Review of The Edible Backyard – Kath Irvine

In this practical step-by-step guide, gardening teacher Kath Irvine shares her wealth of knowledge from more than 20 years of helping Kiwi gardeners design, build, grow and maintain their own productive edible gardens.

Kath’s sage, hands-on, often humorous advice steps readers through everything they need to know to grow great produce at home, including garden design, tools and equipment, seasonal planting advice, soil fertility, seed-saving basics, managing pests and diseases, and how to incorporate organic and permaculture gardening methods into any home garden.
While documenting a year on her own property, Kath shows how you can successfully produce bountiful crops throughout the seasons to provide a steady, daily harvest with minimal wastage.

The book is illustrated with hundreds of stunning photographs and helpful hand-drawn illustrations that share clever design concepts and planting plans for gardens of all shapes and sizes.

Kath is the perfect guide, and this easy-to-understand, comprehensive book is ideal for gardeners at any skill level, from beginners setting up a new garden from scratch, to intermediate trouble-shooters, to advanced green-thumbs seeking deeper knowledge.

The Edible Backyard

Kath Irvine

       RHNZ Godwit

Supplied by Penguin Random House New Zealand

Reviewed by Jacqui Smith

There are certain categories of practical non-fiction where it really is essential to try to get locally produced books. One is fish cookery, and another is gardening. While many principles of horticulture are the same everywhere, what grows best where you live depends very much on your local climate and your soil. And that’s where books like this come, a book by a New Zealand gardener, written for New Zealand gardeners. Now the author’s garden is very different to mine – hers a large garden in rural Horowhenua, mine much smaller in suburban Auckland – but we’re growing a lot of the same things, given the expense of fruit and vegetables these days. Especially tomatoes!

The first half of the book is mostly about setting up your garden. There is some excellent information here, although it’s mostly more applicable to the larger garden. I was especially intrigued by the no-dig garden which I’m sure that my husband would appreciate. He’ll also like the bit about dealing with weeds (much of gardening does involve removing weeds).

The second half includes what I’m finding the most useful section – the one labelled “Know Your Crops”. They are gathered in groups – all the brassicas together for example – and each begins with a simple “Quick Ref.” paragraph. It might have helped to name each group in the side-bar at the edge of the page, but that’s a tiny quibble. There is a good index after all (but what is it about indices and lemons?).

All in all, this is a fine reference for the New Zealand gardener with, a lot of interesting ideas to try. And it is very timely. This is a great time to start gardening!