Book Review: The BackYard Berry Book and The BackYard Orchardist by Stella Otto
Several years ago I converted from primarily doing annual vegetable gardening to primary doing perennial fruit gardening. I love on a 50x100 city lot, so I want to figure out how to make best use of my lot. We grow blueberries, raspberries, blackberries, kiwi, figs, apples, and pears. A few years have gone on since we initially planted and I was looking for some resources on pruning and how to make best use of the space we have.
Two books from Stella Otto looked interesting and were ranked highly on Amazon.com, so I borrowed them from the library. (Sorry Amazon!)
The BackYard Berry Book (Buy at Amazon or Place hold at Multnomah County Library) covers berries, brambles, and vine fruit. I especially valued the section on brambles, as I learned quite a bit about raspberry and blackberry trellising. I also appreciated the list of different varieties, especially the information on less know varients, such as yellow raspberries. Of course, as has happened with every gardening book I've read, none of the varienties in the book were at Portland nursery when I went shopping. Nonetheless, the background was useful. I also learned that day-neutral strawberries send out far fewer runners, require less maintenance than regular varieties, and yield berries all season long.
The BackYard Orchardist (Buy at Amazon or Place hold at Multnomah County Library) covered apples, pears, cherries, plums, apricots, peaches, and nectarines...everything I can imagine except what I was really hoping for, which was pruning information specific for fig trees. But the fig tree has been pretty low maintenance so far (lowest of everything in our yard), so I went with a standard thining of inner branches, and hopefully that will be fine. There was some basic information on grafting, which I used to refine my technique and grafted more fruiting apple shoots onto my ornamental flowering pear trees. My goal is to gradually convert the lower branches of these landscape trees into productive members of our food garden.
Although I'll be returning these two copies to the library soon, I think they are excellent references, and I may buy a copy of the BackYard Berry book at the start of the next growing season.