The Climate Change Resilient Vegetable Garden:

How to Grow Food in a Changing Climate

by Kim Stoddart

 

2025 has been an ‘interesting’ year, weather wise, here in the UK. Heavy rains caused severe flooding, much of the country experienced drought with hosepipe bans during spring and summer, and Storm Floris in August caused widespread damage. It certainly hasn’t been gardening as usual.

Thankfully Kim Stoddart’s beautiful book is packed with helpful, achievable advice for adapting our gardens to an ever changing climate. Kim writes with passion and enthusiasm. Her practical, down to earth advice is filled with hope and optimism, inspiring the reader with her can-do attitude.

 

“There are solutions, there are opportunities, and there is hope, if we all work together within our communities and with others for the sake of the planet. We can all make a difference, together. For person, plate, and planet.” Kim Stoddart

Climate Change Vegetable Gardening

The Climate Change Resilient Vegetable Garden is packed with achievable, low and no-cost ideas for making the garden more resilient to change. Her tips and advice are encouraging and informative for beginners, and more experienced gardeners. 

Kim clearly explains the kinds of problems that gardeners experience, and offers practical solutions for challenges including flooding, droughts, storms, prolonged pest cycles and water use restrictions. The Climate Change Resilient Garden teaches how to build resilience into your plot, with easy to follow regenerative solutions including breeding resilient plants, creating a biologically active healthy soil, directing water with bioswales and creating windbreaks to reduce damage from storms.

Set your planting free!

 

Kim’s gardening methods are not restricted by an established rule book of techniques. She encourages the reader to use their initiative and grow in a way that is ideal for their situation. Tips for increasing abundance and resilience include “free planting”: avoiding monocultures by growing in beds filled with mixed plantings.

The book is packed with ideas for repurposing, recycling and adapting what you already have. For several years Kim grew for free, writing about this journey in The Guardian, and this book is filled with her thrifty tips, all drawn from experience, to save money and reduce consumption.

Packed with really useful advice

The Climate Change Resilient Vegetable Garden will help you learn how to:

Foster adaptation by selectively breeding your favourite veggie varieties for local growing conditions

Nurture biologically active soils that are better able to support your plants

Create bioswales, berms, and rain gardens to improve your garden’s flood tolerance

Plant windbreaks, erect cold frames, and make mini hoop tunnels to protect plants from the wind, snow, and surprise frosts

Enhance biodiversity in your garden to increase pest predation and keep “bad” insects in check

Discover intensive planting techniques to improve yields while protecting your soil and reducing water usage

Select the most adaptable fruit and vegetable crops to grow and tend them in a climate change-savvy way

Recycle rainwater, repurpose household items, and live lightly on the land for a more resourceful gardening life

 

This will be a book that you’ll return to again and again. The chapters Climate Change SOS and Troubleshooting Guide are especially helpful, offering suggestions for what to do in all kinds of situations, from flooding to hosepipe bans. I am looking forward to implementing some of these ideas here at my homestead this winter.

Beautifully illustrated with art by Annie Davidson, and photography of Kim’s homestead, The Climate Change Resilient Garden will be a well-thumbed addition to your sustainability book shelf.

Kim’s wonderful, informative book is available to buy online as a paperback and also as an ebook.

The Climate Change Resilient Vegetable Garden: How to grow food in a changing climate is published by Cool Springs

“I love this book. It’s the savvy guide to future proofing your garden against the increasing extremes of weather through climate change.”

Frances Tophill – Gardeners’ World presenter and author of Rewild Your Garden

 

“With the climate emergency, ‘gardening as usual’ no longer applies and we need to learn how to adapt to prolonged droughts, intense storms, and wildly fluctuating temperatures. The Climate Change Garden is the in depth guide you need to learn how to manage climate extremes and build resilient gardens.”

Niki Jabbour – author of The Year-Round Vegetable Gardener and Growing Under Cover

More information about Kim and her work

Kim Stoddart is the editor of Amateur Gardening magazine, and writes gardening columns and features in many publications including Grow Your Own, Country Smallholding, Gardeners’ World Magazine, and The Guardian. She writes on climate change and resilient gardening from her smallholding in west Wales.

Kim’s website is here.

To follow Kim on Instagram click here. 

 

All photos in this review are copyright of Kim Stoddart.

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An expert in the field of sustainable gardening, food and homesteading, I review books, events, hospitality (restaurants, hotels etc), tools and products.
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