When faced with financial uncertainty or a potential disruption to the food supply, more people turn to vegetable gardening — for the joy, satisfaction, and sense of security that comes from growing food. Today’s gardeners want a bit of everything — vegetables, fruit, medicinal herbs, flowers for pollinators, and even chickens for eggs.
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The dream is to build a diverse landscape that serves multiple functions but achieving that goal can be intimidating and overwhelming. Homesteader Leah Webb shares her strategy for implementing a homestead plan in seven stages, starting small and gradually add more features each year. The Seven-Step Homestead takes readers through the process with a series of doable steps, beginning with establishing one or two raised beds of the easiest vegetables to grow, and gradually building up to the addition of fruit trees and berry bushes on hugelkulture mounds, a coop full of chickens, and a winter’s worth of storage crops.
Step-by-step photos from the author’s own homestead, accompanied by her hard-earned advice and instruction, make this a one-of-a-kind guide for anyone who aspires to free themselves from reliance on the commercial food system but doesn’t know where to start or how to make it happen in a realistic way.
What you’ll learn in each chapter:
Step 1: Starting off small: One or Two Beds.
- Soil basics
- How to plant
- Selecting the easiest plants at the right time of year
- Harvesting techniques
- Garden plans
Step 2: Four-Hundred Square Feet
- Expanding with sheet mulching
- How to build a hügelkulturs
- Garden design
- Growing starts from seed
- Introduction to perennial
foods and herbs
Step 3: Fruit Trees and Shrubs
- Fruit tree placement
- Variety selection and understanding
pollination requirements - Planting and staking new trees
- Basic pruning instructions
- Retaining water with swales on contours
Step 4: Edible and Flowering Perennials
- Choosing natives and other beneficial
pollinator plants - Perennial placement
- Edible landscape design
- Using cover crops to improve soil
- Selecting, growing, and harvesting edible
perennials
Step 5: Four Season Growing
- Harness the greenhouse e ffect
- Crop rotation for soil health
- Cold frames, low tunnels, and greenhouses
- Variety selection and timing
- Seed starting for winter growing
Step 6: Larger Scale Storage Crops
- Explore more heirloom varieties
- Learn about companion planting
- How to grow winter squash, pumpkins,
and gourds - Growing dried beans, sweet potatoes,
and corn - Seed saving
Step 7: Farm Fresh Eggs
- Setting realistic “egg-spectations”
- Designing and building your coop
- Choosing your breeds
- Caring for your birds
- Composting manure
