The Home Farm: How to grow your own fruit and vegetables and keep animals and bees in your backyard

by Nicki Trench

Create your own farm in your backyard with tips on growing, harvesting, and eating your own produce

Nicki Trench has created her own backyard farm from scratch, and now shares with you everything there is to know about growing vegetables, fruit, and herbs, including making your own compost, growing in raised beds, and protecting your crops from pests and disease. Nicki also explains how to rear chickens for eggs and bees for honey, and gives advice on keeping goats and pigs. The benefits of creating your backyard farm are not just economic—the energy once obsessively expended on the exercise bike can now be channeled more productively by digging the vegetable patch, turning the compost, or cleaning out the hen coop. Communities are reappearing over backyard fences as neighbors share their harvest of zucchini, spinach, and eggs. Whatever you choose to grow or rear on your backyard farm, this book offers a taste of the good life that is easy, satisfying, and inexpensive to achieve.

192 pages, Paperback

Published February 8, 2022

About the author

Nicki Trench is one of the leading figures in the revival and promotion of home crafts. As well as teaching, lecturing and feature writing on knitting, crochet, sewing, cake decorating and hen keeping, she is the founder of Laughing Hens, the UK's leading online yarn store, and Rooster Yarns. Her most recent books include Creating Your Garden Farm and 201 Knitting Motifs, Blocks, Projects and Ideas. Nicki also runs Dancing Hens (www.dancinghens.com), a craft studio.

Reviews

[Sushie · Rating 3 out of 5]

Seems like a great reference for gardening and tips on plants, but the animals sections (which were what I checked it out from the library for) were pretty light. More info on chickens than on goats for sure.

[Stacy Jackson · Rating 5 out of 5]

Informative and engaging