How to start growing your own food

There are many things that Lolo Houbein makes look easy. She’s an amazing woman, and her book, One Magic Square: Growing your own food on one square metre, has been a bestseller at Wakefield Press for several years now. She has inspired many of the most unlikely veggie gardeners. But the trick is in showing everyone how easy it is – as you’ll see when you read this, the introduction to her book. It turns out, the best way to grow your own food is just to start!

One Magic Square by Lolo Houbein

To start growing your own food without delay, put down this book, go out in the garden and select a spot in the sun. Dig over one square metre with a garden fork and remove all the weeds by hand. If digging up lawn, cut out the sods with a spade, roots and all, and stack them upside down under a tree as mulch. As you can see clearly already, you do not need to have the most sophisticated tools for the job. The basic hand tools on https://bestofmachinery.com will get you by with most things in gardening. You just have to be resilient or resourceful.

Come inside again and thoroughly wash your hands and clean your nails, as you must always do after working with soil. Pick up this book and in Part One select what you want to grow in your first Salad Plot. Make a list and go out to buy seedlings or seeds for your chosen vegetables and one small bag of blood and bone (B&B), since you don’t yet have compost and composted manure. If you dug a square hole in the lawn, you may need to fill it with a bag of potting soil and plan to put in deep edgings to keep the grass roots out. There must be something you can recycle!

Return home to read descriptions of the vegetables you have bought in the List of Common Vegetables in Part Four. Put a bookmark at every vegetable you would like to grow. It’s easy to grow your own spuds. No more lugging home 10 kg bags – lug manure instead. Love corn on the cob? They’re easy too. So are artichokes, asparagus and rhubarb.

One Magic Square by Lolo Houbein

One of Lolo’s hand-drawn vegie patch designs

Go outside again and rake a few handfuls of B&B through the square, loosening the soil to a depth of 15 cm. Water it in. Now plant your seeds and seedlings according to your chosen Salad Plot plan. Water again. Go indoors to scrub your hands and nails as a surgeon would.

You are now a food gardener!

Want access to Lolo’s complete One Magic Square how-to guide? You can read more about the book and purchase a copy here, and scroll down on the same page for ebook options. Get started straight away!

The Ultimate Wakefield Press Christmas Gift Guide

Alright, let’s keep this snappy. You guys need gift ideas, and we’ve got a book for every possible need.* So welcome to the patented Ultimate Wakefield Press Christmas Gift Guide.**

For adventure-packed holiday reading, try the Steve West thrillers, centring around an ex-AFL star geologist with a heart of gold. Start with Prohibited Zone, set around the Woomera Detention Centre, then move on Ecstasy Lake, which is about a literal goldmine in the middle of the desert.

For fiction fans, Cassie Flanagan Willanski’s Here Where We Live has been making waves online and is a big awards contender. Every single reader has loved this short story collection. Or go for our Miles Franklin longlisted bestseller The Hands, by Stephen Orr. This story of a family surviving on a drought-stricken cattle farm is beautiful, heart-breaking, but not without hope.

Prohibited Zone Christmas Gift GuideEcstasy Lake Christmas Gift GuideHere Where We Live Christmas Gift GuideThe Hands Christmas Gift Guide

For art loversThe Art of Science is proving to be a winner over the holiday season. Showcasing the art (and history) of Nicolas Baudin’s expedition to Australia at beginning of the 19th century, these illustrations will make you see familiar animals with entirely new eyes. Or there’s always Dogs in Australian Art. Got a relative who loves dogs or Aussie art? Present: sorted.

For the foodie in your life, and especially the locavores, you have to have a look at Helen Bennetts’s newly released Willunga Almonds, which recounts the history of this humble nut in Australia alongside mouthwatering but easy recipes. Or there’s the CWA’s Calendar of Cakes, which will see you covered for cake recipes throughout 2017.

Art of Science Christmas Gift GuideDogs in Australian Art Christmas GuideWillunga Almonds Christmas Gift GuideCalendar of Cakes Christmas Gift Guide

 

For the biography buff, you can’t go past Red Professor, the biography of Fred Rose. Shortlisted for the Prime Minister’s Awards, and the catalyst of a lot of ‘were they/weren’t they’ conversations about possible Communist Party members in Australia, the press are saying that this one’s set to be a classic. Or pick up a copy of An Unsentimental Bloke, the National Biography Award-winning account of the life of the great writer C.J. Dennis.

For gardeners, Trevor Nottle’s Endless Pleasure is the ultimate compendium of garden collectables, showcasing weird and wonderful types of secateurs, hoes, spades – even tyre swans and man traps. Or get back to basics with Lolo Houbein’s One Magic Square. No one else has managed to make it so easy for so many people to grow their own food.

Red Professor Christmas Gift GuideUnsentimental Bloke Christmas Gift GuideEndless Pleasure Christmas Gift GuideOne Magic Square Christmas Gift GuideThere are so so many more possibilities, and for the actual Ultimate Wakefield Press Gift Guide you should go to our website. Still, if you can’t find what you’re looking for here, send us a line with your beloved’s Christmas gift requirements, and we’ll send you some suggestions.

Just another Christmas service from the Wakefield team!

 

* Not actually every possible need. Just some needs. Or maybe needs that you didn’t realise you had. Look, I’m trying to get at the fact that we don’t have highly specialised books about, say, how to fly helicopters. You should probably get training for that though, really.

** Not actually patented. Ain’t no one got the money for that.