Do you dream of a low maintenance perennial garden?
One that is full to the brim of perennial vegetables that you don’t have to keep replanting, but only have a small space? Do you struggle with too little time for gardening or controlling the pests and diseases that eat your crops? Do you want to grow unusual vegetable varieties? You can do all of this with Edible Perennial Gardening.
Anni Kelsey has meticulously researched the little known subject of edible perennials and selected her favourite, tasty varieties. She explains how to source and propagate different vegetables, which plants work well together in a polycultures, and what you can plant in small, shady or semi-shady beds as well as in sunny areas.
It includes:
• Getting started and basic principles
• Permaculture, forest gardening and natural farming
• Growing in polycultures
• How to chose suitable leafy greens, onions, roots, tubers and herbs
• Site selection and preparation
• Building fertility
• Low maintenance management strategies
If you long for a forest garden but simply don’t have the space for tree crops, or want to grow a low maintenance edible polyculture, this book will explain everything you need to know to get started on a new gardening adventure that will provide you with beauty, food for your household and save you money.
“I love Anni’s book. She’s taken traditionally ‘big space’ ideas and approaches and brought them alive on a domestic scale, where most gardeners operate. The bigger picture of redesigning our food system with perennials at its heart underlies, yet it never gets in the way of inspiring and enabling the reader with case studies, examples, advice and experience. A must-have for forward thinking gardeners.”
Mark Diacono, experimental gardener, journalist and author of A Year at Otter Farm.“This is a valuable addition to the literature on growing perennial vegetables. The author’s experiences of creating and maintaining polycultures are a great guide and inspiration to this challenging aspect of edible perennial gardening.”
Martin Crawford, director of the Agroforestry Research Trust and author of Creating a Forest Garden and How To Grow Perennial Vegetables
Book Details
Published: March 2014
ISBN: 978 1 85623 149 7
Size: 240 x 170mm
Format: Paperback, 176pp. Illustrated with colour photographs throughout
Author
Anni Kelsey has been passionate about gardening and the natural world for as long as she can remember. As her concerns about the unsustainability of our present food system grew she began to ‘edibilise’ her garden aiming to find a way of growing food that required as little time, effort and skill as possible. She based her experiments on forest gardening but adapted this to fit in an average sized back garden. This led her to focus on experimenting with perennial vegetables, obtaining and growing as many as she possibly could.
