This comprehensive guide to homesteading provides all the information you need to grow and preserve a sustainable harvest of grains and vegetables; raise animals for meat, eggs, and dairy; and keep honey bees for your sweeter days. With easy-to-follow instructions on canning, drying, and pickling, you’ll enjoy your backyard bounty all winter long. Also available in this series: The Backyard Homestead Seasonal Planner, The Backyard Homestead Book of Building Projects, The Backyard Homestead Guide to Raising Farm Animals, and The Backyard Homestead Book of Kitchen Know-How.
Carleen Madigan
February 11, 2009
368 pages
English
978-1603421386
File Size: 37 MB
Available File Formats: PDF AZW3 DOCX EPUB MOBI TXT or Kindle audiobook Audio CD(Several files can be converted to each other)
Language: English, Francais, Italiano, Espanol, Deutsch, chinese
“Bottom line is, even if you’re not ready for complete self-sufficiency, in today’s economic climate, it just makes sense to try to produce some of your own food. And this book is a great way to get your feet wet.” ― Bust”The tone is sweet and accessible, and the well-organized chapters cover all the bases…” ― July 2009 ― Everyday Prepper“This book delivers what it aims to sell. Its 368 pages of information on creating a successful, self sufficient, backyard homestead that will keep you and your family busy and eating all year long. 4.5 out of five stars, this is the book homestead enthusiasts have been looking for. Go buy this book!” ― Boston Sunday Globe “The Backyard Homestead is a comprehensive and accessible guide to starting a vegetable garden, raising chickens and cows, canning food, making cheese, and a whole lot more. Editor Carleen Madigan…a homesteader in her own right, draws on the dozens of books about country living that Storey has published since its founding in 1983.” ― New York Times Book Review “Because you need to brace yourself for what’s on the horizon: The Backyard Homestead. This fascinating, friendly book is brimming with ideas, illustrations, and enthusiasm. The garden plans are solid, the advice crisp; the diagrams, as on pruning and double digging, are models of decorum. Halfway through, she puts the pedal to the metal, and whoosh! At warp speed, we’re growing our own hops and making our own beer, planting our own wheat fields, keeping chickens (ho hum), ducks, geese, and turkeys (now we’re talking) and milking goats, butchering lamb, raising rabbits, and grinding sausage. Oh, and tapping our maple trees, churning butter, and making our own cheese and yogurt. Peacocks, anyone? Need I say more? Well, yes. Stock up on some knitting books because next winter, you’ll want to grow your own sweaters, too.” From the Back Cover From a quarter of an acre, you can harvest 1400 eggs, 50 pounds of wheat, 60 pounds of fruit, 2000 pounds of vegetables, 280 pounds of pork, and 75 pounds of nuts. Put your backyard to work. Enjoy fresher, organic, better-tasting food all the time. The solution is as close as your own backyard. Grow the vegetables and fruits your family loves; keep bees; raise chickens, goats, or even a cow. The Backyard Homestead shows you how it’s done. And when the harvest is in, you’ll learn how to cook, preserve, cure, brew, or pickle the fruits of your labor. The indispensable guide to food self-sufficiency: learn how to milk a goat, prune a fruit tree, dry herbs, make dandelion wine, bake whole-grain bread, tap a maple tree, make fresh mozzarella, brew beer, mill grains for flour, save seeds for next season, and a whole lot more. About the Author Before becoming an editor at Storey Publishing, Carleen Madigan was managing editor of Horticulture magazine and lived on an organic farm outside Boston, Massachusetts, where she learned the homesteading skills contained in The Backyard Homestead. She enjoys gardening, hiking, foraging, baking, spinning wool, and knitting. Read more <div id="
I do not generally write negative reviews. I seriously wonder if any of the amazing number of very positive reviews includes anyone who has actually attempted to implement pretty much anything suggested here.”Garden plans” are ridiculously uninformative and impractical – the “plans” in the section “Making a garden plan” give no dimensions for the bed – or indeed, no dimensions for any of the beds, and no spacing for plants. That is a recipe for failure, and it’s but one example of impractical, incomplete and random information.The book is an extremely poor value for what it is – a cute book for daydreaming about homesteading. Not at all recommended.
This isn’t anything you wouldn’t find in snippits from a magazine like mother earth news, indexed for you. I have a 40 acre ranchette on a river, and I have a 1/4th acre in-town house.I was hoping for a new approach or ideas to my smaller space. I have experience in range of permaculture, aquaculture, greenhouses, chickens, etc. This book isn’t how to create a wholistic or profitable dynamic farm ecology in your backyard, it isn’t about how to “literally” turn your backyard into a homestead, but just do homesteady things like canning, growing vegetables, and caring for small animals. I wasn’t impressed at all and learned nothing new in how to maximize space for efficiency which is what I was looking for. There is literally only 1 page of about 4 paragraphs that even mentions greenhouses, which to maximize space and efficiency is obviously an absolute necessity. It speaks absolutely nothing to water storage, conservation, or recycling, which is an absolute critical necessity as well.This book did not live up to its title at all. There are many better books out there on this subject, and that specialize in the various aspects of food production and preservation. Like you want a good book on fermenting try the Art of Fermentation by Katz. You want a good book on water storage and uses check out Art Ludwigs books. It just feels like this is a bad attempt and bringing together a lot of knowledge because it all felt disconnected and not integrated into an actual plan to produce all the food you need on just a quarter acre. It wasn’t integrated enough into an actual real world case study on an actual site, an actual climate zone, actual amounts of water, actual money spent on inputs that make things like raising a cow on 1/4 acre is totally unfeasible even in the lushest of environments. And a lot of it was like that, too boiler plated, too untested without application. The stuff that was tested with application were just things I could have googled in 5 seconds.If you are an absolute beginner just looking for a random craft project or starting your first garden this could be a good “first intro book” to get your feet wet.
I bought this book at the recommendation from a friend who has her own vegetable garden. First, I checked it out at the library to see if it would be useful to me and got so excited about gardening that I decided to buy it. I had never gardened here in Virginia. I grew up in Colorado where gardening is a challenge. One of my child hood chores was weeding a garden that never produced a single vegetable. So needless to say I had a bitter root (haha) about gardening. After I heard about this book I wanted to try it for myself. This book clearly lays out what to start with as a beginner, how to do it, what to expect, and how to continue once you’ve got it up and running. I was totally skeptical that I could actually grow anything regardless of what this book said. I started with Spinach, red peppers, rosemary, and kaleidoscope carrots, rosemary, lavendar, bee balm, and blueberries. I did everything in pots on my deck as a trial run (will do raised beds next year now that I know I can) and my garden was a success. Now it’s one of my favorite spots to be.
This book is okay… but I think it’s just not for me. I live in deep South Texas, in the Rio Grande Valley, at the bottom-most tip of Texas, near Monterrey. We are a VERY hot climate, it is a desert. Most of the suggestions in this book are for more northern climates, maybe for Missouri, or at the very least North Texas. There is a section on suggested plants and trees for your hardiness zone…I don’t remember any listed for my zone.This book should also have warnings about checking with local ordinances about keeping animals. I live in the city (sigh). We can’t keep poultry or livestock of any kind, at all. So most of this book is useless, but it makes it sound like you could do anything you wanted. It’s good for basics and for inspiration. It can guide you to asking the right questions on YouTube.
I’d describe this book as the first book a prospective homesteader should buy. The book covers a lot (vegetables, fruits, nuts, dairy, grains, poultry, herbs, foraging, canning, drying, companion planting, how to select the right varieties for your family, various recipes, basic construction designs, etc.), but at a **very surface level**. It’s the tip of the iceberg for what to consider, and much more thorough research should be done into all of these topics for someone who actually plans to do any of this at a serious level.If you want to homestead, reading this book is a great place to start. But as you’re going along, keep a running list of questions/topics to dive deeper into — you’ll want to do a lot of extra research to farm successfully. There is so much more to learn (especially since this book was published a decade ago). You’ll be much more successful if you use this text as a launching point to delve much deeper into all of these topics.
First of all, this book is a not a “book” by a single author. Carleen Madigan is the editor of the book. It’s a compilation of texts about country living, gardening,etc. It’s well put together and nice to look at, but I didn’t find anything really new or original in it. This kind of books just recycle the same advice you’ve read a hundred times from other sources. I feel my money was not particularly well spent here. When it comes to gardening,
This might be an interesting read if you are thinking about starting to homestead, but each topic doesn’t have any usable details.Example: chapter ‘Sheep for meat and milk’ doesn’t mention anything about milking sheep or talk about milk sheep breeds.
Purchased as we have 5 acres and are interested in expanding our gardens and adding livestock. The general information is very helpful but there were a lot of things I still needed to look up online for extra information however it definitely has pointed me in the right direction to get going on our little homestead
Muito informativo, com sugestões e dicas preciosas. Apesar de ser escrito para pessoas de outro hemisfério, o que compreensivelmente precisa de ajustes (em relação a plantio, colheita, clima, etc) para quem nao mora lá, é fácil de adequar. Achei util demais.
The amount of good information in this book was much appreciated.The pages at the beginning showing how much you could grow on different sized lots was highly useful. Every chapter gave loads of information on every different topic for starting homesteading.This book is NOT about end of the world senarios it is NOT about mother earth.It is about growing your own vegetables, fruit, goats, chickens, and even honey.It is a book about mini farming on a good sized city lot. Or more ambitious mini farming with pigs, cows and geese.It will give you information on how to care for animals and for butchering and preserving them. Milking, cheese making, egg gathering, and housing animals.It gives you enough information about all of the topics to either win you over to homesteading or convince you this is definitely not for you. Well, maybe a few tomato plants and a fruit tree or two or even three.
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