The Backyard Homestead, by Carleen Madigan
Want to keep goats? Make vinegar? How about eat fresher vegetables and assure your own food supply?
Wherever you may be on the path to food self-sufficiency, "Backyard Homestead: Produce the Food You Need on Just a Quarter Acre," will help get you there with a minimum of difficulty and fear.
A great deal of information is packed into the pages of this book, from lists of cattle breeds to charts on how much ground is needed to produce various crops to ways to preserve different kinds of foods and a lot more. The book is broken into two parts, crops and animals.
Author Carleen Madigan works hard to assuage fears about trying to go farm while also dealing with any guilt people might feel for not going as far as she outlines. She argues pretty convincingly that people should consider growing their own food to save money, to eat better-quality food and to reduce the need to bring food in from thousands of miles away.
Some of the other topics: tools needed to make sausage, different cuts of meat and which part of the animal yields which, planting fruit trees, making wine, building chicken coops, drying herbs and canning food. That's only the beginning.
This book could be used by someone looking to completely redo their yard and turn it over to food production. Or someone who wants just a few ideas on how to reduce trips to the grocery store for mass-produced food could try a couple of these techniques.
The book is thought-provoking on several levels. Over the winter, it's the perfect book to read to plot strategies for the spring.
If you want to learn more about knitting, try Free-Range Knitter
You can read more about old Mideast recipes at Medieval Cuisine from the Islamic World
"The Backyard Homestead: Produce All the Food You Need on Just a Quarter Acre," by Carleen Madigan, published by Storey Publishing.
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