I have a black thumb. Or very unfortunate yard conditions. Or something. I’ve been trying to grow food for many years now, with almost no success. (Our weeds, on the other hand, flourish!) But I keep trying — and I’m grateful to have added The Backyard Homestead Guide to Growing Organic Food to my library as a tool in this endeavor.

The Backyard Homestead Guide to Growing Organic Food

New this spring from Storey Publishing, The Backyard Homestead Guide to Growing Organic Food is a sort of “gardener’s bible” for food growers. The subtitle — A Crop-by-Crop Reference for 62 Vegetables, Fruits, Nuts and Herbs — details its purpose.

The crop-by-crop reference is the bulk of the book, and is a wonderfully compact, but detailed, guide to the listed plants, but the guide has even more than this to offer.

A brief introductory chapter titled “creating a self-sustaining garden” lays the groundwork with information about composting, garden planning, and other basic information that will be particularly helpful to beginning gardeners.

Two not-so-brief sections at the end cover “organic remedies” and “allies & companions.” In fact, together these two sections form almost half of the book (with the remedies chapter being the larger one). The remedies section is a particular boon, since plant problems, diseases, and pests are common issues that often stymie growers attempting to stay organic. After some introductory and general information about dealing with such problems, there’s an entire disease-by-disease section on address plant diseases, followed by a pest-by-pest section detailing solutions to various pests.

The allies & companions section is a chart listing which other plants a given plant is a good “ally” to, what pests it controls, how it does this, and, where appropriate, additional relevant notes.

Crop-by-Crop Reference

More than 150 pages of this book encompass the crop-by-crop reference guide, subdivided into chapters for vegetables, fruits & nuts, and herbs. (I don’t find this subdivision particularly helpful, and would have found the book slightly easier to use had all of the plants been placed in a single alphabetical list.) These plants include:

• artichoke, asparagus, dried beans, lima beans, snap beans, beet, broccoli, brussels sprouts, cabbage, carrot, cauliflower, celeriac, celery, corn, cucumber, eggplant, kale, lettuce, muskmelon, onion, pea, peanut, pepper, potato, spinach, squash, sweet potato, tomato
• almond, apple, apricot, blackberry, blueberry, sour cherry, sweet cherry, chinese chestnut, filbert/hazelnut, grape, kiwi, peach, pear, pecan, plum, raspberry, strawberry, walnut
• sweet basil, caraway, chives, coriander/cilantro, dill, fennel, garlic, lavender, sweet marjoram, oregano, parsley, rosemary, sage, tarragon, thyme

The information provided for each plant is thorough but streamlined, making it easy to find what you need to know without wading through “fluff.” It varies slightly depending on the type of plant.

All of the plant entries include information about soil & water needs (including soil pH), mesurements (for planting, spacing, the full-grown size of the plants, etc.), pests, diseases, plant allies, companion plants, incompatible plants, and information about harvesting and storing the crop.

Fruits and herbs also include notes about locating an appropriate site for planting.

Vegetables and herbs also include information about necessary temperatures for both germination and growth.

In addition, vegetables include how to calculate the range of seed-starting dates for a given crop, as well as (where relevant) information about support structures to use, how to grow in a greenhouse, etc.

Fruits include information about growing and bearing, about shaping and rootstocks (for trees), and about propagation (for vines and similar plants). Some herbs include propagation information, as well.

What I Wanted

Although I have no major complaints about this book, there are a couple minor details I wish had been addressed.

Because of the way the plants are broken up by category, and the differences in how some plants could potentially be listed, I would have liked to see a list of the included plants somewhere. Although the book does have an index, there isn’t a simple, scannable list anywhere of the plants in the crop-by-crop guide. In my opinion, this is a significant oversight, because it’s much easier to scan a list and discover what you need to look for a plant under than to flip back and forth trying to figure out if, for instance, “lima beans” are alphabetized under “l” for “lima beans” or “b” for beans. (And why are muskmelons a “vegetable”?) I might print out a list on label paper and stick it inside the cover of my copy.

I would also have liked to see a blank form (or forms, I guess — one for each plant category) that one could copy and fill in, with the same format, for foods that aren’t included in the book. Although this does seem to cover most of the common ones, there are some surprising omissions (no mint?! or radishes?) and some of us are also growing somewhat “quirkier” foods. (e.g. right now I’m growing figs and have amaranth on hand to plant.) It would be handy to be able to create our own entries for these foods in a matching format.

I still like this book and find it an immensely valuable resource, but I might give it 4.5 stars out of 5 rather than 5 because there could have been a little more attention to detail in the overall production and format of it.

#StoreyAmbassador