The Quarter-Acre Farm: How I Kept the Patio, Lost the Lawn, and Fed My Family for a Year [Paperback]

Spring Warren (Author), Jesse Pruet (Illustrator)

Book Description

Publication Date: March 15, 2011

When Spring Warren told her husband and two teenage boys that she wanted to grow 75 percent of all the food they consumed for one year—and that she wanted to do it in their yard—they told her she was crazy.

She did it anyway.

The Quarter-Acre Farm is Warren’s account of deciding—despite all resistance—to take control of her family’s food choices, get her hands dirty, and create a garden in her suburban yard. It’s a story of bugs, worms, rot, and failure; of learning, replanting, harvesting, and eating. The road is long and riddled with mistakes, but by the end of her yearlong experiment, Warren’s sons and husband have become her biggest fans—in fact, they’re even eager to help harvest (and eat) the beautiful bounty she brings in.

Full of tips and recipes to help anyone interested in growing and preparing at least a small part of their diet at home, The Quarter-Acre Farm is a warm, witty tale about family, food, and the incredible gratification that accompanies self-sufficiency.

Editorial Reviews

Review

"Finally, a book about local eating that doesn't make me feel bad about myself! Warren entirely avoids the genre's stinky mire of holier than thou preaching, and instead tells the honest and informative story of her edible experiment. The recipes following each chapter are tasty, and the illustrations are stunningly beautiful."
—Novella Carpenter, author of Farm City: The Education of an Urban Farmer

“Reading Spring Warren’s book is like chatting with a good friend over coffee as she relates her garden adventures (some hilarious) and muses on the meaning of almost everything. This is an instructive, useful book, based on sound garden experience and in-depth research, and it’s an intimate tale of one woman’s relationship to food and family.”
—Georgeanne Brennan, author of Potager: Fresh Garden Cooking in the French Style and A Pig in Provence

“Spring Warren’s memoir of a year feeding her family from her suburban garden resonates with the American dream of self-sufficiency—what she comes to know of growing food is impressive, the recipes superb—and it is beautifully written, enlightening, and very funny.”
—John Lescroart, New York Times best-selling author

"A wise and tender-hearted book that will teach you as much about life as it will about gardening."
—Thrity Umrigar, best-selling author of The Space Between Us and The Weight of Heaven

About the Author

Spring Warren is the author of the novel Turpentine, a bronze medalist for the 2007 ForeWord Magazine Book of the Year Award and a San Francisco Chronicle Notable Book of 2007.

Warren comes from Wyoming, where here family has lived since 1870. A true gal of the American West, she grew up in Casper and at a ranch in the Black Hills that her parents still own. She’s been a schoolteacher (children bring cow testicles to school for show and tell in Wyoming), raised pigs, killed rattlesnakes, hunted, and fished. When she moved toward writing, she was a working as a short order cook, selling worms and maple bars to campers, and teaching swimming lessons in the shadow of Devil's Tower, and was living in a trailer where she washed clothes in a wringer washer and dried them by the heat of the wood stove.

Warren now lives in Davis, California, an educational hub of the agricultural world, in the Central Valley, the world’s most productive agricultural region.

Product Details

• Paperback: 336 pages
• Publisher: Seal Press (March 15, 2011)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 1580053408
• ISBN-13: 978-1580053402
• Product Dimensions: 8 x 1.2 x 8 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1.2 pounds (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 4.4 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (38 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #75,957 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)
  • #10 in Books > Humor & Entertainment > Humor > Rural Life
  • #18 in Books > Crafts, Hobbies & Home > Gardening & Landscape Design > Essays
  • #18 in Books > Crafts, Hobbies & Home > Gardening & Landscape Design > By Technique > Urban

More About the Author

Spring Warren is a writer with a penchant for art, furniture-making and gardening. Her novel "Turpentine" came out with Grove Press. Her nonfiction book "The Quarter Acre Farm" was published by Seal. Spring resides in California but hails from Wyoming, where her family has lived since the 1870s. Visit her blog, The Quarter Acre Farm, at http://thequarteracrefarm.com/

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

68 of 69 people found the following review helpful

5.0 out of 5 stars Bumped Animal, Vegetable, Miracle from my Top 3! April 13, 2011

By Melonie K.

Format:Paperback|Amazon Verified Purchase

I thoroughly enjoyed The Quarter-Acre Farm. I originally looked for it on Amazon because I saw a comment by the author, Spring Warren, on a Facebook post about the White House garden, where she mentioned her new book. Once I found it and saw several positive reviews, I decided to get my own copy. I had a horrible time deciding between buying the Kindle edition so I could have it RIGHT AWAY or the print version so I could see the illustrations other reviewers mentioned. I finally sprang for the print version and am glad to have done so - Spring Warren's storytelling is wonderful, but Jesse Pruet's pictures add a whole new level of fun and intrigue to the book.

As for my review title - Barbara Kingsolver's Animal, Vegetable, Miracle is the standard I hold a lot of "homesteading" books to. That book taught me SO much about so many subjects that it's an excellent yardstick for me. Kingsolver's book is highly educational, makes me think, makes me feel involved due to her tone, and offers recipes that are approachable and "doable" for folks like me who aren't going to become pro chefs any time soon.

Warren's format in The Quarter-Acre Farm is similar to the format of Kingsolver's book; a chapter full of personal stories and interesting insights and research, along with a recipe to top off each chapter. How did Warren bump Kingsolver from my top 3? With her humor. While Kingsolver shares some fantastic stories, Warren's tone is more approachable and less professorial. Even her chapter titles bring fun to the read: "Pole Dancing" (which gave me a chuckle but then taught me very important things via her pumpkin trellis experiment) - "Magical Fruit" (yes, that would be the beans, of course!...) - all sorts of things made me chuckle, smirk, and in some cases try to roar with laughter as quietly as possible so I wouldn't wake my sleeping children.

Spring Warren definitely shares plenty of insights from her own trials and triumphs in the garden that will be useful to me in my own garden; many authors in the gardening and homesteading arena do this. What she did that very few do is make everything educational AND fun to read. I highly recommend The Quarter-Acre Farm to anyone interested in gardening, whether on a hobby scale or for a full-scale local eating/self-sufficiency effort. I will be rereading this book and plan to have my children read it as one of our more non-traditional texts in our homeschool as well. I'm preparing now for the giggles from my 'tween daughter when we go over snail reproduction. (Trust me, it's worth a giggle - and who knew snails were that strong, too?) I suspect the story of her sister's hair dye venture will bring forth plenty of knowing nods from my kids as it did from me.

The reviews on the back of the book say it all. One author described reading this book as being like sitting down for a chat with a friend over coffee; I would thoroughly agree, but I expect I'd be asked to weed a bit as well. (Which made me laugh all the harder to myself, because I think Warren would convince me quite easily to do so!)

I'm not certain if the Kindle edition of this book includes the illustrations; I plan to find out in the near future by ordering it. If you want to be able to see those, I would highly recommend the print copy. But if you don't care about the pictures as much as just having a phenomenal read, get either version. Hopefully you'll learn as much and laugh as much as I did, and walk away hoping for more from Spring Warren and her garden. Read more ›

29 of 29 people found the following review helpful

5.0 out of 5 stars Fascinating, Humorous, Delicious Look at a Year of Gardening and Eating, With Recipes March 7, 2011

By Rachel Kramer Bussel VINE™ VOICE

Format:Paperback

I picked this memoir up on a whim, even though, as a very city-loving New Yorker, I have no intention of growing my own food. I was surprised and delighted by Warren's humorous voice, the way she walks readers through her adventures (and misadventures) in gardening, and the random, fascinating asides (such as the one about Santa's reindeer and psychotropic mushrooms). Her voice is engaging and she'll throw at you something that will certainly make you want to run out and eat your veggies, even if you haven't quite gotten around to growing them yourself. This is part cookbook, part primer on gardening, and part family memoir about why she decided to start the Quarter-Acre Farm and the lessons about gardening, nutrition, pesticides and more that she learned.

This is not a manifesto about why self-gardening is best and it doesn't wrap up uber-neatly, the way a lot of "I tried this for a year" memoirs do. Warren offers up practical tips and lessons on which vegetables thrived, which didn't, and why, and what she did with both the food and how she composted and tried various ways to increase her yield. The chapter where a "real" farmer comes and inspects her farm is especially interesting. I recommend this even if, like me, you have pretty much no thumb at all when it comes to gardening. Of course, if you do have an inclination toward growing even a small amount of your own food, you'll appreciate Warren's tips and especially her voice, but you don't have to have ever though about gardening or farming before to get a lot out of this book. The sheer respect Warren shows for the animals in her yard (geese!) and the plants and land she is using made me take a look at how easily I consume and dispose often prepackaged foods.... Though, again, this is not a manifesto and Warren isn't condemning how others eat, her critical look at the true impact of our modern consumption should certainly prompt more than a little introspection when it comes time to grocery shop or choose what to eat next. Read more ›

19 of 20 people found the following review helpful

5.0 out of 5 stars Fascinating and Incredibly Helpful! March 18, 2011

By Kelly TOP 1000 REVIEWERVINE™ VOICE

Format:Paperback|Amazon Verified Purchase

I LOVE this book!

Somehow this book manages to be an excellent "how to" guide, an extremely funny diary of the author's failures and successes, and a very readable instruction manual all at once. It will make you feel that producing some portion of your own food is an achievable and worthy goal no matter where you live. This book is just the encouragement and assistance that you've been looking for if you are dreaming of growing your own food on your own small lot/yard.

Above any practical value [though there is TONS of that], this book is the most entertaining and funny thing I've read in ages. Spring Warren has such a humorous perspective and such a clever way of looking at things, I really enjoyed reading what she had to say. I also enjoyed her indomitable spirit which comes through so clearly in this book. Even if you don't ever plan to grow a single thing in your yard, you might enjoy this book just as a really fun read.

I bought this book on a whim because I've been longing to transform my yard into something beautiful and practical [as in: something that feeds us!]. I am so happy that this was the book I chose - it was more than I ever expected. I have laughed out loud and been truly motivated to try this idea. I have learned more than I would have thought possible; all while reading a really great story. You can't ask for more than that from a book.

I agree with another review that says this book avoids all the preaching and chiding that other "environmentally friendly" book often contain - it sure does. The author teaches without preaching and entertains you the whole way.

Buy this book - you won't be sorry!