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Start Gardening - The Basics and Beyond
| Start date: | |
| Duration: | Up to 18 months |
| Formal prerequisite: | None |
| Certificate awarded: | Yes |
| Fee: | £145.00 |
This course is all about how to get close to this huge hobby and to be able to make a success of ones labours. True there are some details which can be easily grasped about how to make one's soil productive and how to make use of the garden space. The focus is principally on growing Vegetables and Fruit organically, but there is lots more on the garden as a whole. Growing food has never been easier, it can be fun, with the added bonus via healthy food, healthy physical activity and healthy for the economics of home grown with some to give away.
| Lesson 1 | Vegetables - This lesson covers the principles of vegetable cultivation, soils, crop rotation, plant nutrition, growing from seeds, protected cropping and irrigation. It is a comprehensive guide to help you start growing your own vegetables. |
| Lesson 2 | Soils, Fruits and Fertilisers - This lessons looks at soil, texture, structure, water, organic matter, cultivation and properties. It then moves on to look at fruit growing including Top Fruit, Wall Fruit, Soft Fruit, pruning and training, rootstocks, pests and diseases, harvesting and storage. The lesson finished with details on fertilisers, growing media and types of compost. |
| Lesson 3 | Lawns - This lesssons looks at lawns, establishing from seed or turf, site preparation, maintenance, equipement, establishing meadows, meadow flowers and meadow grasses. |
| Lesson 4 | Plant Selection, Establishment and Maintenance - This lesson looks at selecting plants, site prepartion and planting techniques, maintenance of plants, flowers for cutting, pruning, pruning equipment, hand tools and pest and diseases. |
| Lesson 5 | Garden Planning - There is a new focus on garden planning thanks to the television programmes now devoted to this subject. This lesson covers Surveying techniques, site appraisals, case studies and example surveys. It then moves on to look at the principles and elements of garden design including line, shape, mass, form, space, texture, colour, rhythm, balance and symmetry, porportion and scale and unity. It looks at garden styles such as formal and informal. It then focuses on hard and soft landscaping, conservation issues, native trees and shrubs. This is a comprehensive lesson and has been adapted from our RHS lesson on Garden Design. |
Special notes
This five lesson course has been developed from our Principles of Gardening course and contains over 680 pages of study material, it is designed as an introduction to gardening that can be added upon with further lessons at a later date. This course comes with a free copy of the RHS Gardening Techniques book rrp. £30.00 when you pay in full.
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