may look at the roots of radical gardening too. The Green Guerillas of 1970s New York, the original community gardeners and throwers of seed-bombs. And the UK's own Meanwhile Gardens near Westbourne Park, where the wasteland turned adventure garden boasted the UK's first skateboard pit.