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

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Brainstorm Better, Bring Diversity to your Team, and Let Others Change your Idea--Answers to your Rebels at Work Questions

Organic gardening expert Alessandro Vitale wants you to embrace the living soiland 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.This is a fantastic gardening book for new gardeners but experienced gardeners are likely to learn something too, especially with the international organic gardening techniques that he highlights. Vitale goes into all the steps in setting up your garden even in urban environments and focuses on doing it frugally and sustainably. He also talks about pests, watering, companion plants, compost, and tons more. He gives lots of instructions for projects too, and real photos of him and his garden are featured throughout. Four and a half stars. Full of information. This would be a superlative choice for public and school library acquisition, home use, allotments/gardening groups, smallholders (with or without urban locations), and similar. The language and spelling are UK English (marrow, aubergine, etc), but will pose no problems in context for readers elsewhere. Tutorial and recipe lists have measurements given in metric units with imperial (American) units in parentheses (yay!). This story matters because Alessandro Vitale – or Spicy Moustache as he is known on social media to his three-million-plus followers – is a content generator whose whole life now revolves around urban gardening with a mission to grow almost all his own food, and an equally strong mission to let nothing go to waste. Place the cabbage in a large mixing bowl. Blanch the cabbage with boiling water, being careful that the bowl is big enough to fit the water in. You don’t want boiling water spilling all over you. The cardboard acts as light exclusion for weeds on the ground, which will slowly die. The weed will decompose in a few months and the roots of the plants planted over it will just penetrate the cardboard and feed on the nutrient-rich substrate underneath. When you apply the cardboard, if you add two pieces or more, make sure to overlap them so you don’t leave gaps. If you don’t have any weeds and your soil is almost clean, you don’t need cardboard!

After school, Vitale worked for a local company making handmade shoes, and it wasn’t until he moved to London in October 2015 that the seeds his grandfather had sown sprouted. One of Vitale’s gardening heroes is Charles ‘No Dig’ Dowding, author of multiple best-selling gardening books, whom he first met through a mutual acquaintance at the tail end of 2021. “I have always admired him and so I had gone to an open day with a friend of mine who had done many courses with him, and he introduced us.” From techniques to the tools you need, and any other things you might need to build it is all explained. For every item you will need, the diagrams show just how to do things. From your own irrigation system to saving seeds. Alessandro Vitale has taken the time to motivate you into having your own organic urban garden. If you think you don’t have the space, he will help you realize you can still have your own garden. Worried you don’t have a green thumb on you, the guidance provided will get you to see that you do. Weigh the cabbage to work out how much salt you will need. It should be 2–5% of the weight of the cabbage. If you don’t have scales, don’t worry. The average cabbage will need about 3 tablespoons of salt, and happily you don’t have to be exact.In reality, Vitale, who says he had originally dreamed of becoming a tattoo artist, was a long way from the nearest wild river, mountain or lake, never mind his home. He was renting a house with barely any outdoor space in North London, and so he started growing chillies in a pot on the windowsill. The compost is organic matter that is always disintegrating, and micro- and macroorganisms are eating it and excreting more nutrients than they would otherwise if you had disturbed and disrupted these creatures’ activities and the natural balance.

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.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. One of my main inspirations and gardening heroes is Charles Dowding, who taught me all I know about a method called No-Dig Gardening, where the principles focus on not disrupting the life within the soil.