Creating Your Garden Farm: First Steps in Self-sufficiency, from Growing Vegetables, Fruit and Herbs, to Keeping Hens and Bees

Synopsis

If you dream of growing, harvesting and eating your own produce, here's how to begin. Author Nicki Trench, who has created her own garden farm from scratch, shares with you everything there is to know about growing crops, keeping bees and rearing hens. Here's how to make compost, grow vegetables and fruit, collect honey, rear chickens for fresh eggs, and make preserves and chutneys, along with natural remedies and cleaning products for a simply natural life inside and outside your home. The benefits of creating your garden 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 garden fences as neighbours share their harvest of courgettes, spinach or eggs. Whatever you choose to grow or rear on your garden farm, this book offers a taste of the good life that is easy, satisfying and inexpensive to achieve.