So I ordered the book back on October 21st and am devouring it. It's one of those truly good books that makes me feel like I just got off the phone with a close friend -and does actually make me "laugh out loud". It's joined the ranks of a small number of books good enough to make me buy multiple copies to give to friends, family, and total strangers (I've bought 3 copies of this book in the last month). Just what I needed after the let-down that was
Chicken and Egg: A Memoir of Suburban Homesteading with 125 Recipes. Even better than
The Feast Nearby: How I lost my job, buried a marriage, and found my way by keeping chickens, foraging, preserving, bartering, and eating locally (all on $40 a week), though I loved that book, too.
The book is strongest when it compares a finished product from the store (a loaf of bread) to what she can make at home using store bought staples (flour, salt, yeast). Since store-bought cream is more expensive than store-bought butter, she concludes it is not cost-effective to make your own butter. This in turn works best with products that were once homemade (hummus, peanut butter, bacon) and less well with items that are an industrial invention (poptarts).
The book does not work as solidly outside of this format, such as when she discusses gardening, bees, chickens, and goats. These chapters are entertaining, but not as well constructed from a cost-benefit-analysis point of view:
The fruit and vegetable sections are shockingly short (vegetables is 6 pages; fruit is 7 pages, 2 of which are for making lard). We try to get as much produce as possible from the backyard (and it meets her criteria of "cheaper, better, and less hassle than a trip to the grocery store"), and especially love the ultra-cheap orange juice and pomegranate juice, so I was surprised at the omission.
The chickens, bees, and goats sections make hilarious and thought provoking stories, but are incomplete in answering the question: "Make or Buy?" SPOILERS: Regarding eggs, she doesn't compare the cost-per-dozen of store-bought eggs versus backyard eggs. Rather, she compares what she was spending at the store a year (about $150, it sounds like) with the cost of housing and caring for 19 birds at a time (she seems to have bought a total of 29); the former provided her the exact number of eggs she needed while the latter left her drowning in eggs, even with giving them away to all takers. Take away lessons: when you build a run, make it predator proof (see
Making It: Radical Home Ec for a Post-Consumer World for good advice here) and don't buy more chickens than you need. 3 or 4 is plenty; they live in much less space and require only 1 nesting box (resulting in MUCH cheaper building costs), they use considerably less feed, straw, and wood shavings and so your ongoing costs are less, too. Because we garden, eggs aren't all we get from the chickens. Each chicken produces 45 pounds of manure a year, which mixes with the deep-bedding straw in their run to make wonderful compost (which we muck out once a year).
SPOILERS: Regarding the bees, I was surprised she didn't have any use for the beeswax. With
Making It: Radical Home Ec for a Post-Consumer World, I use beeswax in concocting deodorant, lip balm, decongestant chest rub, furniture polish, lotion, and more. It's what finally convinced me I need to get some bees. She says she got 3 gallons of honey in 6 months from 2 hives and that it would "last her family a decade." But what if you took the many recipes in this book that call for sugar and reformatted them to work with honey? And she said her "bee folly" cost $1,200 or $25/cup of honey -but that includes Hive 3 and Hive 4, which she had to know were doomed to fail. If the original 2 hives cost $600 and they gave all 3 of the gallons (she says she got nothing from the next 2 before they died), that's *really* $12.50 a cup. Which is still insane, but if they had survived... And in cases where a project was too productive (eggs, honey), she *could* recoup costs by selling the excess (she says the bees and chickens were the 2 projects that ate up the savings created by other projects).
SPOILERS: Regarding the goats, the book is published before either gives birth and therefore before either gives milk, so there's not much information there. And she doesn't mention what she might do with the 2 kids (the original pair of goats -the mothers- cost her $450 so I wonder if she could sell the babies for $450 and recoup some costs? As is, she concludes that goats' milk is "buy". January 28 update: I just finished
Little House in the Suburbs: Backyard farming and home skills for self-sufficient living which had this to say: "The first rule of selecting a goat is don't buy pedigree unless you're going to breed for profit. There's no reason for a pedigree goat. It's like paying for a show dog when you just want a friend to take on walks. A good mixed-breed goat costs between twenty and fifty dollars. Pedigree goats can be in the hundreds or more." (p. 89) "Goats typically give birth to two babies at a time." (p. 100) So, if you pay $50 each for a pair of goats and can get even $20 each for their four offspring (which would just about recover the stud fee expense), the math shouldn't be devastating.
Little House in the Suburbs: Backyard farming and home skills for self-sufficient living, by the way, would make a great companion to this book.
