Carleen Madigan - The Backyard Homestead: Produce all the food you need on just a quarter acre!

THE
BACKYARD HOMESTEAD

THE
BACKYARD HOMESTEAD

Edited by Carleen Madigan

The mission of Storey Publishing is to serve our customers by
publishing practical information that encourages
personal independence in harmony with the environment.

Art direction and book design by Dan O. Williams
Text production by Dan O. Williams and Jennifer Jepson Smith

Cover illustrations by Michael Austin
Additional back cover illustrations by Bethany Caskey: top row left; Beverly Duncan:
bottom row right; Douglas Paisley: bottom row left; Elayne Sears: top row center
and right, bottom row center
Interior illustration credits appear on page 353

Indexed by Nancy D. Wood

2009 by Storey Publishing, LLC

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced without written permission from the publisher, except by a reviewer who may quote brief passages or reproduce illustrations in a review with appropriate credits; nor may any part of this book be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or other without written permission from the publisher.

The information in this book is true and complete to the best of our knowledge. All recommendations are made without guarantee on the part of the author or Storey Publishing. The author and publisher disclaim any liability in connection with the use of this information. For additional information, please contact Storey Publishing, 210 MASS MoCA Way, North Adams, MA 01247.

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Printed in the United States by Versa Press
10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

The backyard homestead / edited by Carleen Madigan.
p. cm.
Includes bibliographical references and index.
ISBN 978-1-60342-138-6 (pbk. : alk. paper)
1. Kitchen gardens. 2. FoodPreservation.
3. Meat animals. I. Madigan, Carleen.
SB321.B1434 2009
641dc22
2009001338

contents

Welcome!

In the early 1980s, my family lived in a small gray house on what I now realize was a half-acre backyard homestead situated on a quiet, tree-lined street in Nampa, Idaho. I was just a small child then, but I still remember the vegetable garden my parents planted each year, tucked away in the far corner of our backyard. There must have been tomatoes and lettuce and squash, along with the other usual vegetable garden suspects, but I paid more attention to the pink raspberries that scrambled along the back fence. They were sun-warmed and sweet, and whenever I snatched a fistful of ripe berries and hid from my sister in the evergreens along the back property line, I felt that I had the makings of my own kingdom, or a fort of self-sufficiency.

In the spring, my mother and I walked the abandoned railroad tracks, collecting wild asparagus (Euell Gibbons would have been proud). My father caught trout from the Snake River and smoked them, and the lingering aroma of the steel smoker inhabited the garage the rest of the year. With some women from our church, my mother started a gleaning group that collected imperfect vegetables and fruit from local farmers, canned them, and donated the goods to feed the needy in our town. She canned for us, too, and a whole room in our basement was filled with sparkling jars of cherries, peaches, tomatoes, and green beans. And, of course, there were her home-baked pita bread, granola, soups, casseroles, and pies. There was always something cooking.

A whole room in our basement was filled with sparkling jars of cherries, peaches, tomatoes, and green beans.

In 1983, Storey Publishing printed its first catalog of books, many of which would have appealed to my parents and other self-sufficiency enthusiasts of the early 1980s. The books included Sweet and Hard Cider (by the then less-than-famous Annie Proulx); Keeping the Harvest; Home Sausage Making; The Zucchini Cookbook; Woodstove Cookery; The Canning, Freezing, Curing, and Smoking of Meat, Fish, and Game; Carrots Love Tomatoes; Fruits and Berries for the Home Garden; The Family Cow; and, of course, the classic The Have-More Plan. (For a list of the other Storey titles youll enjoy, see page 345.)

That all of these books are still in print after so many years is a testament to the timeless practicality of their content. Today, they are being rediscovered by a whole new generation of readers who whether or not they were raised by parents who went back to the land want to learn what it takes to provide their own food. They arent farmers, but they have a little bit of yard (or maybe even none at all yet) and a whole lot of passion. Maybe youre one of those people.

Its about loving the process of creating something delicious and the joy of sharing my creations with people I care about.

If so, The Backyard Homestead is for you. Its an introduction to the best of Storeys information about food production. I hope itll inspire you and give you a starting point, a foothold to learn a few practical skills. Whether its canning tomatoes from your own garden or making fresh chvre from a goat you milked yourself, this book will show you the way forward. Maybe you dont have a garden or a goat, and youll be canning tomatoes from a nearby farm and making cheese with milk from a local dairy. Its a good start. Its also a way to pass along to your own children skills for self-sufficiency and to create in their minds the memory of time spent doing something practical and fun with the people they love.

Its amazing to me that I can still remember so much of my food life from when I was a child. Something from those days must have stuck with me, because Ive become a person who gardens, forages, bakes, makes cheese, and puts up fruits and vegetables, much like my parents did. Through the summer, I harvest fresh vegetables from my garden (though most of my produce comes from a local farm), forage for wild mushrooms, freeze blueberries and cherries, and can apple-sauce, tomatoes, and peaches. On weekends during the winter, theres almost always a pot of soup on the stove and a loaf of bread or a batch of biscuits in the oven. And as long as my local dairy farmers are milking their herd of grass-fed Canadiennes, Ill be making my own mozzarella and cottage cheese.

But to me, its not about food production , which sounds like an industrial term better suited to a factory farm than to my tiny kitchen. Its about loving the process of creating something delicious and the joy of sharing my creations with people I care about.

I hope that, after reading this book, youll discover these joys for yourself!

Carleen Madigan

Start Your Own Backyard Homestead

Whether youre starting off with an acre or two or just an apartment with a small patio, theres something you can do to provide some of your own food.

Who knew, for instance, that an ordinary front yard can be planted to wheat, which you can harvest and grind for flour? Or that you can grow as many as 15 pounds of tomatoes from just one self-watering container on the back patio? Or that you can keep as many as a dozen chickens on a quarter-acre lot and still have space for vegetables, fruit trees, herbs, and even pigs? How exciting is that!