Sadly, Pietro died when his grandson Alessandro was just 10, but more than twenty years on, the grown-up version of that little boy still credits his grandfather with teaching him how to really connect to the land and its abundance and how to have fun doing that. Do you live in the city and yearn for the space and time to grow your own food and live more connected with nature and the seasons? Rebel Gardening shows that anyone can grow a garden of delicious organic fruit and vegetables, wildlife-friendly wildflowers and abundant herbs in absolutely any urban space with a bit of know-how. Organic gardening expert Alessandro Vitale wants you to embrace the living soil and establish your own city eden where creatures and plants can coexist, in harmony with our modern lives. He shares his low-cost and organic approach with all the essential guidance you will need, including his top 50 plants for beginner gardeners, with a plethora of information on how to plant and look after them and how to make the most of all your produce. Alessandro shares a plan for any type of space and how to tend it through the year. Learn about companion gardening, saving seeds, DIY raised beds and everything to allow your garden to flourish. The healing and planet-protecting power of gardening is within your grasp! Cover the veg with the liquid and carefully close the lid tightly while it is still very hot. This should create a vacuum seal as the contents cool.

One of my main inspirations and gardening heroes is Charles Dowding, who taught me all I know about a method called No-Dig Gardening, where the principles focus on not disrupting the life within the soil. Weigh the cabbage to work out how much salt you will need. It should be 2–5% of the weight of the cabbage. If you don’t have scales, don’t worry. The average cabbage will need about 3 tablespoons of salt, and happily you don’t have to be exact. The Resurgence Trust is a company limited by guarantee registered in England and Wales (5821436) and a charity registered in England and Wales (1120414). The Resurgence Trust publishes Resurgence & Ecologist magazine, Resurgence.org, ResurgenceEvents.org and TheEcologist.org to promote ecological sustainability, social justice and spiritual values. Begin by adding a layer of less-decomposed compost (see Note, below), which is less mature and less rich in nutrients, to a raised bed. Alternatively, you could add a mix of mushroom compost, mature horse manure and/or store-bought compost.Rebel Gardeners are students, teachers, parents, administrators, chefs, farmers, business people, artists, cookbook readers, food blog writers, and eaters. We each have a unique role to play in growing a healthy future for our community. Brainstorm Better, Bring Diversity to your Team, and Let Others Change your Idea--Answers to your Rebels at Work Questions In modern society, I feel like growing your own food and trying to be self-sustaining is the ultimate act of rebellion!” Vitale writes—hence the book title. It’s also something that can be taken on by anyone, anywhere, he argues, including in a tiny front yard or on an apartment balcony. Vitale should know: His rental’s 26-by-16-foot garden produces enough fruits and vegetables that he doesn’t have to shop for them anymore, and that’s without the help of chemical fertilizers or tilling the soil. To apply this method to your growing space, if you have a lawn or weeds all over the ground, just put a layer of cardboard on top of it, making sure that the cardboard doesn’t have any tape on it (if you’ve reused a delivery box, like me, for example!). Ink should be fine, as in most cases it is vegetable ink on brown cardboard and not shiny as it often is with bits of plastic. Add the spices and massage the salt into the cabbage for about five minutes, then leave it to stand for a further five minutes. You should see a lot of brine start to come out of the cabbage and you can give it a helping hand by squeezing it.

This story matters because Alessandro Vitale – or Spicy Moustache as he is known on social media to his three-million-plus followers – is a content generator whose whole life now revolves around urban gardening with a mission to grow almost all his own food, and an equally strong mission to let nothing go to waste. Picture a little boy out foraging and fishing in the land and lakes close to his small-town Italian home with his beloved maternal grandfather, Pietro, whom he remembers as someone who lived his whole life aligned with Nature.Floral Retro Rebel Shirt, Comfort Color Shirt, Flower Tee Shirt, Botanical Tee,Oversized Shirt,Rebel Shirt,Gardener Shirt,Retro Flower Shirt Over the course of 3 years (Pepper closed in 2013), hundreds of middle school students became Rebel Gardeners- engaged in the project-based learning experience of growing, cooking, serving, selling, and eating good food – all the while writing/editing/filming/drawing/calculating/experimenting and constantly documenting their activities to learn from and teach others. Now schools throughout West Philadelphia are engaged in food education projects inspired by the Rebel Gardeners. He took me gardening but also foraging for white asparagus and apples. He taught me so much that I carried inside me even though once he passed I had nowhere to go and garden again.”

The compost is organic matter that is always disintegrating, and micro- and macroorganisms are eating it and excreting more nutrients than they would otherwise if you had disturbed and disrupted these creatures’ activities and the natural balance. Add another layer of well-matured compost, tamping it down by walking over it to make sure it’s firm. While walking on it, you won’t have to worry about compaction because the soil is strong enough to support the construction. In roughly six to eight months, the compost level in your raised bed will fall because microorganisms eat organic waste and excrete nutrients into the soil. Did you know cardboard could kill weeds for you? It’s just one gardening practice that Alessandro Vitale, a Londoner by way of Italy with a lifelong passion for growing things, champions in his new book, Rebel Gardening: A Beginner’s Handbook to Creating an Organic Urban Garden, for both its regenerative benefits and novice friendliness.

The cardboard acts as light exclusion for weeds on the ground, which will slowly die. The weed will decompose in a few months and the roots of the plants planted over it will just penetrate the cardboard and feed on the nutrient-rich substrate underneath. When you apply the cardboard, if you add two pieces or more, make sure to overlap them so you don’t leave gaps. If you don’t have any weeds and your soil is almost clean, you don’t need cardboard!

Failure is an essential component of gardening and of being a Rebel at Work. It’s only been in the past year that, as a gardener, I’ve become comfortable in ripping out plants that didn’t work out where I put them. I used to think such bad outcomes were an indictment of my underdeveloped gardening skills. Now I understand that only through experimentation can I learn what works and what doesn’t. Now Rebels at Work probably can’t afford too many bad ideas, but if you can master the art of tiny pivots—small experiments that can test some aspect of a proposal, you can learn to leverage “failure.” Before gardeners invest real money in a new flower bed, they should first test just a plant here or there to see what works in the soil and light. Quirky, cool and rammed with tips for getting started and keeping going growing your own food, the book contains a quote early on that I think captures something of Vitale’s essential spirit and explains why his social media channels have a combined following of over 3.7 million and rising.After school, Vitale worked for a local company making handmade shoes, and it wasn’t until he moved to London in October 2015 that the seeds his grandfather had sown sprouted. Here, I show how to turn any disused space into a garden ready to thrive by first establishing weed-free pathways, then raised beds where you will grow your plants. Creating Weed-Free Pathways The soil will also increase the moisture retention capabilities so you won’t have to water as much as in normal garden beds. The beauty of this method is that you can start planting your plants straightaway and start growing your own food as soon as you make your garden bed.