Grow Food for Free
The easy, sustainable, zero-cost way to a plentiful harvest
Huw Richards · DK, 2020
How to start growing with essentially no budget — pallet beds, upcycled containers, free seed, and a 52-week record of the author actually doing it.
What's actually in it
- Finding and preparing free growing space — yards, terraces, balconies, containers.
- Sourcing free materials — repurposing wooden pallets instead of buying raised beds, making containers and seed pots from household waste, collecting rainwater.
- Composting, which the whole approach pivots on.
- Sourcing free seed, including from things already in your kitchen.
- Growing guides for 30+ crops with step-by-step stages and photography.
- Weeds, pests and diseases; a 52-week journal of the author's own zero-cost year; and selling surplus to fund expanding the plot.
What it actually says
Specifics from inside the book — so you can judge whether it's telling you anything you don't already know.
- A pallet converted into a bed, with the dimensions and the fixing detail: one pallet makes a 1.2 × 1.2m bed two planks deep, with cross planks positioned 15cm from either end.
- A composting ratio you can actually remember: two buckets of brown material to every one bucket of green. Turned monthly with fine material you might have usable compost in six to eight months; most takes about a year. Leaf mould gets at least two years.
- A stated position against fussing: he doesn't sieve compost before sowing fine seed like lettuce or tomatoes, because the seed germinates anyway.
- Planning numbers a beginner can act on: about 1 × 2m of ground supplies a family of four with salad leaves from mid-spring to late autumn; even a spot getting only four hours of direct sun suits most crops; he takes frost precautions whenever any forecast shows 4°C or below.
- He defines his own terms honestly: "free" means no money changing hands — explicitly not "no effort".
Buy it if
You want to start this season and you don't want to spend anything to find out whether you enjoy it.
Don't buy it if
Anyone wanting a reference book. Thirty-plus crops in 224 pages that also carry all the resourcing material and a year-long journal means each crop gets limited space.
Where it falls short
A lot of the "free" premise rests on having a community around you — seed swaps, freecycling, borrowing tools, being given materials. If you're rural and isolated, or new to an area, parts of it are harder to act on than the book suggests. No meaningful fruit content, and no month-by-month instructional spine — the journal is a record, not a calendar. Reviewer coverage of this title is thin and uniformly positive, which is worth knowing.
Who wrote it
Same author as Veg in One Bed — self-taught, mid-Wales, large online audience, no formal horticultural qualification we could verify. Worth saying about this book in particular: because the whole premise is growing from scavenged materials at no cost, the usual conflict between an author and the things they'd like you to buy is much weaker here than in almost any other gardening book. There is very little for anyone to sell you.
Where it was written
Mid-Wales. The 52-week journal is a real UK year.
The facts
- AuthorHuw Richards
- PublisherDK
- Published2020
- FormatHardback, 224 pages
- ISBN-13
9780241411995 - LevelBeginner
Checked against publisher listings, UK retailers and library records in August 2026. If any of this is wrong, tell us and we'll fix it.
Where to get it
Buying secondhand? Match the ISBN above — several books on this shelf have editions that look identical but aren't.