Country Skills: A Practical Guide to Self-Sufficiency

Country Skills is the complete, practical guide to living off the land. Author Alison Candlin offers easy-to-follow advice about planning, establishing, and maintaining a small-acre farm, an allotment, or a backyard garden. She also includes essential tips on selecting, housing, and looking after chickens, goats, pigs, bees, and other animals, as well as expert advice on collecting and recycling water, composting your left-over scraps, and generating energy for your own home—saving you lots of money and reducing your carbon footprint.

Throughout are step-by-step instructions and over 350 photographs and illustrations to guide readers on planting, growing, harvesting, preserving, and storing vegetables and fruit of all kinds, in all seasons, in all parts of the country. Candlin also discusses building and using greenhouses, rotating crops to replenish soil nutrients, and installing proper drainage around your garden. Complete with a directory of common pests and diseases that could plague your homegrown produce, as well as useful information on how to harvest wild food, this book is the essential manual on living a self-sufficient, greener, and healthier lifestyle.

Alison Candlin is an experienced writer and editor, with credits in numerous cooking and gardening books, including Food from your Garden and Plant it, Grow it, Eat it! She and her young family tend their own kitchen garden, plunder the hedgerows for berries, and enjoy cooking (and consuming) the fruits of their labor.