Backyard Homesteading – A Back-to-Basics Guide to Self-Sufficiency

By David Toht
Creative Homeowner
December 5, 2011

David Toht has more than 60 how-to books to this credit. He considers harvesting a sun-warmed tomato from his own garden one of life’s sweetest pleasures. He and his wife, Rebecca, live in Olympia, Washington.

From the author David Toht:

We once had a flock of brown-egg chickens. We called them our “illicit biddies” because they weren’t strictly legal in town. My wife and kids and I thoroughly enjoyed the experience, relishing the fresh eggs and delighting in the antics of the hens. They were great fun to work with, grateful for weeds and vegetable scraps, donating manure for the compost pile, meticulously scratching up insects and grubs.

Our flock inspired me to contact Creative Homeowner about doing a book on chickens. They had a better idea, a book on the broader topic of food self-sufficiency. Backyard Homesteading is the result. I hope you find it a useful introduction to the joys of raising your own food.

I thoroughly enjoyed working on the book because I got to visit scores of backyard farms and talk with people passionate about things like top-bar bee hives, heritage tomatoes, and pygmy goats. Their hard-won knowledge and canny tricks of the trade were invaluable in putting this book together.

That exposure dovetailed with the summers I spent on my grandparents’ farm in west-central Illinois. The farm was that rarity, a diversified farm, with not just row crops like corn and soybeans, but fields of alfalfa, oats, and hay, as well as chickens, hogs, and steers. In addition, a huge garden yielded a cellar full of canned vegetables. I watched my grandfather butcher chickens, using the axe and chopping block method. The smell of scalded chicken feathers is something you don’t forget. That farm gave me an early exposure to how our food is produced and a lifelong love of working the soil. It also taught valuable lessons about the ingenuity and hard work self-sufficiency requires–and its substantial rewards.

See the book here.