Back to Basics Backyard Guide

A complete guide to traditional skills. A backyard guide to: buying and working land, raising livestock, generating your own energy, enjoying your harvest, household skills and crafts and more. The classic guide to self-sufficiency. Anyone who wants to learn basic living skills - the kind employed by our forefathers - and adapt them for a better life in the 21st Century need look no further than this eminently useful, full-color guide. Countless readers have turned to Back to Basics for inspiration and instruction, escaping to an era before power saws and fast-food restaurants and rediscovering the pleasures and challenges of a healthier, greener and more self-sufficient lifestyle.

Now newly updated, the hundreds of projects, step-by-step sequences, photographs, charts and illustrations in Back to Basics will help you dye your own wool with plant pigments, graft trees, raise chickens, craft a hutch table with hand tools and make treats such as blackberry peach jam and cheddar cheese. The truly ambitious will find instructions on how to build a log cabin or an adobe brick homestead. More than just practical advice, this is also a book for dreamers - even if you live in a city apartment, you will find your imagination sparked and there's no reason why you can't, for example, make a loom and weave a rag rug. Complete with tips for old-fashioned fun (square dancing calls, homemade toys and kayaking tips), this may be the most thorough book on voluntary simplicity available. Hardcover. 528 pages with color photos

$18.36
$16.52