Barnheart: The Incurable Longing for a Farm of One's Own

by Jenna Woginrich

Overview

With humor and poise, Jenna Woginrich describes her adventurous self-education in homesteading. Poignant offbeat observations on learning to farm by trial and error punctuate the story of her quest to find a permanent home for herself and her livestock: chickens, geese, sheep, ducks, rabbits, a goat, and a turkey. Alone and on a shoestring budget, Woginrich takes on cranky neighbors and small-town politics without ever losing her trademark humility or comedic style.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781603427951
Publisher:	Storey Books
Publication date:	11/16/2011
Pages:	184
Sales rank:	754,292
Product dimensions:	5.40(w) x 8.40(h) x 0.60(d)

About the Author

Jenna Woginrich is a homesteader and the author of Barnheart, Chick Days, and Made from Scratch. She blogs at Cold Antler Farm, as well as Mother Earth News and The Huffington Post. A Pennsylvania native, she has made her home in the mountains of Tennessee, in northern Idaho, in rural Vermont, and most recently in upstate New York, where she lives with a flock of Scottish Blackface sheep, a border collie in training, chickens and geese, a hive of bees, a horse, and several amiable rabbits.

Table of Contents

A Cabin in the Woods
A Very Long Winter
Sheep 101
The Arrival of Rufus Wainwright and Benjamin Franklin
Into the Garden
Meet the Locals
The Society of Lamb and Wool
The Hooves Have Landed
Getting My Goat
You Need a Truck, Girl
Building Paradise Broke and Alone
Saving Sarah
Turkey Drama
A Note on the Door
The Search Begins
Going Home

Editorial Reviews

A kind of Under the Tuscan Sun for livestock lovers, this candid and sincere memoir recounts the trials and tribulations of an aspiring farmer who yearns to have land to call her own. Transplanted to New England to take an office job, Woginrich (Made from Scratch) writes of longing to rise before dawn to feed chickens, tend sheep, train dogs, breed rabbits, and work the land. Endowed with seemingly boundless reservoirs of energy and enthusiasm for her agricultural pursuits, Woginrich strives to learn all there is to know about border collies and sheep handling while settling in to a new life in a new place with only her dogs and fiddle to keep her company. Self-sufficiency and determination keep the author's homesteading dreams alive as she gradually becomes part of the community and develops into the farmer she always aspired to be. As Woginrich rationalizes away her vegetarianism by contending that the animals she raises as meat are well treated, we are reminded that farming is not for the squeamish. VERDICT A good read for armchair farmers and aspiring and established homesteaders.—Donna L. Davey, New York Univ. Lib.

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