Backyard Homesteader: How to Save Water, Keep Bees, Eat from Your Garden, and Live a More Sustainable Life

by Alison Candlin

The essential beginner's manual on living a greener, healthier, and more self-sufficient lifestyle. Absolutely all you need to know to provide you and your family with homegrown food throughout the year. Alison Candlin offers easy-to-follow advice on planning, establishing, and maintaining a small-acre farm, an allotment, or a backyard garden. She also includes essential tips for selecting, housing, and looking after chickens, goats, pigs, bees, and other animals. Learn how to collect and recycle water, compost your leftover scraps, and generate renewable energy for your own home in order to save money and minimize your impact on the environment. With step-by-step instructions and more than 350 photographs and charming illustrations, this book is a practical and comprehensive guide to living off the land.

Genres: Gardening, Nonfiction, Nature

256 pages, Hardcover

Published March 2, 2021

Reviews

[Jessica · Rating 3 out of 5]

This is a very broad overview of homesteading. There is SO MUCH covered, but not in depth. There are chapters on starting out your homestead (planning, fencing, buildings, etc.), growing vegetables and fruit, pests and diseases, keeping animals, foraging/hunting/wild food, preserving, and water and energy conservation. I think this book is more geared toward someone either interested in starting to homestead and trying to get ideas or someone who's already doing it and wants to add on something new. You're not going to learn to keep bees with 3 pages about beekeeping, but you could get an idea of what it takes to know if you want to add that or not. There are a LOT of color pictures, but I found the book somewhat lacking overall. In the chapter about planning there are 3 illustrations of how to divide out your property for vegetables, animals, etc. but she never gives any range of space/acreage needed. It would be helpful to show picture 1 and say this could be done on 1/4 - 1 acre lot, etc. Also, in the pest chapter there is a picture of a snail, but literally nothing about slug/snails which are the WORST pest issue for me in my garden (esp. when plants are small or seedlings). It's a pretty book, but I don't know how useful it would be overall. In my opinion there are a lot better homesteading or interest-specific books out there.

[Sherri · Rating 3 out of 5]

A basic book for beginners that could be good to have in your home library.

[Brea Nyhus · Rating 4 out of 5]

Great beginners starting point but does not go into great depths on topics. Can be a great reference guide.

[emyrose8 · Rating 3 out of 5]

🤔 hard to say what to think of this book. It breaks everything down pretty good. Very text heavy, but there are some pretty photos and the text is chunked in manageable pieces. LOTS of info on growing things. The planning your homestead layout was a little weak IMO. But there is a ton of instructions for gardening (calendar to do list, seasonal growing guides, how to train plants/fruit trees, super detailed cultivation guides broken into plant types). There’s a directory of pests and diseases.

Another section focuses on keeping animals... I skipped that since I grew up on a farm with animals. Seemed a bit simplistic and general, especially in the feeding of goats. But again, I skimmed. The animal section included parts of how to kill/prepare birds for eating.

And there’s a section on foraging, wood chopping, preserving produce, water/energy conservation.

So, I think my issue with the book is that it tackles too much. It’s a fantastic resource for certain things and then is rather vague in others. Will I still check out this book when it’s time to start my garden? Absolutely.

[Katie · Rating 3 out of 5]

Covers many topics you’d need to think about when planning and running a homestead. I particularly liked the section on fruit - several pages with many diagrams to show you how best to prune and care for various fruits. Most topics however are not deeply covered, so I feel like you’d get an overview of something in this book, but have to go to other sources for more detailed information.

Going in, I expected this to be a good reference book, but I’m not sure how helpful it would actually be.

[Pam · Rating 3 out of 5]

Good to read at end of winter, to look forward to growing season

[Mskychick · Rating 4 out of 5]

3.5 to 4 stars?
It’s a pretty broad and pretty basic book
But provides a good framework for the reader to identify broad concepts, in order to point out things that will need more in-depth research

[Laura Day · Rating 4 out of 5]

An informative and dense guide for homesteaders. More of a reference than a read all the way through book.

[Tracy Wilson · Rating 4 out of 5]

Great information

[Emily Hoornstra · Rating 3 out of 5]

Beautiful illustrations and lots of great ideas. I would suggest double checking with your local extension office before jumping into the food preservation world for the first time.