Rebel Gardening: A beginner’s handbook to organic urban gardening

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Do you know a gardener, greener, community gardener or adopter of feral lands who's digging for a better society? Perhaps there's someone in your life who's on a mission to change the world one vegetable patch at a time? Let us know below about the projects you find inspiring and perhaps we'll feature them here. Rebel Gardening is full of vital information to give your garden its own spotlight. The education and knowledge shared are impressive, there is no gatekeeping, only useful information. As our high streets wither in the shadow of recession, radical gardeners are reimagining our shared social spaces as green ones. We'll meet the people following in the muddy bootprints of Ebenezer Howard, creator of the original garden city, Letchworth: like the team behind Cardiff's vertical gardening project, How Green Is Your Alley? Or Elephant and Castle's original guerilla gardening Richard Reynolds, currently busy with his Mobile Gardeners project.

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. Learn how to make vegan honey with dandelions, establish a micro-orchard, or brew a natural antibiotic from garlic. 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.

Depending on how historical we're feeling we may look at the roots of radical gardening too. The Green Guerillas of 1970s New York, the original community gardeners and throwers of seed-bombs. And the UK's own Meanwhile Gardens near Westbourne Park, where the wasteland turned adventure garden boasted the UK's first skateboard pit. Many gardeners struggle with growing lettuce in the middle of summer; sitting in direct sunlight causes it to bolt and go into flower. Thanks to your small space, you can succeed with plants that people with larger gardens will struggle to grow. You just have to be mindful of how the sun moves. You don’t need a big garden to reconnect with nature. Grow and eat fresh, organic food using nature’s own principles as your guide:

The one area that didn’t work for me is that in his quest for sustainability he uses quite a lot of containers I wouldn’t consider optimal, especially for organic gardening. Not only does he use lots of plastic containers with no talk about how plastics degrade and are taken up in the soil, but he recommends planting food crops in old tires (lined with plastic). I commend him for reusing materials and caring for the environment, but I personally would not feel great about using those materials to grow food and wish he’d at least discussed the topic for new gardeners who might not know about potential health risks. Those of us growing for children or pregnant women need to be especially mindful of the risks.Never create food waste again by creating compost in an odourless composting system that can be kept inside.