Handbook Series - Böcker

Here is a full-color guide to help you and your family to be kinder to Mother Earth, while being kind to your bank account! It doesn’t matter where your homestead is located—farm, suburb, or even city—you can learn to grow vegetables, use alternative energy, can and preserve, and more! You, too, can be more self-sufficient!With the rapid depletion of our planet’s natural resources, we would all like to live a more self-sufficient lifestyle. But in the midst of an economic crisis, it’s just as important to save money as it is to go green.Plan, plant, and harvest your own organic home garden.Enjoy fruits and vegetables year-round by canning, drying, and freezing.Build alternate energy devices by hand, such as solar panels or geothermal heat pumps.Differentiate between an edible puffball mushroom and a poisonous amanita.Prepare butternut squash soup using ingredients from your own garden.Conserve water by making a rain barrel or installing an irrigation system.Have fun and save cash by handcrafting items such as soap, potpourri, and paper.Experience the satisfaction that comes with self-sufficiency, as well as the assurance that you have done your part to help keep our planet green. The Homesteading Handbook is your roadmap to living in harmony with the land.

More and more cooks are turning to their own gardens or to local farmers’ markets to find inspiration for their meals. Eating fresh, local produce is a hot trend, but lifelong Vermonter Marie Lawrence has been cooking with produce from her gardens, buying milk from the farmers up the road, and lavishing her family and lucky friends with the fruits of her kitchen labor since she was a kid. In this book she includes recipes for everything from biscuits and breads to pies and cookies, soups and stews to ribs and roasts. Also included are instructions for making cheese, curing meats, canning and preserving, and much more.Organized by month to coordinate with a farmer’s calendar, cooks will find orange date bran muffins and old fashioned pot roast in January, hot spiced maple milk and fried cinnamon buns in March, mint mallow ice cream in July, Vermont cheddar onion bread in October, and almond baked apples with Swedish custard cream in December. Other recipes include grilled chicken with peach maple glaze, veggie tempura, raspberry chocolate chip cheesecake, and dozens of other breads, salads, drinks, and desserts that are fresh from the farmer’s kitchen.

Packed with step-by-step instructions, useful tips, time-honored wisdom, and both illustrations and photographs, this compact guide has everything you need to dive into a more self-sufficient life. From canning and preserving to keeping chickens, fermenting vegetables to soap-making, Gehring covers all the basics in this easy-to-read, approachable collection. Topics covered include:Generating your own energyHerbal medicineCheese-makingMaple sugaringFarm mechanicsBuilding a smokehouseDyeing woolCompostingDisaster PreparednessAnd more!Whether you own one hundred acres or rent a studio apartment in the city, this book has plenty of ideas to inspire you. Learn how to build a log cabin or how to craft handmade paper; find out how to install a solar panel on your roof or brew your own tea from dried herbs; Cure a ham, bake a loaf of bread, or brew your own beer. This book has something for everyone.