Review: Backyard Berry Book | Backyard Orchardist by Stella Otto

If you want to add fruit to your edible landscape, the Backyard Berry Book and the Backyard Orchardist are excellent primers.

Stella Otto certainly knows fruit. A professional horticulturist and former orchard and farm market owner for 25 years, she’s grown just about every fruit that’s possible to grow in Michigan. In The Backyard Berry Book and The Backyard Orchardist, she shares her expertise in simple, clear terms that the novice gardener will understand, and the intermediate gardener will appreciate. Each book is full of illustrations, charts and specific instructions for growing the most common fruits in North America.

The Backyard Berry Book

I have quite the edible landscape: raspberries, strawberries, blackberries, blueberries, and cherries. Raspberries are relatively simple if you tie them to a large vertical support like a fence, and blackberries are also relatively easy if you keep them pruned. But strawberries have to be planted and maintained in a very specific way for best fruit production, and blueberries are an even greater challenge, as they require a lot of organic matter in the soil, excellent drainage, and a highly acidic soil. This book addresses all of these issues in a clear, comprehensive manner, explores various pruning techniques, and has already provided me with some useful tips. It’s also educating me on grapes, which is my next challenge.

The Backyard Berry Book includes chapters on growing strawberries, rhubarb, raspberries, blackberries, lingonberries, currants, grapes, and kiwi, and soil preparation, pruning, maintenance, and disease and pest control for each fruit.

[su_highlight background=”#fffc30″ color=”#000003″]Buy on Amazon: The Backyard Berry Book: A Hands-On Guide to Growing Berries, Brambles, and Vine Fruit in the Home Garden[/su_highlight]

The Backyard Orchardist

Many people get excited in the spring when they see an apple tree at their local nursery. “Oh honey, wouldn’t it be great to have fresh apples?” Sure it would. But novices are under the impression that fruit trees are as easy to grow as willows.

Most fruit trees come embedded with high maintenance and potential pest problems – if you haven’t educated yourself about best practices for growing that specific fruit, you may end up disappointed, with a lawn full of rotten fruit. But when you learn the basics of tree care for the specific fruit you wish to grow, your harvests will be amazing. Backyard Orchardist gets into the nitty-gritty on growing apples, pears, sweet and sour cherries, apricots, plums, peaches, and other tree fruits. It also includes sections on growing fruit trees in containers, disease and pest identification and prevention, pruning, how to deter wildlife from eating your fruit, and harvesting and storing. It does not include citrus fruits like lemons, oranges or grapefruits (they can’t be grown in Michigan where the author lives).

The Backyard Berry Book and The Backyard Orchardist are a great set of books from a person who’s spent her life doing exactly what she’s written about.

[su_highlight background=”#fffc30″ color=”#000003″]Buy on Amazon: The Backyard Orchardist: A complete guide to growing fruit trees in the home garden, 2nd Edition[/su_highlight]