November meeting – Dick Handscombe “The Opportunities and Challenges of Spanish Gardening”

The Garden club is delighted that we have famous author Dick Handscombe as our speaker for the meeting on 10 November at 11.00 am at the Youth Centre in Competa.

“The opportunities and Challenges of Spanish Gardening”

As evidenced in the short summary below of Dick’s literary career, Dick is extremely knowledgeable about gardening, and has extended the range of his publications to helping people with their retirement planning in Spain, as well writing management texts.

The Youth Centre is right next to the Correos and was also the venue of our October meeting.

The talk will also be open to non-members and member’s visitors on payment of 5 Euros per visitor on entry.

We will also have an opportunity to ask questions at the close of the session

To help us plan the refreshments please use the reply box below to let us know if you are attending, and if you are bringing any visitors, or email me at sunley.judith@btinternet.com

ABOUT DICK HANDSCOMBE

Dick Handscombe has had 24 books published over the past forty years, 16 of them since retiring to Spain in 1994 where he has lived an extremely active and varied lifestyle. He also co-writes with his wife Clodagh.

Find out more about him on his website here www.gardenspain.com

‘HOW TO USE LESS WATER IN YOUR GARDEN’ (2014 ) is a practical guide to what is involved in water-wise gardening in Spain and other Mediterranean climate situation worldwide. Includes several hundred ideas for application to various styles of gardens and also in developing emergency strategies at household , village, town, regional and national levels. This is now also published in Spanish as ‘COMO USAR MENOS AQUA EN TU JARDIN’(2015).

‘YOUR GARDEN IN SPAIN – Practical ideas for gardens that suit your Spanish lifestyle’ (2005) was the total guide to gardening in Spain including growing vegetables and fruit. However after a few years the publisher, Santana Books’, asked us to make the following three books out of it in order to reduce its cost of printing and eventual price.

‘YOUR GARDEN IN SPAIN – From planning to planting and maintenance’* (2007) is the comprehensive guide for resident and holiday-home owners to creating colourful, interesting and productive gardens that match and enable their planned short and longer term lifestyles.

‘APARTMENT GARDENING – MEDITERRANEAN STYLE’* (2010) is the complete guide to terrace, balcony and windowsill gardening enabling the development and maintenance of colourful and productive outdoor living spaces that can in fact be seen as patios in the sky.

‘GROWING HEALTHY VEGETABLES IN SPAIN’( 2006 )* is the comprehensive guide to growing the families daily vegetables under Spanish conditions taking into account the soils, climate, seasonal varieties of vegetables and pests etc., that need to be conquered. Growing vegetables in containers, raised beds and vegetable plots are all covered.

‘GROWING HEALTHY FRUIT IN SPAIN’* (2007 ) is the sister book to the vegetable one and the growing of over seventy types of fruit are discussed.

‘PRACTICAL GARDENING ON THE COSTA BLANCA’* (2001) and the related second edition retitled as ‘PRACTICAL GARDENING ON THE COSTA’* (2003) were a re-publication as a book of the first hundred gardening articles we wrote for the Costa Blanca News family of newspapers.

`Living Well from Our Mediterranean Garden’. (September 2011) To help develop a holistic colourful, perfumed, therapeutic and productive garden with benefits for mental and physical health, gastronomy and family economics.

‘Making Waterless Gardens a Practical Reality Worldwide’ (November 2012) An Amazon Kindle E-book.

As well as writing books he has also written over a thousand articles and in each case the writing is focussed on helping expatriates and Spaniards to better enjoy their life in Spain and other Mediterranean situations and for those still working to improve the effectiveness of the organisations they lead or work for.