This compact guide provides advice, tips, and step-by-step instructions for hundreds of projects, offering the entire family the tools they need to make the shift toward self-sufficient living. Readers will learn to dip candles, bake bread, make maple syrup, start a vineyard, and much more. With special features for young homesteaders, this is an essential family guide to self-sufficient living.

- Bake Pies, Cakes, and Bread

- Grow Vegetables yy Raise Chickens

- Keep Bees

- Preserve Your Harvest

- Cure Meats

- Build a Treehouse

- Spin Wool

- Make a Toboggan

- And Much More

Anyone who wants to learn basic living skills--the kind employed by our forefathers--and adapt them for a better life in the twenty-first century need look no further than this eminently useful, full-color guide. Countless readers have turned to "Back to Basics" for inspiration and instruction, escaping to an era before power saws and fast food restaurants and rediscovering the pleasures and challenges of a healthier, greener, and more self-sufficient lifestyle.
Now newly updated, the hundreds of projects, step-by-step sequences, photographs, charts, and illustrations in "Back to Basics" will help you dye your own wool with plant pigments, graft trees, raise chickens, craft a hutch table with hand tools, and make treats such as blueberry peach jam and cheddar cheese. The truly ambitious will find instructions on how to build a log cabin or an adobe brick homestead. More than just practical advice, this is also a book for dreamers--even if you live in a city apartment you will find your imagination sparked, and there's no reason why you can't, for example, make a loom and weave a rag rug. Complete with tips for old-fashioned fun (square dancing calls, homemade toys, and kayaking tips), this may be the most thorough book on voluntary simplicity available.

With the rapid depletion of our planet's natural resources, we would all like to live a more self-sufficient lifestyle. But in the midst of an economic crisis, it's just as important to save money as it is to go green. As Gehring shows in this thorough but concise guide, being kind to Mother Earth can also mean being kind to your bank account It doesn't matter where your homestead is located--farm, suburb, or even city. Wherever you live, "The Homesteading Handbook" can help you:
- Plan, plant, and harvest your own organic home garden.
- Enjoy fruits and vegetables year-round by canning, drying, and freezing.
- Build alternate energy devices by hand, such as solar panels or geothermal heat pumps.
- Differentiate between an edible puffball mushroom and a poisonous amanita.
- Prepare butternut squash soup using ingredients from your own garden.
- Conserve water by making a rain barrel or installing an irrigation system.
- Have fun and save cash by handcrafting items such as soap, potpourri, and paper.
Experience the satisfaction that comes with self-sufficiency, as well as the assurance that you have done your part to help keep our planet green. "The Homesteading Handbook" is your roadmap to living in harmony with the land.