The guru of No Dig writes about growing plants together, vegetables that thrive when planted with others rather than just a mish-mash (I speak about myself here).

There are different types of companion planting. The one I always think of is growing something that prevents bugs/pests/diseases from attacking the main plant such as tagetes to keep whitefly off tomatoes. The only thing is, I have never found it to work. I saw a video of Sarah Raven’s gardener planting a small-leaved salvia under a rose to prevent whitefly/blackfly/anything else. Well, I have this combination already in my garden and the rose is the only rose with greenfly all over the buds.

However, let us not be put off. Dowding talks about catch cropping where one plant matures before the other thus leaving more space, succession using interplanting where one crop finishes and the second already planted takes over and succession using intersowing which relies on direct sowing so best used towards the summer.

Each of the pairings is described, often with pictures and is then followed by the varieties of vegetable growing, length of time from seed to harvest and timings for sowing each veg. For me, this is the most useful element of the book.

On our allotment site, half plots are now given out because the waiting list is so long. If you are short of space and want to grow the maximum amount of veg you can, this book would be invaluable, but I am not convinced that it is necessary. I am going to make a note of some of the varieties of veg grown, though.