Here are 100 books that Chickens In Your Backyard fans have personally recommended if you like
Chickens In Your Backyard.
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Since childhood, I have wanted to live in the country. Six of my earliest years were spent in the city of Bradford, Yorkshire, and San Francisco, California. Sandwiched between those two periods was a year I barely remember on a chicken farm in Zephyrhills, Florida. The fuzzy reminisces of that period elevated it in my mind to a lovely existence in which I roamed about freely, following my parents as they worked in the garden and produced delicious meals from its bounty. I romanticized living on the land as I grew up. My favorite books in childhood were Little House on the Prairie and The Bobbsey Twins in the Country.
I believe everyone should read at least one book by Penelope Lively, and this one is my favorite.
I love this book because I can enjoy it over and over. I can pick it up and read a chapter at random and find something engaging, surprising, even magical.
The author loves reading, writing, and gardening. So do I. When I read a chapter of Lively’s book it immediately draws me in, away from any troubles or challenges I may have been struggling with, and transports me to another place, for example to the prairies of Willa Cather and Laura Ingalls Wilder in the chapter on Time, Order and the Garden, or to a Somerset garden in the UK, overrun with rabbits and foxes and cats, in the chapter she calls Town and Country.
'Wonderful. A manifesto of horticultural delight' Literary Review
'Beautiful. Perfect for literary garden lovers' Good Housekeeping
'Rich and unusual, a book to treasure. Few recent gardening books come anywhere close to its style, intelligence and depth' Observer
'The two central activities in my life - alongside writing - have been reading and gardening.'
Penelope Lively has always been a keen gardener. This book is partly a memoir of her own life in gardens: the large garden at home in Cairo where she spent most of her childhood, her grandmother's garden in a sloping Somerset field, then two successive Oxfordshire gardens…
Magical realism meets the magic of Christmas in this mix of Jewish, New Testament, and Santa stories–all reenacted in an urban psychiatric hospital!
On locked ward 5C4, Josh, a patient with many similarities to Jesus, is hospitalized concurrently with Nick, a patient with many similarities to Santa. The two argue…
Since childhood, I have wanted to live in the country. Six of my earliest years were spent in the city of Bradford, Yorkshire, and San Francisco, California. Sandwiched between those two periods was a year I barely remember on a chicken farm in Zephyrhills, Florida. The fuzzy reminisces of that period elevated it in my mind to a lovely existence in which I roamed about freely, following my parents as they worked in the garden and produced delicious meals from its bounty. I romanticized living on the land as I grew up. My favorite books in childhood were Little House on the Prairie and The Bobbsey Twins in the Country.
This is an academic book, but I found it easy and fascinating to read. The author is a sociologist who studied 1300 of the thousands of individuals who gave up their suburban homes in the 60’s, 70s, and 80s for a few acres of rural land.
I loved it because the experiences of the families the author studied shared my values and my own reasons for living off the grid. It also described some of my romantic misconceptions about what it would be like to live a “simple life” with a group of friends. I would describe this book as an introduction to homesteading for city dwellers who dream of moving to the country.
"[P]ractically everyone I know is nursing fantasies about escaping the life they're trapped in and creating one that makes more sense," writes the editor of Utne Reader in a recent issue. "The people I most admire, though, are those who actually do it-who break free and pursue a higher calling no matter how great the risk."
New Pioneers is about one such group of people-the hundreds of thousands of urban North Americans who over the past three decades have given up their city or suburban homes for a few acres of land in the countryside.
Since childhood, I have wanted to live in the country. Six of my earliest years were spent in the city of Bradford, Yorkshire, and San Francisco, California. Sandwiched between those two periods was a year I barely remember on a chicken farm in Zephyrhills, Florida. The fuzzy reminisces of that period elevated it in my mind to a lovely existence in which I roamed about freely, following my parents as they worked in the garden and produced delicious meals from its bounty. I romanticized living on the land as I grew up. My favorite books in childhood were Little House on the Prairie and The Bobbsey Twins in the Country.
This book tells the story of Helen and Scott Nearing, who left the city in 1932 for a rural life in Vermont based on hard work, self-reliance, good health, and a small amount of cash. They later moved to Main, where they continued living on the land until the early 1980s.
I loved this book because it was a “how-to” guide to rural homesteading, and because the authors made their life seem so rewarding and worthwhile. It must have been, because Scott Nearing lived to the age of 100, and Helen to 91.
This one volume edition of Living the Good Life and Continuing the Good Life brings these classics on rural homesteading together. This couple abandoned the city for a rural life with minimal cash and the knowledge of self reliance and good health.
A Duke with rigid opinions, a Lady whose beliefs conflict with his, a long disputed parcel of land, a conniving neighbour, a desperate collaboration, a failure of trust, a love found despite it all.
Alexander Cavendish, Duke of Ravensworth, returned from war to find that his father and brother had…
Since childhood, I have wanted to live in the country. Six of my earliest years were spent in the city of Bradford, Yorkshire, and San Francisco, California. Sandwiched between those two periods was a year I barely remember on a chicken farm in Zephyrhills, Florida. The fuzzy reminisces of that period elevated it in my mind to a lovely existence in which I roamed about freely, following my parents as they worked in the garden and produced delicious meals from its bounty. I romanticized living on the land as I grew up. My favorite books in childhood were Little House on the Prairie and The Bobbsey Twins in the Country.
First published in 1972, Gene Logsdon’s first book about farming is a how-to guide for beginning back-to-the-landers. For those who had romantic or idealistic ideas about farming and raising animals, as I did, the author provides practical advice on gardening and homesteading as well as reassurance that life in the country can be rewarding and enjoyable.
I loved this book because it supported my view that living on the land was possible and would be fulfilling, while teaching me some very important skills needed to get as much as possible out of the land I had purchased.
Two Acre Eden is more than your average how-to book. The first in a long line of beloved books by homesteading sage Gene Logsdon, Two Acre Eden is an insightful and light-hearted treatise on gardening, homesteading, and getting the most out of your land.
With a healthy dose of humor and eye toward pragmatism, Logsdon dispenses page after page of unbeatable advice on designing, building, and living off of your very own two-acre Garden of Eden. Inside you'll find practical and creative tips on:
Mulching
Pesticide use
Planting cycles
Urban farming
Pruning
Seed selection
And much more...
Home food production & self-sufficiency was Joann Grohman’s lifelong enthusiasm. With a young, hungry family of eight children, she started milking cows by hand and did so until she was almost 90 years old. She simply could not imagine life without a family cow, a remarkable animal that makes grass into nutritious milk and cream that can feed people, pigs, and chickens, as well as provide manure to grow vegetables. When asked if having a cow means feeling stuck on the farm, she countered that a cow supports a beautiful life that can be found in no other way.
A highly innovative book on the why and how of keeping chickens and other poultry without dependence on buying chicken feed from the feed store.
There is nothing new about keeping chickens to process your weeds and leftovers into human food—people have relied on them for thousands of years—but purchasing large volumes of expensive feed to produce eggs is not sustainable or practical. This book will solve that problem for you.
The first edition of The Small-Scale Poultry Flock helped thousands of small-scale farmers and smallholders adopt a practical model for working with chickens and other domestic fowl based on natural systems.
In this expanded and thoroughly revised edition, readers will find plenty of all-new material. Author Harvey Ussery introduces readers to his new favorite breed of chicken, Icelandics; describes how he manages his breeding flock using a clan mating system; presents detailed information on the use of trapnests and record-keeping spreadsheets for evaluating breeding hen performance; and provides step-by-step instructions for construction of an ingeniously designed mobile poultry shelter.
I have raised miniature dairy goats since 1998 and encountered many health issues in my goats and those of friends. Only one mainstream book on raising my goats existed when I got them. I decided to write my own book. That plan was put on hold when I became publisher of Ruminations magazine. I frequently wrote about goat health care and reviewed new goat books as they came out. In 2009, I published my book, a comprehensive compilation of articles from Ruminations. Afterwards, I wrote Raising Goats for Dummies. Not many studies are done on goats, but each book has added to the body of knowledge regarding goat health care.
This detailed book deals with many animals but shouldn’t be overlooked regarding goat health. I refer to it regularly if I have a sick goat and can’t find the info elsewhere. It is broken out by body systems and is the only book that addresses medications in depth.
It has the added bonus of serving as a resource for other livestock and pet care and is comprehensive in its coverage of poisoning—providing information that may be hard to find elsewhere when trying to determine what is making your goat sick.
The Merck Veterinary Manual (MVM) covers all domesticated species and diseases in veterinary medicine worldwide. This completely revised and redesigned new edition of the veterinary classic uses a two-column format and color throughout for easy-to-read text and tables. Hundreds of color images enhance and illustrate the text. In addition to extensive revisions and updates, this edition includes a new section on public health and zoonoses, expanded coverage of fish and aquaculture, new chapters on backyard poultry, toxicologic workplace hazards, smoke inhalation, and additional coverage of numerous new and emerging topics in veterinary medicine.
It is April 1st, 2038. Day 60 of China's blockade of the rebel island of Taiwan.
The US government has agreed to provide Taiwan with a weapons system so advanced that it can disrupt the balance of power in the region. But what pilot would be crazy enough to run…
I’m an American environmental historian with specialties in food and horticulture. I mostly write on alcohol, wine, garden history, and orchids, but I’ve also kept a small flock of backyard chickens since early 2020. In my preparation for my brood, I read every single chicken history and chicken-keeping book available. Here’s the best of the best.
Tastes Like Chicken is a seriously excellent book on the history and culture of chickens in America since its earliest days!The book is fun and well-crafted for a wide audience because it covers so much about the chicken industry, as well as the history, uses, and symbolism of chicken, as well as a wider range of foods in the United States.
How did chicken achieve the culinary ubiquity it enjoys today? It's hard to imagine, but there was a point in history, not terribly long ago, that individual people each consumed less than ten pounds of chicken per year. Today, those numbers are strikingly different: we consumer nearly twenty-five times as much chicken as our great-grandparents did.
Collectively, Americans devour 73.1 million pounds of chicken in a day, close to 8.6 billion birds per year. How did chicken rise from near-invisibility to being in seemingly "every pot," as per Herbert Hoover's famous promise?
Emelyn Rude explores this fascinating phenomenon in Tastes…
I’m an American environmental historian with specialties in food and horticulture. I mostly write on alcohol, wine, garden history, and orchids, but I’ve also kept a small flock of backyard chickens since early 2020. In my preparation for my brood, I read every single chicken history and chicken-keeping book available. Here’s the best of the best.
Why Did the Chicken Cross the World? might be the worst title of all time, but it is a wonderfully surprising and fascinating book. There are tasty nuggets here for everyone (sorry/not sorry for the pun). Did you know that Mexicans eat more eggs per capita than any other people in the world? Or how many different slang terms and metaphors there are for chickens through time? (“Biology can’t explain why our favored slang word for the male organ refers to a bird that lacks one.” Ha!)Or that in the mid-nineteenth century, Britain and America were absolutely obsessed with raising exotic “fancy” chickens? And that pound for pound, chicken releases only one-tenth the greenhouse gases of red meat such as hamburgers? Read up on the world’s favorite bird and laugh while you’re at it with Lawler’s book.
Queen Victoria was obsessed with it. Socrates' last words were about it. Charles Darwin and Louis Pasteur made their scientific breakthroughs using it. Hailed as a messenger of the gods, powerful sex symbol, gambling aid, all-purpose medicine and handy research tool, the humble chicken has been also cast as the epitome of evil, and the star of the world's most famous joke. Beginning with the recent discovery, that the chicken's unlikely ancestor is the T. Rex, How the Chicken Crossed the World tracks the chicken from its original domestication in the jungles of Southeast Asia some 10,000 years ago to…
I’m an American environmental historian with specialties in food and horticulture. I mostly write on alcohol, wine, garden history, and orchids, but I’ve also kept a small flock of backyard chickens since early 2020. In my preparation for my brood, I read every single chicken history and chicken-keeping book available. Here’s the best of the best.
There are an estimated 50 billion chickens to the world’s 7 billion humans, and chickens are the closest living relative to Tyrannosaurus rex, so why wouldn’t you want to learn their language?This is a fun, fast book to read in anticipation of getting your first little flock. The central lesson in the book is that you should spend time with your chickens--watching them, but also listening to them. The book teaches what their core vocalizations mean, therefore also helping you in caring for their needs. I couldn’t wait to have a "chicken name" assigned to me by my laying ladies!
Best-selling author Melissa Caughey knows that backyard chickens are like any favorite pet — fun to spend time with and fascinating to observe. Her hours among the flock have resulted in this quirky, irresistible guide packed with firsthand insights into how chickens communicate and interact, use their senses to understand the world around them, and establish pecking order and roles within the flock. Combining her up-close observations with scientific findings and interviews with other chicken enthusiasts, Caughey answers unexpected questions such as Do chickens have names for each other? How do their eyes work? and How do chickens learn?
The Duke's Christmas Redemption
by
Arietta Richmond,
A Duke who has rejected love, a Lady who dreams of a love match, an arranged marriage, a house full of secrets, a most unneighborly neighbor, a plot to destroy reputations, an unexpected love that redeems it all.
Lady Charlotte Wyndham, given in an arranged marriage to a man she…
For me, backyard composting is more than just a way to lessen how much waste I send to the landfill. When you compost you transform items that many people consider garbage into a valuable soil amendment for your garden. You are creating something with real value that can help plants thrive and act as a carbon sink to help reduce negative impacts of climate change. Composting is so easy and rewarding that I really want to see everyone give it a try.
I love reading books by authors whose passion for a topic bleeds into their writing. You can tell when you read this book that Mormino loves her chickens and has spent a lot of time working with and thinking about how to best raise them. There are many books out there about raising chickens, but for me, Mormino’s book was just the right length and detail and covered all of the topics you would need to bring some feathered friends into your life.
The Chicken Chick's Guide to Backyard Chickens covers all aspects of keeping pet chickens in a beautifully illustrated, no-nonsense format. Kathy addresses everything needed to keep chickens simply, including coops, chick care, breed selection, chicken health, and beyond!
Internationally known as The Chicken Chick, Kathy Shea Mormino brings an informative style and fresh perspective on raising backyard chickens to millions of fans around the world. An attorney by profession, Kathy is the founder and one-woman creative force behind her wildly popular and award-winning Facebook page and blog, The-Chicken-Chick.com.
Now her practical, down-to-earth approach to chicken-keeping is available in book form.…
