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.
Introduction Slugs can undo weeks of careful gardening in a single damp night. One evening everything looks healthy; by morning, your lettuce has vanished, seedlings are stripped to stems, and your prized hostas look like lace. So if you are searching for how to get
Introduction Imagine a garden where plants naturally support one another, reducing the need for fertilizers, pesticides, and excessive watering. That’s the magic of Three Sisters Planting—a time-tested companion planting method used for centuries by Indigenous peoples of North America. It’s a sustainable way to maximize
Introduction Food is expensive — and it’s only getting worse. At the same time, plastic packaging wraps almost everything we bring home. Somewhere along the way, in most modern UK kitchens, we lost the simple, practical knowledge of how to store vegetables UK households actually
Introduction Gardening often gets a reputation for being either expensive or time‑consuming — and, in many cases, both. Walk into a garden centre in spring and it’s easy to feel like you need specialist tools, branded feeds, and stacks of plastic trays just to get
Introduction As March arrived in 2020, the first real signs of spring began to show in the North West of the UK. Temperatures were slowly rising, days were stretching out, and nature was starting to wake up. With that shift in the air, it felt
Introduction Radishes are one of the quickest and easiest vegetables to grow, which makes them a great choice for gardeners at any stage. They grow fast, mature in as little as four weeks, and add a crisp, peppery bite to all sorts of everyday meals.
Choosing the Best Vegetables to Grow in the UK If you’re wondering what the best vegetables to grow in the UK are, it usually comes down to suitability rather than ambition. The British climate is generally mild but unpredictable, with cool springs, changeable summers, and
Introduction: Why Control of Our Food Matters Again For most of human history, food wasn’t something we overthought. It came from nearby land, familiar people, and processes we understood. What we ate followed the seasons, relied on practical skills, and stayed rooted in place. In