HOME FARM

A practical guide to all aspects of land management, animal husbandry, kitchen gardening and traditional larder crafts. Accompanied by colour illustrations.

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From Hobby Farms Magazine

The best-looking book on our bookshelf is definitely Home Farm: A Practical Guide to the Good Life by Paul Heiny. This hardback book, published by Dorling Kindersley, is brimming with colorful photographs and drawings tempting you to the farming life. A truly great advertisement for the simple life, Home Farm could draw even the most hardened city dweller to the country-at least for a visit. Home Farm addresses small house garden farms with mostly produce and a few animals, as well as larger home farms (over 10 acres) with wheat fields, grapevines, orchards and a range of livestock. The book is exhaustive with detailed information on livestock, gardens, field crops and food preparation. Split into five easy-to-use sections, each chapter addresses an element of the home farm. Under Animal Husbandry, Heiny provides several-page spreads on keeping each common type of livestock, including rabbits, goats, sheep and poultry. The chapters brim with information on everything from breeding and birthing, to feeding and sheltering. The Fruits of the Earth section is as much interest to in-city gardeners as country farmers, with chapters on developing a kitchen garden, using compost and fertilizer, rotating beds and growing vegetables, fruits and herbs. To Heiny, the kitchen garden is a respite from the other labors of farm life, “I have always considered my kitchen garden to be a retreat where I can put the pressure of the rest of the farm behind me, and indulge in the simpler pleasures of growing my own vegetables.” His joy in working his garden is obvious and his writing and the sumptuous photographs of glossy fruits and vegetables bring a fresh, enthusiastic shine to this part of the book. Heiny is also careful to show where the home farm fits into the larger farming industry and the environment surrounding it. An especially interesting chapter, Farming and Wildlife, provides methods to ensure your farm co-exists happily with surrounding nature. Heiny expects small farmers to serve as custodians not only over his or her own animals and cultivated land, but also for the wild animals and un-cultivated forest and meadowland on around the farm. Farming and Wildlife provides instruction on creating refuges for wild fauna and flora, pond maintenance and general wood management. For sheer fun, the best part of this book has to be the last section, Home Comforts. Laid out like a glossy gourmet magazine, this section shows the final results of your efforts—from barnyard to kitchen table. Heiny uses atmospheric photographs and step-by-step directions for the best canning, cooking and baking methods. There is nothing like a loaf of bread made with hand-milled grain and fresh eggs and spread with hand-churned butter—all products of your own efforts. Heiny captures this. Your mouth will water as he describes a dessert of yogurt made from the milk of your cows, sweetened with honey from your beehives and used as a topping for fruits from your garden. In a way, this is the basis of home farming: the reward of tasting the fruits of your labor. Better, not only for their organic, vine-ripened flavor, but also for the satisfaction that comes from hard work and simple living. As Heiny relates in his forward, “[Home farming] brings you closer to that deep satisfaction that can come only from living and working on the land.”