In your Backyard: Urban Harvest: Online extra resources
In Your Backyard: Urban Harvest, is a guide to growing fruit and vegetables in small gardens. We’ve compiled extra materials and videos here to help further your understanding of this exciting topic.
Video stories
Watch our collection of videos for additional garden tips and inspiration.
Video: How Kate Coughlan’s inner city courtyard garden became a 100% edible oasis
When NZ Life & Leisure editor Kate Coughlan left behind her vast veggie beds at the Rocket Ranch for city life she felt starved. She called in the experts to create a small courtyard garden with 100% edibles.
Video: Take a tour of Rory Harding’s George Street Orchard in Dunedin
An inventive landscape gardener has transformed a dull inner-city garden into an overflowing food forest.
Video: Dr Compost Ben Elms recipe for a good life and tips for top compost
As a champion of the health and happiness benefits of rich, rotting compost, nothing makes Ben Elms more content than the multitude of microscopic critters squirming in his soil.
The buzz on Kelli Walker’s burgeoning business, Forage & Ferment
Kelli Walker felt a business was brewing inside her, and found one that can’t stop bubbling, burbling and babbling about itself.
Chapter 1 Crop Guide
ThisNZlife contains a vast amount of information on growing veggies. Find further information on popular vegetables and herbs in the list below.
Chapter 2 Get a plan
Garden design ideas.
We take a guided tour through three very different food forests at different stages in their lifecycle.
A DIY guide to creating a green chicken coop.
The Christchurch couple living self-sufficient dream in their half-acre urban garden
Meg and John Christie are living their self-sufficient dream on a half acre block, but they haven’t had to leave the city to do it.
Chapter 3 Garden Care
Tips on growing healthy plants.
As temperatures tumble, the process of composting slows down, but it doesn’t stop altogether. The outside layers of your compost heap may be cool, but the inside layers will continue to decompose if the right materials are added.
Which mulch is your best ally in the war against weeds?
Bugs are a part of nature but when they invade an entire apple crop, its time to declare war and this is the month to get started.
Under the cover of the right plants lurk good guys who are weapons of mass destruction.
Ben Gaia shares tips to get you growing more food using fewer chemicals.
Chapter 4 Indoors
Grow vegetables inside in the cooler months.
Easy to grow and nutritious, microgreens are a winter garden goer.
There isn’t anything else you could grow this easily or this quickly that tastes this good and is so nutritious.
The Growroom project aims to encourage urban agriculture with free construction
Architects are collaborating on innovative solutions for food production in increasingly urbanised areas.
Chapter 5 Urban Orchard
ThisNZlife contains a vast amount of information on growing fruit. Find further information on popular fruit trees and berries in the list below.
How to rejuvenate an unhealthy citrus tree.
The Meyer is not a true lemon but it is as good as it gets for most of us.
Got trees that need to be trimmed this winter? Here are 12 tips on how to get it right.
Haven’t pruned your fruit tree in years? Here’s where to begin.
Passionfruit is a warm-climate plant, but with protection from wind and cold, plants can be grown in cooler areas too. Overseas they’re often grown as indoor plants, but a warm greenhouse will do the trick too.
Chapter 6 The Harvest
Additional vegetable based vegetables from thisNZlife.
Recipe: Ruth Pretty’s 20-vegetable salad with cucumber dressing
This is based on a salad I loved eating in Tokyo. Change the veggies depending on what is in your fridge or the garden.
This is a simple roast potato and cauliflower dish with a Goan twist.
Recipe: Market vegetables with buttermilk ranch & bagna càuda
Get the barbecue started with these delicious grilled veggies with ranch dressing and bagna càuda, an Italian anchovy dip.
Use a cast-iron skillet to cook this delicious dessert directly on the barbecue.
READ THE RECIPE HERE
Chapter 7 Foraging
Familiarise yourself with common foraged foods.
Foraging for wild food is fun and satisfying, but when you stumble across mysterious morsels on your own land, it’s even more satisfying.
There are plenty of edible wild plant foods in the NZ countryside, if you know where to look and what to look for.
Additional forage food recipes from In Your Backyard: Urban Harvest
Additional foraging recipes from our special edition In Your Backyard: Urban Harvest.
In Your Backyard: Urban Harvest, our new special edition, features everything New Zealanders need to know to grow food in the city. It is packed with expert advice on how to start a productive veggie garden, the best crops to grow and how to create awesome soil.
PLUS: space-saving ideas for vertical growing, container gardening, hydroponics, microgreens, espalier trees and edible hedges – even how to forage.
