harvest

The Complete Book of Butchering, Smoking, Curing, and Sausage Making

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One self-reliant project that I enjoy, but haven’t got around to videotaping is home sausage making. I believe that the ability to cure and store meat is a vital skill to anyone interested in producing a majority of their own food (vegans and veggies excepted). I can deal with a lot of things, but a … Read more

Homegrown Whole Grains

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Book Review: Homegrown Whole Grains
Book Review: Homegrown Whole Grains
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A backyard field of grains? Yes, absolutely! Homegrown Whole Grains are rapidly replacing grass in the yards of dedicated locavores across the country. For adventurous homeowners who want to get in on the movement, Homegrown Whole Grains is the place to begin.

Growing whole grains is simpler and more rewarding than most people imagine. With as little as 1000 square feet of land, backyard farmers can grow enough wheat to harvest 50 pounds in a single afternoon – and those 50 pounds can be baked into 50 loaves of fresh bread.

In addition to providing information on wheat and corn, Homegrown Whole Grains includes complete growing, harvesting, and threshing instructions for barley, millet, oats, rice, rye, spelt, and quinoa, and lighter coverage of several specialty grains. Readers will also find helpful tips on processing whole grains, from what to look for in a home mill to how to dry corn and remove the hulls from barley and rice.

Chapters for each grain include inventive recipes for cereals, desserts, casseroles, salads, soups and stews, and, of course, home-baked breads, the crowning achievement of the home grain grower. Sara Pitzer shares dozens of ideas for using whole grains – from cooking sturdy wheat berries in a slow cooker to malting barley for homebrewed beer. Whether milled into nutritional flours or used in any of their unmilled states, wheat, barley, quinoa, and the other grain crops are healthful additions to every diet.

The Winter Harvest Handbook

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The Winter Harvest Handbook
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The Winter Harvest Handbook is a bestselling that guide will help you extend your growing season.  It teaches how to build greenhouses and cold-frames, and is full of innovative techniques that are proven to help extend your growing season.

From the Amazon Description:

Choosing locally grown organic food is a sustainable living trend that’s taken hold throughout North America. Celebrated farming expert Eliot Coleman helped start this movement with The New Organic Grower published 20 years ago. He continues to lead the way, pushing the limits of the harvest season while working his world-renowned organic farm in Harborside, Maine.

Now, with his long-awaited new book, The Winter Harvest Handbook, anyone can have access to his hard-won experience. Gardeners and farmers can use the innovative, highly successful methods Coleman describes in this comprehensive handbook to raise crops throughout the coldest of winters.

Building on the techniques that hundreds of thousands of farmers and gardeners adopted from The New Organic Grower and Four-Season Harvest, this new book focuses on growing produce of unparalleled freshness and quality in customized unheated or, in some cases, minimally heated, movable plastic greenhouses.

Coleman offers clear, concise details on greenhouse construction and maintenance, planting schedules, crop management, harvesting practices, and even marketing methods in this complete, meticulous, and illustrated guide. Readers have access to all the techniques that have proven to produce higher-quality crops on Coleman’s own farm.

His painstaking research and experimentation with more than 30 different crops will be valuable to small farmers, homesteaders, and experienced home gardeners who seek to expand their production seasons.

A passionate advocate for the revival of small-scale sustainable farming, Coleman provides a practical model for supplying fresh, locally grown produce during the winter season, even in climates where conventional wisdom says it “just can’t be done.”