The Little Veggie Patch Co.'s Guide to Backyard Farming

Fabian Capomolla and Mat Pember are back with The Little Veggie Patch Co's Guide to Backyard Farming. Spend a year in the garden with the boys, growing vegetables in pots and homemade window boxes, or maybe even a vertical veggie garden if space is tight!

Each chapter covers a month of the year and includes heaps of advice on what is happening in the garden at that time of year, and which veggies, fruit and herbs you should be planting and harvesting. There are also twelve delicious recipes using produce from the garden, such as Haloumi, Asparagus and Roasted Tomato Salad, Zucchini and Dill Fritters, and Beetroot and Chocolate Cake.

The book is packed with fun and easy-to-follow activities like keeping chickens, building a vertical veggie garden, making cider and tomato sugo, and starting a backyard beehive. Learn how to use excess produce to make delicious preserves and jams, or create garden-inspired gifts such as wooden herb markers or stencilled pots. On top of this, there are lots of activities covering the basics, all of which are perfect for kids too – planting seedlings, sowing seeds and growing food in pots. So, it's time to get into your garden (or balcony or even nature strip!) and get your hands dirty. Regardless of what kind of outdoor space you have, Fabian and Mat will help you to grow fresh fruit and veggies, and discover your own inner backyard farmer.

About the Author

For Fabian Capomollo, Sunday lunch would always consist of loud arguments, pasta, veggies from the garden, and would finish with an espresso and a selection of ripe fruit from the backyard orchard. All Mat Pember's childhood memories revolve around his Nonna and Nonno's backyard. The veggie garden, the enormous garage, where the pork and fennel sausage would hang drying from the ceiling beams, checking the chook shed for eggs, and then looking what was ready for picking in the huge, rambling vegetable patch. Fabian and Mat are now The Little Veggie Patch Co, an incredibly busy Melbourne-based business that specialises in helping people grow their own food.