Creating Your Backyard Farm: How to Grow Fruit and Vegetables and Raise Chickens and Bees

If you dream of growing, harvesting, and eating your own produce, here’s how to begin.

Author Nicki Trench, who has created her own backyard farm from scratch, shares with you everything there is to know about growing vegetables, fruit, and herbs, including making your own compost, growing in raised beds, and protecting your crops from pests and disease. Nicki also explains how to rear chickens for eggs and bees for honey, and gives advice on keeping goats and pigs. The benefits of creating your backyard farm are not just economic—the energy once obsessively expended on the exercise bike can now be channelled more productively by digging the vegetable patch, turning the compost or cleaning out the hen coop. Communities are reappearing over backyard fences as neighbors share their harvest of zucchini, spinach, and eggs. Whatever you choose to grow or rear on your backyard farm, this book offers a taste of the good life that is easy, satisfying, and inexpensive to achieve.

Nicki Trench is a bestselling author, crafter, and vegetable grower. As well as teaching, lecturing, and feature writing on knitting, crochet, sewing, cake decorating, and hen keeping, she is the founder of Laughing Hens, the UK’s leading online yarn store, and Rooster Yarns. Some of her books include Geek Chic Crochet, Cute & Easy Crocheted Baby Clothes, A Passion for Quilting, and Cute & Easy Crochet.

The author is based in Radlett, Hertfordshire, UK.