Allotment Books How to Grow WINTER VEGETABLES Charles Dowding Publisher Green Books 2011 Reviewed by Sue Berger. I have just purchased this new book and I am finding it fascinating and enormously helpful. Charles Dowding demonstrates that with careful planning, the vegetable patch can provide produce all year round. He describes true winter as under way by December and continuing until March. He then identifies and addresses the ‘hungry gap’ months, which he describes as a kind of second winter when in April, May and June, the garden can be almost bare of produce. Dowding explains that a well organised plot can be full in these winter months if planned for carefully and well ahead. With this in mind he provides an extensive month by month sowing, planting and growing calendar. Harvests for winter will mostly be sown and planted in mid-August through till early September. The timing is critical, so from the moment I started reading, I began filling my diary with reminders for sowing and planting in the months ahead. Based on his 30 years experience of organic vegetable growing, the book is full of excellent tips high-lighted in coloured boxes on each page. One such tip is to grow, at the end of a summer crop, a variety of seedlings that mature at the same rate. He identifies several groups and gives for example one collection namely spinach, chard, lettuce, endive, chicory and winter purslane. This group takes four or five weeks from sowing till ready to plant in the ground. He suggests sowing a mix of these seeds in plastic module trays with up o 60 cells. This will give a large selection of plants that can all be planted out at the same time to create a bed with a variety of different crops. There is an extensive chapter on under-cover growing in poly tunnels, greenhouses, cloches and cold frames to extend harvests. He’s very enthusiastic about home-made cloches and offers advice on materials for making them. The clear and realistic photographs throughout the book are as inspiring as the direct and simple text. I highly recommend it for extending productivity on the allotment. The book is available on Amazon for £10.03 - here.. Made with Xara © Hotwells & District Allotments Ltd 2007-2012 Website designed, implemented and maintained by HwDAA Webmaster