NO-WASTE ORGANIC GARDENING

Recycle and reuse your way to a less wasteful and more environmentally friendly garden with this collection of handy tips and tricks.

Reviewer Catherine Smalley is a freelance writer and gardener.

From reusing plastic food containers to use as seed trays and cloches, to making your own compost, eco-friendly gardening goes hand in hand with saving money and being more resourceful. US green-living author Shawna Coronado takes inspiration from her Second World War-era grandmothers to create this timely collection of practical tips on how to reduce, reuse and recycle in the garden.

Collecting seeds in a paper bag or laying down cardboard to suppress weeds might seem obvious to some, but other suggestions are quite novel – I had never thought of using coffee filters to prevent soil leaking from drainage holes. Even for gardening sages, there are clever tricks on offer here.

One of the book’s greatest strengths lies in its simplification of organic techniques. In her friendly and colloquial style, Coronado offers the most straightforward explanation of no-dig gardening I have ever come across and demystifies the art of making compost; ingredients are broken down into carbon-rich ‘browns’ and nitrogen-rich ‘greens’, and we are advised to keep the pile ‘as moist as a wrung-out sponge’. I particularly enjoyed the simple recipes for manure tea and soap-based insecticide – a welcome antidote to the rows of chemicals found in many a garden shed.

At times, the text can feel slightly lightweight and the explanations of how each action helps to avoid waste become repetitive, but the spirit of ingenuity that runs through the book makes this forgivable.

Now, and into the future, gardeners will by necessity have to be more resourceconscious, and through her funky wine bottle watering cans, clever rubbish bin rain barrels and colourful upcycled garden furniture, Coronado shows that such challenges can in fact be a source of creativity, and even fun.