'Twenty years of self-sufficiency and eight years working as a professional gardener underpins his book . [it] will tell you everything you ever need to know about maintaining soil fertility.' Independent Growing your own organic vegetables will give you fresher, tastier and more nutritious produce, while doing away with food miles, fossil fuel consumption and unnecessary packaging. This new and updated edition provides detailed information on how to make best use of whatever sized vegetable garden you have. It describes the principles of design and rotation, as well as suggestions for catch cropping, intercropping and succession planting in order to obtain two crops a year. The book also addresses climate change, explaining how gardeners will need to be more flexible, such as growing different crops at short notice and changing the way they grow traditional crops. In addition, it examines how different soil management techniques can be applied in response to hotter, cooler, wetter or drier weather. The techniques described are based on the author's forty years of organic gardening experience, including over twenty years of self-sufficiency and eight as a professional gardener growing vegetables and fruit in walled gardens.

In 2006 he graduated from the University of Reading with a soil science degree.