Carleen Madigan

This is an excellent first or second book for someone interested in homesteading or mini-farming. It's a Reader's Digest-style compendium of selected chunks of dozens of Storey Publishing titles, so every chapter is written by an expert. It covers vegetable gardening, fruits and nuts, herbs, grains, poultry, meat, and wild foods.

The subtitle on the cover is “Produce all the food you need on just a quarter acre!” The introductory chapter gives a nice overview of preliminary considerations (Start here or move? What will the neighbors think? Are chickens legal here?) and suggests some mini-farm layouts for 1/10, 1/4, and 1/2 of an acre. While this may make the target audience seem to be urban or suburban homesteaders, the majority of the book can be applied to any size yard.… (mer)

This book has more than I could have hoped for. I had read its companion about animal raising and I ordered this because I have been a vegetable gardener for several years now.

OH. MY. GOSH. This book is incredible. My goal is to one day be a homesteader myself – once I can afford to move out to some land – and this book has everything to get me started. Could it be used alone? No, you might need some more manuals to help you troubleshoot problems and have more detailed information about any one particular thing. But my goodness, it has more than you could imagine in there! It walks you through the planting, care, harvesting, and storage of so many different plants, includes recipes and 'how to's (like how to make bear, how to make tea, how to build a chicken coop, how to pasteurize), and it's illustrated! I'm moving from Massachusetts to a small plot of land in Louisiana this summer and I'll be starting my garden again and raising chickens. This book is going to get me through it all and tell me more than I ever could have asked. My little self is freaking out over this book!

This book is a GREAT resource for anyone with a "back to the land" kind of drive in them. Whether you want to get the most out of your vegetable garden, you want to know what you'd have to do to raise meat, you want to make your own dairy products, or you want to know how to forage!, this book is for you!!… (mer)