The BACKYARD HOMSTEAD

edited by CARLEEN MADIGAN

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New softcover book, 368 pages. Published 2009

Produce all the food you need on just a quarter of an acre!

With just a quarter of an acre of land, you can feed a family of four with fresh, organic food year-round. This comprehensive guide to self-sufficiency gives you all the information you need to grow and preserve a variety of vegetables, fruits, herbs, nuts, and grains; raise chickens for eggs and meat; raise cows, sheep, and goats for meat or milk; raise pigs and rabbits; and keep honey bees. Simple instructions make it easy to enjoy canned, frozen, dried, and pickled produce all winter; use your own grains to make bread, pasta, and beer; turn fresh milk into delicious homemade yogurt, butter, and cheese; make your own wine, cordials, and herbal teas; and much, much more.

It truly is possible to eat entirely from your backyard. 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 to eat, keep bees, raise chickens or even a cow. The Backyard Homesteader shows you how. And when the harvest is in, you'll learn how to cook, preserve, cure, brew or pickle the fruits of your labour so that nothing is wasted.

Features chapters on

• The home vegetable garden
• Backyard fruits and nuts
• Easy, fragrant herbs
• Home-grown grains
• Poultry for eggs and meat
• Meat and dairy
• Food from the wild

An index and list of useful websites and addresses makes this an invaluable reference for anyone interested in pursuing the dream of self-sufficiency. Please note that this is a US publication, so some of the information is relevant to the US only. Measurements for recipes, heights of trees etc are all imperial.

About the author

Carleen Madigan is a gardening editor at Storey Publishing, and has also been the managing editor at Horticulture magazine. She learned many of the homesteading skills described in The Backyard Homesteader while living on an organic farm ourside Boston, Massachusetts.

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The Backyard Homestead edited by Carleen Madigan