Most households that want to grow more of their own food hit the same wall: they don’t know what’s actually possible on the land they have. This book answers that question directly. Carleen Madigan, then managing editor at Storey Publishing and an organic farmer outside Boston, organized the collective expertise of Storey’s four decades of homesteading publishing into one volume — a comprehensive guide to what you can produce on a quarter-acre suburban lot and exactly how to do it.
Part one covers growing food: vegetable gardens (with charts showing how much food a given area produces), fruit trees and berry bushes, and grains. Part two covers animals: chickens for eggs and meat, rabbits, goats, sheep, cows, pigs, and honeybees. Part three covers the kitchen: canning, freezing, drying, and pickling, plus cheese-making and brewing. Everything is grounded in small-lot practicality — this isn’t about 100 acres; it’s about the backyard lot most households actually have. Storey has printed this more than fourteen times since 2009, which is its own credibility signal.
On this shelf, it sits alongside Carla Emery’s Encyclopedia (the comprehensive American reference) and John Seymour’s Self-Sufficient Life (the philosophical rural vision). Together they cover the full range of land situations. More on the self-reliance skills that pair with this book lives in our Self-Reliance guides.
