This archive brings together practical, experience-led articles from The Backyard Farmer, covering gardening, DIY, indoor growing, foraging, reviews, and sustainable living. Each post is written with real-world use in mind — focusing on working with nature, building practical skills, and making sustainable choices more accessible.
Planning a vegetable garden is about more than deciding what to plant in spring. A useful plan shows what each bed will grow through the year, when crops will need the space, what can follow them and how those crop groups can move between seasons.
If you’ve ever stood in your garden and thought, “What if I had a little more land?” you’re not alone. Most smallholders begin with raised beds, compost and perhaps a few hens. Over time, the ambition shifts from growing food to managing land. Starting a
Summer planting on these grand isles is special, and even beginners will notice the shift straight away. By June, most beds are producing an abundance of courgettes, peas, beans and tomatoes. Then, by July or August, it almost feels like its time to pause and
Introduction April marks the real start of spring harvest momentum in many UK gardens. The days are noticeably longer, the soil begins to warm, and growth speeds up across the plot. As a result, there’s a clear jump in both variety and quantity compared to
Introduction March sits right in the middle of the UK’s “hungry gap” — that stretch where winter crops are winding down but true spring abundance hasn’t quite arrived. However, that doesn’t mean your beds are empty. In fact, there are still plenty of vegetables ready
Use this UK harvest calendar to see which fruit, vegetables and herbs are typically ready each month, whether you grow on an allotment, in a back garden or under cover. It will help you pick crops at their best, avoid leaving them too long and
This article is to help you when you wake up a bit fuzzy on a Sunday, get to the Allotment, and realise you have no idea what to do! (We’ve all been there) Most gardeners on these little islands don’t need more theory or long
When I started looking at allotment planning software, I kept finding the same problem: many tools were useful, but they also came with more setup, tracking and administration than I actually wanted. Sometimes you simply want to work out what will fit, where it should
Intro: Why This Planner Exists I’m a working gardener based in the UK, and I built this free vegetable garden planner for a simple reason: I needed a practical, reliable way to plan real food growing — not just tidy diagrams that look good on
Intro: Why This Planner Exists I’m a working gardener based in the UK, and I built this free vegetable garden planner for a simple reason: I needed a practical, reliable way to plan real food growing — not just sketch tidy diagrams that look good
Intro: Why This Planner Exists I’m a working gardener based in the UK, and I built this free vegetable garden planner for a simple reason: I needed a practical, reliable way to plan real food growing — not just sketch tidy diagrams that look good
The BBC Virtual Garden Planner no longer works reliably on modern browsers or operating systems. The original tool appears to have been retired and is no longer maintained, so changing browser settings or reinstalling old files is unlikely to provide a dependable fix. Some archived