{"id":1737,"date":"2017-03-06T12:00:12","date_gmt":"2017-03-06T01:30:12","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.wakefieldpress.com.au\/blog\/?p=1737"},"modified":"2021-04-06T18:07:23","modified_gmt":"2021-04-06T07:37:23","slug":"how-start-growing-your-own-food","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.wakefieldpress.com.au\/blog\/2017\/03\/how-start-growing-your-own-food\/","title":{"rendered":"How to start growing your own food"},"content":{"rendered":"

There are many things that Lolo Houbein makes look easy. She’s an amazing woman, and her book,\u00a0<\/em>One Magic Square: Growing your own food on one square metre<\/a>, 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 \u2013 as you’ll see when you read this, the introduction to her book. It turns out, the best way to grow your own food\u00a0is just to start!<\/em><\/p>\n

\"One<\/a><\/p>\n

To start growing your own food without delay, put down this book, go out in the\u00a0garden and select a spot in the sun. Dig over one square metre with a garden\u00a0fork and remove all the weeds by hand. If digging up lawn, cut out the sods with\u00a0a 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\u00a0https:\/\/bestofmachinery.com<\/a> will get you by with most things in gardening. You just have to be resilient or resourceful.<\/p>\n

Come inside again and thoroughly wash your hands and clean your nails,\u00a0as you must always do after working with soil. Pick up this book and in Part One\u00a0select what you want to grow in your first Salad Plot. Make a list and go out to\u00a0buy seedlings or seeds for your chosen vegetables and one small bag of blood and\u00a0bone (B&B), since you don\u2019t yet have compost and composted manure. If you dug\u00a0a square hole in the lawn, you may need to fill it with a bag of potting soil and\u00a0plan to put in deep edgings to keep the grass roots out. There must be something\u00a0you can recycle!<\/p>\n

Return home to read descriptions of the vegetables you have bought in the\u00a0List of Common Vegetables in Part Four. Put a bookmark at every vegetable\u00a0you would like to grow. It\u2019s easy to grow your own spuds. No more lugging\u00a0home 10 kg bags \u2013 lug manure instead. Love corn on the cob? They\u2019re easy too.\u00a0So are artichokes, asparagus and rhubarb.<\/p>\n

\"One<\/a>

One of Lolo’s hand-drawn vegie patch designs<\/p><\/div>\n

Go outside again and rake a few handfuls of B&B through the square,\u00a0loosening the soil to a depth of 15 cm. Water it in. Now plant your seeds and\u00a0seedlings according to your chosen Salad Plot plan. Water again. Go indoors to\u00a0scrub your hands and nails as a surgeon would.<\/p>\n

You are now a food gardener!<\/p>\n

Want access to Lolo’s complete\u00a0<\/em>One Magic Square how-to guide? You can read more about the book and purchase a copy here<\/a>, and scroll down on the same page for ebook options. Get started straight away!<\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

There are many things that Lolo Houbein makes look easy. She’s an amazing woman, and her book,\u00a0One Magic Square: Growing your own food on one square metre, has been a bestseller at Wakefield Press for several years now. She has … Continue reading →<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"advanced_seo_description":"","jetpack_seo_html_title":"","jetpack_seo_noindex":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":true,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[107],"tags":[25,545,544,542,543,546,547],"class_list":["post-1737","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-extract","tag-gardening","tag-growing-your-own-food","tag-lolo-houbein","tag-one-magic-square","tag-outside-the-magic-square","tag-vegetables","tag-veggies"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p4v1Of-s1","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack-related-posts":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.wakefieldpress.com.au\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1737","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.wakefieldpress.com.au\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.wakefieldpress.com.au\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.wakefieldpress.com.au\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.wakefieldpress.com.au\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1737"}],"version-history":[{"count":9,"href":"https:\/\/www.wakefieldpress.com.au\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1737\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":4307,"href":"https:\/\/www.wakefieldpress.com.au\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1737\/revisions\/4307"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.wakefieldpress.com.au\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1737"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.wakefieldpress.com.au\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1737"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.wakefieldpress.com.au\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1737"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}