Charles Dowding's Skills for Growing: Sowing, Spacing, Planting, Picking, Watering and More

The knowledge and techniques you need for successful vegetable growing, based on Charles' decades of experience

• Grow vegetables easily throughout the year
• Use time creatively to maximize growth
• Learn cost-effective and productive-per-area methods
• Learn to plan, sow, multisow, transplant, space, water, harvest, and succeed with succession
• Improve growth while working alongside nature

Master gardener Charles Dowding explains the skills and understandings you need for successful growing. His approach sometimes diverges from the mainstream because he assays and develop new or lesser-known methods, for easier and better results.

Skills for Growing illustrates how you create planting plans and advises on succession and rotation, interplanting and multisowing, how to propagate plants and quick ways to set them in the ground.

It gives detailed information on spacing, harvesting methods and timings, watering, and using covers for both warmth and pest protection.

Dowding describes the skills needed for successful winter gardening, growing in containers and growing perennial vegetables and herbs.

The advice given in the book is based on having a clean and fertile area in which to grow vegetables. It may not be large, but that is fine: there are examples of how much food you can grow every year in just one bed, and in containers too.

The book comprises 18 chapters, grouped into 6 parts. Each chapter is illustrated with captioned, full-color photographs from Dowding's garden in Southwest UK.

Charles Dowding develops and explains time- and labour-saving methods of high-yielding nature-friendly gardening. He has written ten books and an annual calendar of sowing dates, runs a YouTube channel with 36 million views, writes for national gardening magazines, and gives talks and courses at home and abroad. He has created three online courses: No Dig Gardening, Course 1; Growing Success Course 2. His third online course appeared in 2021.

He has been growing professionally since 1982, and has been experimenting with No Dig methods for the past 20 years. His current site at Homeacres is well known for its rapid transformation from weedy pasture to beautiful garden in just a half-year (see the video "No Dig Abundance" on Youtube). Currently he crops an intensive 0.35 acres/1300 square metres, and sells £20,000 of harvests--mainly salad leaves--locally.