1. Grow Food For Free by Huw Richards (£16.99, DK): Organic veg champion and former child YouTuber Huw Richards explains how to build up your stash of gardening equipment through bartering, borrowing and making do. He’s got nifty tips on propagating and taking cuttings and still gets you up to speed with the basics of fruit and veg growing.
2. Grow & Cook by Mark Diacono (£10.99, Headline Home): Colour and picture-free but the author has a straightforward style that’s easy to follow. He talks you through more than 180 varieties of fruit and veg, from when to start them off, to how to space them, and when to start picking and eating them.
3. How To Grow Stuff by Alice Vincent (£12.99, Ebury Press): Ideal for urban gardeners with little space to play with, this offers a crash course in nurturing herbs, salad leaves, tomatoes, chillies and courgettes. Helpfully, Vincent is all for making the most of seeds and plants that are readily found in the supermarket.
4. The Ten-Minute Gardener by Val Bourne (£9.99, Bantam Press): This little book has the power to encourage you to take the 10 minutes you were going to spend scrolling on your phone, and apply it to the outside world. The author breaks down the swift jobs you can do month by month, and cheers you on to exploit every last usable scrap of daylight.
5. Veg In One Bed by Huw Richards (£14.99, DK): This manual from Huw Richards (the man’s a veg-growing wunderkind) is a massive bestseller, and tells you what plants should fill what gaps when, and how to cycle through different veggies as the seasons progress, so you stay consistently well fed throughout.
6. RHS Step-by-Step Veg Patch: A Foolproof Guide To Every Stage of Growing Fruit and Veg by Lucy Chamberlain (£16.99, DK): If there’s one thing a newbie veg grower needs to know, it’s that the RHS is about to become your most trusted resource and beloved touchstone. The RHS website is good, but words on a paper page often hold more gravitas, and this newly updated version of a step-by-step classic guide will have you turning tiny seeds into carrots, onions and aubergines in no time.
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