Put your backyard to work with the books: The Backyard Homestead and The Backyard Homestead Guide to Raising Farm Animals

Do you eat food?  Do you eat food every day?  I'm sure you probably do, or you wouldn't be reading these words.  Perhaps you're aware that the quality of your food is important to your health.  After all your body is built out of the nutrients in the food you eat.  What you may not know is the corporatized globalized homogenized pasteurized agriculture system that gives us the food in the mainstream grocery stores, well, that "food" lacks in nutritional goodness.

There's growing interest in local fresh food eaten when the food is freshly harvested.  There's a huge difference between the normal not-quite-food shipped from a zillion miles away, and fresh local food.  This doesn't have to be just a matter of shopping hoity-toity high end organic grocery stores, and doesn't have to mean bustling with the crowds at farmers markets.  You can instead spend months and months of drudgery in your back yard growing your own fresh food.

The drudgery part is one of those stereotypes about gardening that doesn't have to be true.  And the book being reviewed now, The Backyard Homestead, is here to make you feel like it would be extremely simple to plant a quarter acre of ground with gardens and/or orchards and/or livestock and harvest 1400 eggs a year, for example.

The book comes from Storey Publishing and says it was Edited by Carleen Madigan.  It's chock full of pencil drawings of typical garden layouts, advice on growing different plants, combinations of plants that are successful, typical growing areas and growing seasons, plus an extensive section on livestock that makes it seem impossibly realistic you could have a flock of chickens in your backyard keeping you well stocked in eggs and chicken soup.

The book weighs in at 360ish pages and is chock full of information, drawings, written advice, reference material, and so on.

Sections cover

• The Home Vegetable Garden
• Backyard Fruits and Nuts (grow your own orchard!)
• Easy Fragrant Herbs
• Home Grown Grains
• Poultry for Meat and Eggs
• Meat and Dairy (other livestock)
• Food from the Wild (honey, mushrooms, etc)

To go along with the Poultry section, the indices contain a list of backyard chicken laws from around the U.S.  In some areas it's subversive and even illegal to raise your own chickens in your backyard.  My friend who does raise chickens has a bumper sticker reading "My Pet Gives Me Eggs" .. think about it

An important section up front covers planning out your garden not only for the available space, but to minimize the work you do.  For example raised bed gardening is described as a big win because the plants are closer to you (you don't have to bend over as far) and the growing conditions can be better.  This section is also important to avoid the drudgery stereotype I mentioned above.

Speaking of which - every page in this book oozes with confidence that this is simple and easy stuff to do.  I sure got excited all over again about the thought of starting a garden or even having some chickens.

There's also a companion book, The Backyard Homestead Guide to Raising Farm Animals: Choose the Best Breeds for Small-Space Farming, Produce Your Own Grass-Fed Meat, Gather Fresh ... Rabbits, Goats, Sheep, Pigs, Cattle, & Bees, which I haven't read but clearly starts with the poultry and livestock section of this book and expands on it in a huge way.  That book is also 360 pages and even includes a full color pull-out chart of something or other.

Together these books should help you "Put Your Back Yard To Work" so that you could not only feed yourself and your family, but perhaps earn a secondary income growing food to sell to others.  In these uncertain economic times this could be some personal resilience that could make the difference between life or death depending on how bad things become.  On the other hand earning an income is not quite so simple nowadays thanks to food safety laws that are being used to crack down on organic farming.  Check your local laws before committing to a business plan and buying equipment.

The books are highly recommended and totally excellent.  Backyards across the country could be a backyard local food agriculture resource.  There have been times in our history where this was a matter of national importance (Victory Gardens), and there may well be a time soon when this is again highly important.

New Yorker's being thwarted from foraging for veggies in City Parks, sign of economic collapse?

Enough people in New York are foraging for "wild" food in city parks, that the city is taking measures to stop the activity. They're training park rangers and others to be on the lookout for foragers, and "chase them off". It may be a sign of people looking for "local food" (because of the local food movement), or it may be a sign of economic worries and a symptom of peak oil. Whatever the reason, New Yorkers are increasingly fanning out across the city’s parks to hunt and gather edible wild plants, like mushrooms, American ginger and elderberries.

From the perspective of the city parks administration, New York’s public lands are not a communal pantry: "If people decide that they want to make their salads out of our plants, then we’re not going to have any chipmunks," said Maria Hernandez, director of horticulture for the Central Park Conservancy, the nonprofit group that manages Central Park.

It's not just plants - it's fish, turtles, and other animals.

Foraging in New York parks is not a new thing, and neither is foraging in general. Foraging is, after all, part of our societal heritage in that thousands of years ago, before Civilization corralled us into cities, our ancestors were foragers. But I suppose the thousands of years of civilization has erased foraging as normally acceptable behavior. And really, if a city of millions of people were to turn to the parks for wild grown food, the parks would be stripped of plants in no time.

Today there are several people writing about and leading tours in city parks focused on foraging. There's a lot of edible plants growing unrecognized in parks and vacant lots and along highways and so on. But there are also poisonous plants growing among the edible plants and it takes some training to recognize the safe or unsafe plants. And there are ecologically sound ways to harvest these plants, and it's arguably good for the health of the plants to harvest food from them.

Now, what does this mean? Maybe it's meaning nothing other than the local food movement causing people to become re-interested in plants grown near where they live, and recognizing that city parks have some of those plants. But maybe it means something else.

Many people are saying our society is not sustainable. Whether it's peak oil, or peak copper, or financial distress, etc, many think our society is heading towards a generalized collapse. The remnants of civilization, our neighbors etc, would be left as foragers and the ones who have practical skills like building things or finding safe food, they'll be the ones who survive where others will die in some way.

This may or may not be among the consciously known reasons behind the increase in foragers. It may be buried as an unconscious motivation. The effects I just named are widely recognized, but modern life has so many distractions in it that most don't have time to really think about it between the faux concerns like sports statistics, or the latest fake celebrity fake controversy. Some of my friends are consciously interested in relearning skills like cooking from scratch or recognizing safe foods, and are purposely reskilling themselves, and I expect some of the New York foragers may be similarly concerned as my friends.

Interesting ... In the meantime, here's a few books about foraging and growing food in urban settings.

The Locavore's Handbook: The Busy Person's Guide to Eating Local on a Budget

Your Farm in the City: An Urban-Dweller's Guide to Growing Food and Raising Animals

Food Not Lawns: How to Turn Your Yard Into a Garden and Your Neighborhood Into a Community

Urban Agriculture: Ideas and Designs for the New Food Revolution

The Urban Food Revolution: Changing the Way We Feed Cities

For Hunger-Proof Cities: Sustainable Urban Food Systems

Street Foods: Urban Food and Employment in Developing Countries

The Wild Table: Seasonal Foraged Food and Recipes

The Forager's Harvest: A Guide to Identifying, Harvesting, and Preparing Edible Wild Plants

The Feast Nearby: How I Lost My Job, Buried a Marriage, and Found My Way by Keeping Chickens, Foraging, Preserving, Bartering, and Eatin

The Everything Guide to Foraging: Identifying, Harvesting, and Cooking Nature's Wild Fruits and Vegetables (Everything)

Links: 

Enjoy Park Greenery, City Says, but Not as Salad

Hyperlocavore - a yard sharing community

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Hyperlocavore - a yard sharing community

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Our vision: healthy kids who love the smell of dirt, blocks with foreclosed homes becoming vibrant neighborhoods, plates full of delicious safe food at costs we can all afford, and neighbors who become real friends. Join hyperlocavore to find or start a yard share in your town. CSAs and community gardens fill up fast. Food is expensive! Grow together!

La Vida Locavore

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La Vida Locavore

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The blog for anyone whose crazy life includes planting, growing, weeding, fertilizing, raising, picking, harvesting, processing, cooking, baking, making, serving, buying, selling, distributing, transporting, composting, organizing around, lobbying about, writing about, thinking about, talking about, playing with, and eating food!