Customer Reviews

The Backyard Homestead, Mini-Farm and Garden Log Book

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This book explains biointensive gardening, which would be enough to recommend it. But, it also provides abundant planning charts for your own situation, including garden space and layout, length of growing season, frost dates, and desired crops. You can keep records of cultivars chosen and how they did (over several seasons), fertilizers used and the results, planting dates and methods. There's a whole year planning calendar with log pages in the back, a schedule for planting based on YOUR frost dates, and log pages for each type of veg. or other crop. Also included are recommendations for an herbal lawn, fruit trees, and small livestock, reference data for many different crops, and tons more. Publishing date is 1983, but it's not one bit outdated. Get this book!

John Jeavons, et al published this book as a large (12"x8"x1")heavy paper bound in 1983. Back then the book retailed for $8.95. The '83 edition went out of print within a few years yet remained a popular repository of gardening wisdom
among those who realized that herein was a true revolutionary treatist on sustainable living. The used copies started selling for $25 to $50 depending.
Jeavons has been criticized for his reliance on the small space/large yield from raised beds practice but this method will work for those suited to this type of gardening. The unique bits of this work are the emphasis on record keeping, the introduction for the first time in the USA of the broad hoe which Jeavons calls "the U-Bar", and his up-beat You Can! attitude. The book is an important addition to your survivalist libary right along side "Gardening When It Counts" by Steve Solomon and "The New Organic Grower" by Eliot Coleman.