The Backyard Homestead: Produce all the food you need on just a quarter acre! Kindle Edition

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.

Much of this time was spent fantasizing about one day having a 1/10th or 1/4th acre homestead. During that time, the book was eye-opening as to what is possible with that little space. Having soaked up these ideas about raised beds, chickens, dwarf fruit trees, and so on for so long, when I finally got a house recently, I knew exactly what I wanted to do with it, which alone is probably worth the price of the book.But now that I have fruit trees to prune and chicks to raise, I'm not looking to this book for information. For building raised beds, I'm using the instructions from  The Urban Homestead (Expanded & Revised Edition): Your Guide to Self-Sufficient Living in the Heart of the City (Process Self-reliance Series) , which also details composting with worms, reducing your reliance on the energy grid, and using water more intelligently -things The Backyard Homestead doesn't even mention. Or take pruning. On page 111, "Pruning a Fruit Tree in Four Steps," Step 2 says "First shorten the branch to about a foot, then undercut the branch slightly before sawing it from above. Finally, saw off the stub, leaving a slight collar to promote good healing." These are just the kind of clear-as-mud directions that would greatly benefit from an illustration; unfortunately all that is there is a drawing of a man sawing a branch with a long-handled tool of some kind, nothing to show what exactly a collar is or how much of the remaining foot qualifies as the stub or even why he selected that particular branch. So for pruning, I attended a workshop presented by my local nursery, which was far more informative and has the advantage of pertaining entirely to where I live. Regarding chickens: There are some interesting points, like letting a fresh egg age in the fridge a week before hard-boiling so it won't be difficult to peel or selecting a dual-purpose (egg laying and meat) breed because they are more disease-resistant than specialized breeds, but nothing that will in anyway get you started. For that I'm presently using the book  Chick Days: An Absolute Beginner's Guide to Raising Chickens from Hatching to Laying . For rabbits, you'll get two pages most of which just informs you that there are different breeds.The only section of The Backyard Homestead that I was able to test out in my apartment days was the section on herb gardening. I killed all of them, until getting  Grow Great Grub: Organic Food from Small Spaces ), which revealed why the rosemary survived but did not grow (too small a pot), why the basil died (unrelenting exposure to wind), how all of them could have benefited from mulch, and how to make simple plant foods. It also explained terms I had seen thrown around in several gardening books, like the warning to not let your plants "bolt" (which at the time I could only imagine involved my herbs running away to a more competent home). All those other books have unhelpful charts describing the exact conditions favored by each plant (type of soil, pH, full sun vs partial shade, etc) until you believe each plant should be grown in its own meticulously placed test tube. And I spent years thinking "partial shade" meant some kind of sparse, broken shade, like under a tree. Turns out the "partial" refers to time; 4-6 hours of direct sun per day compared to 8 hours of direct sun per day for "full sun." And if you've always wanted to grow herbs, but wondered what you might do with them beyond cooking, then absolutely get  Making It: Radical Home Ec for a Post-Consumer World , a brilliant DIY book on everything from making your own shampoo to beer to how to slaughter a chicken (The Backyard Homestead refers you to other books for any slaughtering instructions).By all means, get The Backyard Homestead. Pour over it for hours in a coffee shop/bathtub/Cracker Barrel/escape-of-your-choice. Gaze lovingly at the beautiful, orderly homestead layouts at the beginning of the book. But think of it more as a course catalogue for college, that thick book (if they still put those out) that lists every class a college offers along with a brief description for each, rather than as the classes themselves. Use it to sketch out which topics you'd like to study, then find other resources (mentors, workshops, youtube demonstrations, books, meetup groups, feed stores, nurseries, magazines like Urban Farm) and go from there.

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,  The New Organic Grower: Master's Manual of Tools and Techniques for the Home and Market Gardener (A Gardener's Supply Book)  is still number one for me. The New Organic Grower: Master's Manual of Tools and Techniques for the Home and Market Gardener (A Gardener's Supply Book)

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

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.

This is a book we refer to all year 'round.The book quality is professional, and has upheld to my constantly using it as a reference book.The information inside is great for people just starting to investigate their journey with back yard homesteading, and an excellent source of ongoing learning as you walk through the seasons.This is seriously my favourite gardening/homesteading book!