The Homesteading Handbook: A Back to Basics Guide to Growing Your Own Food, Canning, Keeping Chickens, Generating Your Own Energy, Crafting, Herbal Medicine, and More

by Abigail Gehring (Editor)

Overview

Here is a full-color guide to help you and your family to be kinder to Mother Earth, while being kind to your bank account! It doesn’t matter where your homestead is located—farm, suburb, or even city—you can learn to grow vegetables, use alternative energy, can and preserve, and more! You, too, can be more self-sufficient!

With the rapid depletion of our planet’s natural resources, we would all like to live a more self-sufficient lifestyle. But in the midst of an economic crisis, it’s just as important to save money as it is to go green.

• Plan, plant, and harvest your own organic home garden.
• Enjoy fruits and vegetables year-round by canning, drying, and freezing.
• Build alternate energy devices by hand, such as solar panels or geothermal heat pumps.
• Differentiate between an edible puffball mushroom and a poisonous amanita.
• Prepare butternut squash soup using ingredients from your own garden.
• Conserve water by making a rain barrel or installing an irrigation system.
• Have fun and save cash by handcrafting items such as soap, potpourri, and paper.

Experience the satisfaction that comes with self-sufficiency, as well as the assurance that you have done your part to help keep our planet green. The Homesteading Handbook is your roadmap to living in harmony with the land.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781616082659
Publisher:	Skyhorse
Publication date:	05/25/2011
Series:	Handbook Series
Pages:	272
Sales rank:	73,083
Product dimensions:	7.00(w) x 9.90(h) x 0.90(d)

About the Author

Abigail R. Gehring is the author or editor of more than a dozen books including Back to Basics, Homesteading, The Illustrated Encyclopedia of Country Living, and Classic Candy. She enjoys writing, gardening, experimenting in the kitchen, and spending time with family. She lives with her husband and two children in an 1800s farmstead they are restoring in Marlboro, Vermont.

Editorial Reviews

Whether people are motivated by economic or social sensibility, self-sufficiency has growing appeal. This revised handbook (originally published in 2009) appears to cover it all but falls short. Group activities such as community gardening and selling handicrafts have been removed from this edition, and the sections that remain have not been updated. There are a lot of ideas offered but no practical instruction. The clip art-like illustrations are simplistic, and the photographs lack useful detail. Carleen Madigan's The Backyard Homestead offers more practical advice with nods toward community regulations and being a good neighbor.

Library Journal