The Backyard Farm: Growing Your Own Food

By Paula Zayco Aberasturi

To achieve the idyllic life of backyard farms and homegrown food, months of dirt, drudgery, and grit is needed. Here's a handy companion that will give any future food grower just the right push to unleash the farmer within. This book teaches you how to start your own backyard farm in the tropics, following biodynamic, permaculture and organic agriculture principles.To achieve the idyllic life of backyard farms and homegrown food, months of dirt, drudgery, and grit is needed. Here's a handy companion that will give any future food grower just the right push to unleash the farmer within. This book teaches you how to start your own backyard farm in the tropics, following biodynamic, permaculture and organic agriculture principles.To achieve the idyllic life of backyard farms and homegrown food, months of dirt, drudgery, and grit is needed. Here's a handy companion that will give any future food grower just the right push to unleash the farmer within. This book teaches you how to start your own backyard farm in the tropics, following biodynamic, permaculture and organic agriculture principles.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Anvil Publishing, Inc.
• Release date: May 3, 2021
• ISBN: 9789712736735

Book preview

Introduction

Four years ago, we moved to the boondocks. I always dreamed of a backyard. My husband always dreamed of a farm. We now had 1,000 square meters of lawn. I saw in my mind a lounge chair and my children swinging. My husband could only see humus, beds, and fruit trees. Four years later and enough moments spent arguing about form and function, I now have a backyard + farm that gives me 2 tons of food and 10 tons of compost yearly, and a dozen eggs daily. We now have 600 square meters of food garden, raised beds and nurseries, a chicken coop and run, 2 compost bins, a rainwater catchment, rabbits, chickens, and worms. And of course, I have my lounge chair and my chidren’s swing.

There has never been a better time to transform our lawns into food gardens. People now have dreams of moving to the country and growing their own food. We want to sit in the patio nestled in green with a breakfast of just-hatched orange-yolk eggs, a salad of sun-warmed tomatoes, or a fluffy omelet of just-picked herbs and arugula. We imagine sitting in our lawn chair and sipping iced tea made from the climbing blue vine, taking an afternoon nap, and then reading a homesteading book in a cozy garden nook, with magnificent dragonflies dancing.

But to achieve the idyllic life of food gardens and homegrown food, you need months of dirt, drudgery, and grit. There’s a gap between browsing through farm pictures and standing knee-deep in compost. Farm life, the one that gives you golden eggs and salad days, is tedious. It’s muddy boots that house a frog, it’s the same shit on different days. It’s a hallway of dirt tracks that lead to the bathroom, the yard, and back again. It’s a truck, a van, a car caked with mud. It’s a backyard hobby that gets out of control. It’s the whole gamut of an ecosystem: climate change, and soil, and seed, and sapling, and tree and fruit. Remember, though, the rewards are worth their weight in golden eggs.

And then there’s hardly any help to get from catalogs and books on tropical gardens. We do not have four seasons. We have rain and more rain. There’s a huge difference between pretty rows of lettuces and courgettes, and the rows of kangkong we should be growing instead. Rosemary and thyme will drown if you water them according to the manual. One does not learn these from imported farm books; one learns from another farmer in the tropics.

I write this beginner’s guide using the wisdom of my husband, and my experience as a city kid who knew zilch about farming. Who else to lay it bare but a girl from the city who married into farming and is now living with 70 chickens and compost heaps? I write this, as though I am talking to myself. I write this with you, beginners, in mind.

And so here’s a (hopefully) easy handbook for starting your own backyard farm or kitchen garden. We are committed to sustainable agriculture and so these practices follow biodynamic, permaculture, and organic agriculture principles. I hope it inspires you to unleash the farmer within.

Chapter 1:

Getting Started

Planning your Garden: The Where

First things first!

Decide where you will be planting.

Size up the area where you are planning to build a backyard farm or kitchen garden. Remember that FARMS ARE ECOSYSTEMS. You need to map a layout that is