How To Grow Your Own Nuts

How to Grow Your Own Nuts

A comprehensive guide to growing, harvesting and processing nuts, written by forest gardening expert Martin Crawford. Nut trees are perennials, requiring little maintenance or soil cultivation, so it is no surprise that nuts are such a popular forest garden crop. A crucial source of protein and a delicious snack, nuts also have a number of surprising health benefits. They lower blood pressure, are full of antioxidants, and decrease the risk of heart and neurodegenerative diseases. Filled with gorgeous illustrations of trees and nuts, How to Grow Your Own Nuts contains old favourites like hazelnuts and walnuts alongside less common varieties such as hickories and butternuts and the exotically named chinkapin. It considers how nuts can be planted in a variety of ways: singly in a small area, in an orchard or nuttery, as silvopasture around grazing animals, in alley cropping between cereal crops or intercropping between fruit bushes. This beautiful guide also features a handy A-Z, which details nut trees' many secondary uses from timber, oil, dyes, fodder and cosmetics to medicines and honey. Martin also discusses how the beautiful spring blossom is attractive to bees, particularly from almond and sweet chestnut trees, making them excellent for supporting pollinators. Whether you are planning to grow nuts at home or commercially, this book is essential reading.

An Orchard Odyssey

Inspiring and practical, this is a lovely resource for anyone looking to grow fruit trees or start an orchard, whether in your garden or as a community project. For centuries, orchards have been a compelling and important part of our landscape. The sight of a fruit tree, blushing in blossom in the spring, and then laden with fresh fruit in the summer and autumn, can be truly enchanting, inspiring folklore and art. Not only do orchards provide bountiful fruit for families and communities, they are also attractive to pollinators such as bees, and make a wonderful habitat for birds. There are many ways of incorporating orchard living into your lifestyle, no matter how busy or short of space you are. Written by esteemed horticulturalist Naomi Slade, this gloriously illustrated resource illuminates the possibilities and enables you to make it a reality – whether you have a few fruit trees already or have always wanted an orchard of your own. An Orchard Odyssey shows you how to plant and care for your trees and suggests fruit trees suitable for different spaces. It also covers the benefits of orchard for conservation and biodiversity, orchard heritage, and the role of fruit trees in garden and landscape design. The guide promotes the 'five trees' principle of orchards, and encourages the reader to embrace the orchards in a way that is personal to them. Packed with practical ideas and inspiration, let this delightful book encourage you to re-engage with tree fruit in new ways: look at it the right way and everyone can have an orchard.

Growing Your Own Vegetables