Possible one of the most wonderful gardening books I’ve read for ages! It’s got tons of useful charts in!

The Organic Gardeners Handbook

The Organic Gardeners Handbook by Michael Littlewood is a really practical book.

It starts off really usefully by having a list of contents and then a list of illustrations so if you want to refer back to a particular image you can find it really easily.
It starts off with the basics about soil and climate giving you more of an understanding of how these affect you as a gardener.

The planning of your plot is discussed with several sections explaining about crop rotation and cropping plans. One of the nice charts explains how far apart to plant things in an 8x4ft bed and gives you totals on how many plants of each type you’ll get in it!
The section on the ground explains about soil, fertilisers, nutrients, minerals, compost and manures. For instance did you know that microbes make up 1% of the volume of soil?
With useful advice on checking your soil, acidity, and structure you’ll get a good understanding about how important the soil in your garden or allotment is. A useful chart is about plants and soil types, pointing out which will grow well and which won’t, in certain soil types.

Nutrient cycles – carbon and nitrogen are explained.
With an good discussion on plant requirements of minerals and minor elements, and major plant nutrients.

the section on compost is good too and will give a newbie plenty of advice about starting a compost pile!
Planting and protection are other very useful chapters – the whole book is absolutely crammed with practical and useful information!
You will feel educated after reading this book and it’ll be a very useful resource for your home bookshelf!

The Organic Gardeners Handbook is highly recommended!