Final Thoughts on Backyard Farming: Growing Vegetables and Herbs
This is part of our series retelling Backyard Farming: Growing Vegetables and Herbs by Kim Pezza (ISBN: 978-1-57826-460-5).
We’ve gone through the whole book. From the history of vegetable gardens to planning your layout, building your soil, planting seeds, fighting weeds and pests, preserving your harvest, and putting the garden to bed for winter. That’s the full cycle. So what’s the verdict?
Overall Impressions
This is a great beginner book. Pezza writes the way a knowledgeable neighbor would talk to you over the fence. No jargon, no showing off, just practical information delivered in plain language. She assumes you know nothing and builds from there without being condescending about it.
The book covers everything end to end. That’s its biggest strength. You could pick this up with zero gardening experience and walk away with enough knowledge to actually start. And probably succeed, as long as you’re willing to put in the work.
Key Takeaways
Start small. This comes up repeatedly throughout the book, and it’s the best advice in here. A 4-by-8-foot raised bed is more than enough for your first year. You’ll learn more from a small garden you actually maintain than a large one you abandon by July.
Any space works. Apartment balcony, suburban backyard, rural acreage. Pezza covers four garden types: in-ground, raised beds, containers, and vertical gardens. Between those options, almost anyone can grow something. You don’t need land to be a gardener. You need a container and some sunlight.
Companion planting is worth learning. Certain plants help each other grow. Others actively harm each other. Knowing which is which can save you a lot of frustration. This was one of the more useful sections of the book, and it’s the kind of thing most beginners don’t think about.
Food preservation extends the value of your garden. Growing food is great. But if you can freeze, can, and dry your harvest, a single growing season feeds you for months longer. The cookie sheet freezing trick alone is worth knowing.
Gardening is a learning process. Things will go wrong. Seeds won’t germinate. Pests will eat your lettuce. A late frost will kill your tomatoes. That’s all normal. Pezza is encouraging about this, and I think that matters for beginners who might feel like failure means they’re not cut out for it.
What the Book Does Well
The practical tips are the star of this book. Using egg cartons as seed starters. Laying newspaper as mulch. Setting out beer pans for slugs. Making a soaker hose from an old leaky garden hose. These are the kind of low-cost, accessible ideas that make gardening feel doable for regular people, not just folks with unlimited budgets and time.
The tone is right too. Pezza doesn’t lecture. She shares what she knows, admits when things didn’t work (like her hybrid cabbage seed experiment), and encourages you to try things yourself. That honesty makes the book trustworthy.
What Could Be Better
The book was published in 2013, and it shows in a few places. Some of the resources and websites mentioned may be outdated or gone entirely. That’s not a huge deal since the gardening advice itself is timeless, but it’s worth noting.
I would have liked more detail on specific plant care. The book covers categories of vegetables and herbs well, but it stays fairly general. If you want to know the exact spacing, watering schedule, and pest vulnerabilities for, say, bell peppers specifically, you’ll need a more focused reference.
And modern techniques like smart irrigation systems, app-based garden planning, or automated watering timers don’t get any coverage. Again, understandable given when it was written, but a reader in 2019 or beyond might want to pair this with some more current resources.
Who Should Read This
If you’ve never grown anything in your life and you want to start, this is a solid first book. It won’t overwhelm you. It covers the full process from start to finish. And it’s encouraging without being unrealistic.
If you’re already an experienced gardener, you probably won’t find much new here. This is a beginner book and it owns that.
It’s also good for anyone interested in self-sufficiency, even at a small scale. The food preservation chapter alone gives you practical skills that go beyond gardening.
Kim Pezza’s Philosophy
What comes through most clearly is Pezza’s belief that anyone can do this. She writes, “don’t be afraid to experiment, maybe even failing once or twice.” That’s the right mindset. Gardening rewards patience and curiosity more than perfection.
She also doesn’t try to make it sound easier than it is. There’s real work involved. Weeding is tedious. Pests are frustrating. But the payoff of eating food you grew yourself is something you can’t replicate any other way.
Final Thought
Gardening connects you to food in a way that grocery shopping never will. When you grow a tomato from seed, watch it climb a stake over months, and then slice it onto a sandwich in August, that’s a different experience than grabbing one off a shelf.
Kim Pezza’s book won’t make you an expert overnight. But it will get you started. And starting is the hardest part.