The Backyard Homestead: Produce All the Food You Need on Just a Quarter Acre

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 show more 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!! show less

Excellent beginner urban/suburban homesteaders resource. Introduces you to everything that's possible even on a small piece of land. My city doesn't allow for all of these ideas, but I'm implementing those that I can do and am very excited about it.

This year I did a very successful test garden an implemented a lot of other ideas from the book: built coldframes, started making bread and sourdough, made yogurt, got a dwarf apple (self pollinating) and raspberries established, started dehydrating, got a grain mill, began sprouting again for winter, and added 2 rabbits (although I'm vegetarian so I got angoras for spinning fiber and fertilizer).

I'm very excited to expand my garden to the rest of the yard this year and try some of the other show more ideas the book has tempted me with. It's inspired me to do more research on my own and go even further, adding skills like spinning and soapmaking in an effort to life as self-sufficiently as city living will allow. show less

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 show more the book can be applied to any size yard. show less

I picked this one up at a church book sale. My nine-year-old and I have looked through it, and while it's unlikely we're going to put livestock in our suburban yard (except maybe chickens), I can see us using some of Madigan's suggestions. It certainly has been interesting reading about how, with careful management, a fairly small piece of land can yield one heck of a lot of food.

This was an intriguing book, but not really practical for my purposes. I don't have the resources or ability to really do anything, and I am not that much of a gardener so the book wasn't all that interesting to me. I skimmed over quite a bit too.

This book covers just about every topic you could think of when it comes to homesteading, but it only covers a little bit of each topic. Put into actual use, this book would be nowhere near enough to help you do any of the things it talks about. You would need to read books on each specific topic or research those topics online to really figure out how to do those things.

What this book IS good for, is giving you some idea of what you're getting into if you're completely clueless about all show more things homesteading. For example, I was curious about starting a little garden with my favorite veggies. After reading this book I now know that isn't feasible. There is a lot more to gardening even just a small garden with a few vegetables than I thought. I am glad I found all that out without putting hours of research into it. There isn't enough information in this book to really start a garden, but it's definitely enough to get a good idea of what's involved. And so it is with all the other topics they cover.

All in all, it's not a bad read. But I am glad I checked it out at the library rather than reading it. show less

I thoroughly enjoyed reading this, and I plan to purchase it for reference in the future. The book combines textual explanations and instructions regarding small-space farming with tables, charts, and illustrations that allow readers to easily access vital information. I wouldn't say this should be your only homesteading reference, but it should be one of them.

This book is an inspirational introduction to the "minihomestead": producing as much food as possible on as little land as possible. Each section describes a different topic: growing grains, making cheese, keeping bees, and so on. No topic is cover in much detail, but the book does get the thought gears in motion. I especially like the front pages where it shows example yard layouts of 1/8 acre, 1/4 acre, and 1/2 acre and how much food you could produce with each layout.