Bob's Basics

The best fertilizer for your organic garden is compost. It's easy to make, economically friendly, and teeming with nutrients. In this highly useful installment of his Bob's Basics series, Bob Flowerdew takes you through all the steps necessary to make a rich compost pile best suited to your needs. Composting is a highly comprehensive guide that goes over all the steps, from building a bin to collecting material to maintaining and adding to the finished product.

One of the biggest challenges of growing an organic garden is keeping away pests and diseases without using harmful pesticides. But as Bob illustrates in this necessary guide for any organic gardener, it is possible to keep your garden chemical-, pest-, and disease-free all at once. A master at growing organic produce, Flowerdew outlines the best natural methods, from building effective physical barriers and pest traps out of plants and recycled materials to using such natural pest predators as birds, reptiles, and even other bugs.

According to Flowerdew, the key to successful organic gardening is working with nature, rather than against it, to get your plants to thrive. This practice is called companion planting, and it is explained in this volume with a style that is both no-nonsense and reader-friendly. Topics range from plants that compete for nutrients to plants that enrich their soil for future crops. Gardeners of all levels will learn from Companion Planting and their gardens will benefit from happy and healthy plants.

What sets Bob Flowerdew's Pruning, Training, and Tidying apart from other books on the subject is that it does not advise pruning every single plant in your garden. Rather, as Flowerdew puts it, this guide explains the simplest basics of pruning, and how to get admirable results without obsessing over the growing pattern of every plant. Whatever you are growing, and whatever your garden looks like, Pruning, Training, and Tidying will help you to keep your garden beautiful and functional.

You most likely already know that nurturing a planted seed is necessary for growing a healthy plant. But how do you know the right amount of water to give? What are the best kinds of organic fertilizers? How can you plant a seed to set it on the right track for optimal growth? In Sowing, Planting, Watering, and Feeding, Bob Flowerdew guides you through these and other quandaries, and provides practical advice for dodging common mistakes gardeners make when nurturing their seedlings.

The nuisance caused by weeds sprouting in your otherwise thriving garden may make you want to reach for the herbicide, but as Flowerdew writes in this installment of his Bob's Basics series, weed control can be much more simple, inexpensive, and eco-friendly without chemical intervention. Because every weed is best removed with a different method, Weeding Without Chemicals begins with a discussion of the various weed categories. No matter what sort of weed is plaguing your garden, Bob has a chemical-free way to keep it under control.