Master gardener Charles Dowding explains the skills and understandings you need for successful growing. His approach sometimes diverges from the mainstream because he assays and develops new or lesser-known methods for easier and better results.

Skills for Growing illustrates how you create planting plans and advise on succession and rotation, interplanting and multisowing, propagating plants, and quick ways to set them in the ground.

It gives detailed information on spacing, harvesting methods, timings, watering, and using covers for warmth and pest protection.

Dowding describes the skills needed for successful winter gardening, growing in containers and growing perennial vegetables and herbs.

The advice given in the book is based on having a clean and fertile area to grow vegetables. It may not be large, but that is fine: there are examples of how much food you can grow yearly in just one bed and containers.

This book contains 18 chapters, grouped into six parts. Each chapter is illustrated with captioned, full-color photographs from Dowding’s garden in the Southwest United Kingdom.