Ready to do a little research?!

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the Sustainable Homestead 

 From capturing water and building strong soil to helping your animals live their best lives, The Sustainable Homestead is about making your homestead stronger by achieving synergy between what can seem like different parts. 

Back to Basics

Hundreds of projects, step-by-step sequences, photographs, charts, and illustrations in Back to Basics will help you dye your own wool with plant pigments, graft trees, raise chickens, craft a hutch table with hand tools, and make treats such as blueberry peach jam and cheddar cheese. The truly ambitious will find instructions on how to build a log cabin or an adobe brick homestead. 

Dirt to Soil

As a series of weather-related crop disasters put Brown and his wife in desperate financial straits, they started making bold changes to their farm. In an effort to simply survive, Brown began experimenting with new practices he’d learned about from reading and talking with innovative researchers and ranchers. As he and his family struggled to keep the farm viable, they found themselves on an amazing journey into a new type of farming: regenerative agriculture. He dropped the use of most of the herbicides, insecticides, and synthetic fertilizers that are a standard part of conventional agriculture. He switched to no-till planting, started planting diverse cover crops mixes, and changed his grazing practices. In so doing Brown transformed a degraded farm ecosystem into one full of life―starting with the soil and working his way up, one plant and one animal at a time. In Dirt to Soil Gabe Brown tells the story of that amazing journey and offers a wealth of innovative solutions to restoring the soil by laying out and explaining his "five principles of soil health"

The Backyard Beekeeper

Recommended by my beekeeper association,  

This is more than a guide to beekeeping, it features expert advice for:

• Setting up and caring for your own colonies
• Selecting the best location to place your new bee colonies for their safety and yours
• The most practical and nontoxic ways to care for your bees
• Swarm control
• Using top bar hives
• Harvesting the products of a beehive and collecting and using honey
• Bee problems and treatments
• Information for urban bees and beekeepers
• Using your smoker the right way
• Better pest management
• Providing consistent and abundant good food
• Keeping your hives healthy

The Beginners Guide to Raising Chickens

 This book on raising chickens guides you through:

• Getting from the chicken to the egg—Find out how to raise chicks, keep your birds safe from predators, introduce new birds to the flock, and more.
• Creating a custom coop—Build the perfect home for raising chickens with detailed backyard coop construction guides.
• Expert care advice—Learn how to identify different behaviors in your chicken, help solve egg shortages, and navigate a range of potential surprises with confidence.

Greenhouse Gardening for Beginners

 By reading this book, you’ll discover:

• A clear Step to Step process to Choosing and Planning your Greenhouse
• A Super-Useful Year-Round Planting Calendar
• A complete chapter with detailed instructions on how to grow the most common and beginner-friendly vegetables, herbs, fruits and flowers
• Techniques for Extending the Growing Season
• 10 Perfect Greenhouse Projects 
• Solutions to the Most Common Maintenance Problems
• Many Tips and Tricks to Get the Most out of Your Greenhouse 
• Suggests How a Greenhouse Project can Save Money at the Supermarket and even Lead to the Creation of a Business

101 Chicken Keeping Hacks 

 This guide includes these handy ideas and much more:

• Feeding: Try homemade scratch, growing fodder, or frozen treats
• The Run: Make a chicken swing or DIY scarecrow
• Chicken Health: Find ideas for boredom busters, homemade salves, and herbal teas
• The Coop: Keep it clean with a natural coop cleaner and make your own coop curtains
• The Garden: Build an herb drying rack or brew a batch of chicken poop “tea”