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Description / general overview :
Joy Larkcom believes passionately that a vegetable garden, whatever its size, can be as beautiful as a conventional garden of flowers and shrubs. In Creative Vegetable Gardening , she shows how the principles of good design can be applied to a kitchen plot and how to use the vibrant textures, colours, and forms of vegetables, herbs, and fruit to create glorious effects and intriguing patterns without jeopardizing their productivity. Inspirational colour photographs of potagers and kitchen plots capture the essence of the creative approach to vegetable growing. Techniques are described in clear stages and illustrated with full-colour step-by-step artworks, while an A-Z directory includes more than 150 edible plants with key facts on their cultivation, supplemented with ideas on how to grow them to maximum ornamental effect. Beautifully illustrated, intricate plans of five types of potager - formal, informal, small, urban, and winter - add to the wealth of inspirational information. Creative Vegetable Gardening will capture the imagination and inspire all those who think that growing garden produce is mundane. From creating a full-scale potager to simply adding some new effects with vegetables, this book has something for beginners and experienced gardeners alike.
Contents :
1 THE MAGIC IN VEGETABLE GARDENING, Starting at home, What is a potager? The threads of inspiration, Contemporary approaches, The home of the edible landscape, Ecstasy or anguish?
- 2 ELEMENTS OF DESIGN, Getting started - The site
- The style
- Drawing up the plan, Plan of a formal potager, Plan of an informal potager, Plan of a small, urban potager, Plan of a low-maintenance potager, Plan of a winter potager, Patterns and bed shapes - Squares, Diamonds and triangles, Circles, Unconventional patterns, Minimal patterns, Boundaries - Man-made, Hedges, Instant boundaries, Paths - Soft paths, Mulched paths, Hard surfaces, Edges - Hard edges, Dwarf hedges, Focal points and features - Arches, Seats and arbours, Standard trees, Topiary, Supports, Containers
- 3 DRAMATIC EFFECTS Planting for effect, Architectural and dramatic plants, Drama from seedheads and flowering vegetables, Climbers - Culinary climbers, Mixing climbing flowers and shrubs with vegetables, Living edges - Frivolous edges, Useful edges Ground cover - Types of ground-cover plants, Special effects with ground cover Textured effects - Plants with form and texture Colourful touches - Vegetables and herbs, Flowering edibles and edible flowers, Intermingling annuals, Mixing bulbs with edibles, Vegetables in the flower beds, Intercropping - The patterns, Practicalities, Options for intercropping, Contrasting colours, Contrasting heights, Contrasting textures, Seedling patches - Suitable crops, Sowing and growing, Effects with cca seedlings
- 4 FRUIT AS A DECORATIVE FEATURE Using fruit creatively - Shapely and colourful trees, Fruit in containers, Integrating fruit into the garden, Selecting fruit, Fruit as a framework - Trained fruit on boundaries, Trained fruit forms, Climbers and trailers on the boundary, Using Fruit for ornamental highlights - Arches, Tunnels and walkways, Columnar effects
- 5 POTAGER MANAGEMENT Soil fertility - Green manuring, Mulching, Watering Raising good quality plants - Direct sowing, Sowing in seedbeds, Raising plants 'indoors', Keeping order, Controlling pests and diseases, Plant protection, Forcing pots, Planning for succession, 6 A-Z DIRECTORY Table of common and botanical names, Brassicas, Salad and leafy vegetables, Roots, bulbs, tubers and swollen stems, Podded vegetables, Fruiting and seeding vegetables, Gourds and squashes, Perennials, Herbs, Edible flowers, Glossary, Seasons, Further reading, Suppliers, Index, Acknowledgements, Photo acknowledgements.
Additional Info :
Tells how to create decorative effects in the vegetable garden, where food plants combine with flowers and foliage to create a tapestry effect . This book shows how the principles of good design can be applied to a kitchen plot and how to use the vibrant textures, colours, and forms of vegetables, herbs, and fruit to create glorious effects.
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![[Book cover]](/covers/9781845333904_large.jpg)
