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!

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.

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!