The Basics of Backyard Farming: History and Benefits of Growing Your Own Food
This is part of our series retelling Backyard Farming: Growing Vegetables and Herbs by Kim Pezza (ISBN: 978-1-57826-460-5).
Pezza starts the book by making a simple but important point. Gardens aren’t just about making your yard look pretty. For most of human history, gardens existed for one reason: food. Flower gardens and decorative landscapes came later. The original purpose was survival.
And honestly, that reframe matters. A lot of us think of gardening as a hobby. Something retired people do on weekends. But growing food is one of the most fundamental human skills there is. Pezza wants you to remember that.
Why People Garden
The book breaks down gardening motivations into a few categories. Some people grow food for self-sufficiency. They want to reduce their dependence on grocery stores and know exactly what they’re eating. Others run market gardens, growing food to sell at farmers markets or to local restaurants. And then there’s the biggest group: people who just want fresh food for their family.
All three are valid. You don’t need to go full homesteader to benefit from growing a few tomato plants and some basil on your porch.
A Quick History of Growing Food
Here’s where the book gets surprisingly interesting. Pezza traces vegetable gardening all the way back to the Fertile Crescent, that stretch of land from the Nile River through the Tigris and Euphrates valleys. People have been intentionally growing food for about 8,000 years. That’s wild when you think about it. We’ve been doing this longer than we’ve been doing almost anything else.
She also drops some cool American history. John Adams started a vegetable garden at the White House around 1800. Thomas Jefferson planted fruit trees on the grounds. Andrew Jackson even built a greenhouse there. These weren’t just symbolic gestures. These presidents actually used the gardens to feed their households.
And get this. The first known gardening book was written in 1599 by a guy named Richard Gardiner. Yes, his actual last name was Gardiner. You can’t make that up. The book was called Profitable Instructions for the Manuring, Sowing, and Planting of Kitchen Gardens. Not exactly a bestseller title by today’s standards, but it shows that people have been writing guides about this stuff for over 400 years.
Kitchen gardens were a huge deal in early America too. Most households had one. It wasn’t a lifestyle choice. It was just how you ate. Somewhere along the way we outsourced all of that to industrial farming and supermarkets. Now growing your own food feels revolutionary, which is kind of funny when you think about it.
The Benefits of Growing Your Own Food
Pezza lays out several reasons to start a garden, and most of them are pretty hard to argue with.
You control what goes into your food. No mystery chemicals. No pesticides you didn’t choose. If you want to grow organic, you can. If you just want to avoid certain things, you can do that too. This is a big deal for people with allergies. When you grow your own food, you know exactly what touched it from seed to plate. That kind of certainty is hard to get from a grocery store, even with organic labels.
You can grow what you actually like. Grocery stores carry what sells in bulk. That means you get the same ten varieties of tomato everywhere. But there are hundreds of tomato varieties out there. Same with peppers, lettuce, herbs, and pretty much everything else. Your garden, your choices.
It teaches kids where food comes from. Pezza makes this point and I think it’s underrated. A lot of kids genuinely don’t know that french fries start as a potato in the ground. Getting them involved in a garden connects them to their food in a way that no amount of explaining ever will. They plant a seed, watch it grow, and then eat it. That’s powerful.
It saves money over time. A packet of seeds costs a couple of dollars and can produce more food than you’d spend twenty or thirty dollars on at the store. The startup costs are real, especially if you’re building raised beds or buying soil. But season over season, a garden pays for itself.
Our Take
What stands out about this chapter is how Pezza doesn’t oversell it. She’s not promising that backyard farming will change your life or save the planet. She’s just laying out the facts: people have been doing this forever, it works, and here are the practical reasons it might work for you too.
That grounded approach is refreshing. And it sets the tone for the rest of the book. No hype. Just useful information from someone who knows what she’s talking about.
Next up, we get into the actual planning. How to figure out what you want to grow, what kind of garden to build, and how to match your ambitions to your actual space.