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    How to Guzzle Your Garden
    How to Guzzle Your Garden
    How to Guzzle Your Garden
    Ebook147 pages1 hour

    How to Guzzle Your Garden

    By Jackie French

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    About this ebook


    Children will love guzzling their garden - and it's not too much work as this book will show them. Jackie French is well-known as a gardening expert from her articles in many magazines and newspapers and her tV spot on 'Burke's Backyard'. In this book she will describe and show children how to easily and quickly set up a garden and be able to eat thing from it with little financial outlay and not too much work! they will be munching their garden in no time at all. this book will also be terrific for schools and other groups to use in teaching children all about growing edible plants. Ages 10+
    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherHarperCollins Publishers Australia
    Release dateOct 1, 2010
    ISBN9780730450610
    How to Guzzle Your Garden
    Author

    Jackie French

    Jackie French AM is an award-winning writer, wombat negotiator, the 2014–2015 Australian Children's Laureate and the 2015 Senior Australian of the Year. In 2016, Jackie became a Member of the Order of Australia for her contribution to children's literature and her advocacy for youth literacy. She is regarded as one of Australia's most popular children's authors and writes across all genres — from picture books, history, fantasy, ecology and sci-fi, to her much-loved historical fiction for a variety of age groups. 'A book can change a child's life. A book can change the world' was the primary philosophy behind Jackie's two-year term as Laureate. jackiefrench.com facebook.com/authorjackiefrench

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      Book preview

      How to Guzzle Your Garden - Jackie French

      Chapter 1

      When I was a Kid…

      image 3

      When I was a kid I HATED gardening.

      I thought gardening was holding the hose over the gerberas on Sunday afternoon or Dad swearing at the lawn mower or my grandmother getting cross as she pruned the roses and a thorn got stuck in her thumb and she wasn’t able to have Christmas dinner.

      As far as I was concerned anyone who liked gardening was weird!

      Then suddenly I found myself living on an avocado orchard (which is a long story and I won’t go into it here) and I discovered that gardening wasn’t about pushing lawn mowers and muttering at the roses.

      It was about eating.

      I like eating. It’s one of my favourite activities. And that is one of the reasons I like gardening.

      (I also like gardening now because it’s exciting to see things grow. Tiny seeds turn into giant trees or flowers where there was nothing before. There’s always something happening when you have a garden.)

      I’ve also discovered that having a garden doesn’t have to be a lot of work.

      Okay, some people like having gardens they have to weed and mow and spray. There are people who like sticking pins into themselves too. (They’re called masochists.)

      But a garden doesn’t have to be hard work.

      There are many things that grow if you just stick them in the ground, water them once or twice and give them a feed every year or two.

      And then eat them.

      Which is what this book is about.

      Chapter 2

      How to Have a Garden You Can Guzzle

      image 4

      We grow lots of different varieties of fruit at our place – about forty-six sorts of apples, five sorts of oranges, plums, avocados, custard apples, cherries, peaches, pears, walnuts…okay, you probably don’t want me to list all of them (it’d take the whole page anyway).

      There’s never a time in the year when you can’t roam around our garden and munch at least six sorts of fruit, not to mention heaps of different vegetables.

      We grow a LOT of fruit. The birds feast on cherries and avocados and apples and strawberries, and the wombats munch fallen lemons (wombats are weird sometimes) and the wallabies guzzle oranges and the juice runs down their stomachs so they’re sticky and disgusting…

      How do I get my garden like this?

      (Perhaps without the wombats and wallabies.)

      You just start planting.

      Many types of fruit trees don’t fruit for four or five years, or even longer, and most of them take a lot of work, but there are some fruits you can plant that will give you stuff to eat in the first year.

      If you plant strawberry plants in a pot today you might be eating strawberries in a few months time! Spit out the plum stones from the plums in your lunch box and you can grow a plum tree!

      Some plants really have to be looked after – watered and weeded and fed. But others just grow themselves. When you learn how to feed and water plants you’ll see how easy it is.

      It’s like riding a bicycle. It’s hard at first, then you don’t even think about it. The first few plants you grow may be hard work, then suddenly you think ‘Hey, this is simple! Why didn’t I do this before?’

      But my mum and dad say we don’t have

      room in our garden for anything else.

      Aha…be sneaky.

      Have you got a bare fence? Plant a passionfruit vine.

      Have you got somewhere you can put a pot? Grow watermelons.

      You can grow a cumquat tree in a tub on the patio.

      You can grow potatoes in a bucket.

      You can grow strawberries in a hanging basket.

      There’s always room for more plants, if you really think about it. Keep reading and I’ll show you how!

      But we don’t even have a garden.

      We live in a flat!

      No excuse. Grow a pot of strawberries on a sunny windowsill, or a dwarf peach tree in a pot on the patio, or even parsley in your joggers, or transform your school so you can spend all lunchtime wandering from tree to tree guzzling…

      ANYONE can have a garden to gobble – even if you live in the tiniest flat in the biggest city.

      But I don’t have any money to buy plants!

      Who cares! Just plant the seeds from the fruit in your lunch box.

      image 5image 6

      Chapter 3

      How to Grow Trees to Munch

      image 7

      Most fruit trees take a lot of work.

      They get fruit fly (those tiny grubs that wriggle all over the place which you sometimes find in fruit) and they need pruning, because the fruit only grows on new wood (and you need to keep pruning so the tree grows more new wood).

      Forget about trees like that!

      The fruit trees in this book are dead easy. And they grow just about anywhere.

      Why should I bother?

      Because in a few years you’ll get to eat the fruit.

      Because the birds’ll eat the fruit too and you can watch them guzzling and squabbling and yelling at each other to see who gets the best bit.

      Because sitting up in a tree laden with fruit is one of the best spots in the world.

      Because your house will look a heck of a lot more interesting with a few fruit trees.

      Because you can ask your friends over to pick fruit, which is fun.

      Because it’s fascinating to watch a miserable-looking stick turn into a fat big-branched fruit tree.

      Because you’ll be helping the environment and it will make you happier.

      Where can I grow a tree?

      You can grow a fruit tree almost anywhere that has at least four hours of sunlight a day, plenty of room for the tree to grow, and good deep soil.

      Get your school to plant some in the playground or in a nature strip so everyone can eat fruit at lunch time.

      Get your local council to plant trees along the footpaths, so all the kids can slurp the fruit as you go home from school.

      Ask your parents to plant one in your backyard, so in a few years time you can munch the lot.

      How much do trees cost?

      Most trees cost between $12 and $15 to buy.

      But I don’t have any money!

      Who cares? The giant multi-million dollar peach orchards near here were started by planting peach stones collected from a rubbish bin. All fruit trees can be grown from seed (except bananas, which grow from suckers – new bits that grow out the side of the original tree).

      If you don’t have money to buy fruit trees, you can plant your lunch – I’m serious.

      If you’ve got a bit of fruit that has seeds, you can grow a fruit tree. Turn to Chapter Seven.

      image 8

      Planting a tree

      Step 1. Look at the size of the roots.

      Step 2. Dig a hole TWICE as wide and deep as the roots.

      image 9

      Step 3. Take all the bits of grass and most of the rocks out of the soil you dug from the hole.

      Step 4. Mound a LITTLE of the soil in

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