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

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He took me gardening but also foraging for white asparagus and apples. He taught me so much that I carried inside me even though once he passed I had nowhere to go and garden again.” Do you live in the city and yearn for the space and time to grow your own food and live more connected with nature and the seasons? Rebel Gardening shows that anyone can grow a garden of delicious organic fruit and vegetables, wildlife-friendly wildflowers and abundant herbsin absolutely any urban space with a bit of know-how. Bring the vinegar or cider to a rolling boil in a large pan and add the cloves, bay leaves, mustard seeds, peppercorns and salt. Begin by adding a layer of less-decomposed compost (see Note, below), which is less mature and less rich in nutrients, to a raised bed. Alternatively, you could add a mix of mushroom compost, mature horse manure and/or store-bought compost.

Cover the veg with the liquid and carefully close the lid tightly while it is still very hot. This should create a vacuum seal as the contents cool. Add the spices and massage the salt into the cabbage for about five minutes, then leave it to stand for a further five minutes. You should see a lot of brine start to come out of the cabbage and you can give it a helping hand by squeezing it. The soil will also increase the moisture retention capabilities so you won’t have to water as much as in normal garden beds. The beauty of this method is that you can start planting your plants straightaway and start growing your own food as soon as you make your garden bed.And, of course or I wouldn’t be writing about it here, gardening offers a series of lessons for Rebels at Work. Being a Rebel at Work calls upon your analytic talents. And the more experience you have as a Rebel, the smarter you will be about advocating for change in organizations. But beyond that… This is a beginner’s handbook for organic urban gardening. If you have seen Vitale’s videos on social media, you know how empowering and motivational a gardener he is. Rebel Gardening brings us all the action. Not only is the book put together in the best way, but the instructions or guides to create your garden are also helpful. I wish someone had told me sooner that gardening was a learning activity. Only by paying attention to how the plants behave under different conditions can you improve your gardening success rate. If you get into it, gardening is a deeply analytic activity. Sadly, Pietro died when his grandson Alessandro was just 10, but more than twenty years on, the grown-up version of that little boy still credits his grandfather with teaching him how to really connect to the land and its abundance and how to have fun doing that. Add the cauliflower, onions, carrots and celery and simmer for 10–15 minutes, until the veg is cooked but still firm.

The first Rebel Gardeners project started at Pepper Middle School in Southwest Philadelphia through a partnership between the students, parents, teachers, and staff at the school, staff at the Agatston Urban Nutrition Initiative, and students and faculty at the University of Pennsylvania. The focus of the project was working with a nearby community garden that was threatened to be demolished. Young people were trained as ethnographers and documented the old gardeners stories, and in the process learned how to grow food, and why to grow food, themselves. 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.This is the ultimate beginner’s guide to establishing and tending an organic kitchen garden in any urban space, no matter how small, written by the YouTuber and TikToker known as Spicy Moustache. The shady spots are never as shady as you think and the sunny spots are never as sunny. This partly explains why failure is an essential component of gardening. Just a few feet of separation can produce significant changes in light. I once planted two rose bushes within three feet of each other on the southeast exposure of my lawn. One prospered but the other faltered because of the dappled sunlight that reached it through overhanging trees. When I moved the laggard to what I had previously thought of as the too-shady side of my lawn, it doubled in size. Rebels can sometimes make facile assumptions about what parts of the organization would be most receptive to change. The team you think is ideal for your prototype because the leader is so friendly may actually harbor bamboo spikes underneath its surface. Go beyond superficial appearances.

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.

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Brainstorm Better, Bring Diversity to your Team, and Let Others Change your Idea--Answers to your Rebels at Work Questions 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.” To apply this method to your growing space, if you have a lawn or weeds all over the ground, just put a layer of cardboard on top of it, making sure that the cardboard doesn’t have any tape on it (if you’ve reused a delivery box, like me, for example!). Ink should be fine, as in most cases it is vegetable ink on brown cardboard and not shiny as it often is with bits of plastic. Do you live in the city and yearn for the space and time to grow your own food and live more connected with nature and the seasons? Rebel Gardening shows that anyone can grow a garden of delicious organic fruit and vegetables, wildlife-friendly wildflowers and abundant herbs in absolutely any urban space with a bit of know-how. Organic gardening expert Alessandro Vitale wants you to embrace the living soil and 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. Alessandro shares a plan for any type of space and how to tend it through the year. Learn about companion gardening, saving seeds, DIY raised beds and everything to allow your garden to flourish. The healing and planet-protecting power of gardening is within your grasp!