Author: Lou Ureneck Publisher: Penguin ISBN: 1101544279 Category : Biography & Autobiography Languages : en Pages : 177
Book Description
Inspired by his From the Ground Up New York Times blog, a beautifully written memoir about building and brotherhood. Confronted with the disappointments and knockdowns that can come in middle age-job loss, the death of his mother, a health scare, a divorce-Lou Ureneck needed a project that would engage the better part of him and put him back in life's good graces. City-bound for a decade, Lou decided he needed to build a simple post-and-beam cabin in the woods. He bought five acres in the hills of western Maine and asked his younger brother, Paul, to help him. Twenty years earlier the brothers had built a house together. Now Lou saw working with Paul as a way to reconnect with their shared history and to rediscover his truest self. As the brothers-with the help of Paul's sons-undertake the challenging construction, nothing seems to go according to plan. But as they raise the cabin, Ureneck eloquently reveals his own evolving insights into the richness and complexity of family relationships, the healing power of nature, and the need to root oneself in a place one can call home. With its exploration of the satisfaction of building and of physical labor, Cabin will also appeal to readers of Robert Pirsig's Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance, Matthew Crawford's Shop Class as Soulcraft, and Tracy Kidder's House.
Author: Leigh Tate Publisher: Geraldine Leigh Tate ISBN: 9780989711104 Category : Alternative lifestyles Languages : en Pages : 0
Book Description
What does it take to become a successful homesteader? Based on her popular homesteading blog, 5 Acres & A Dream, Leigh Tate shares how she and her husband Dan are facing the challenges of trying to establish a self-sufficient homestead; from defining their dream, finding property, and setting priorities, to obstacles and difficult times, to learning how to work smarter, not harder. She shares what they've learned about energy self-sufficiency, water self-sufficiency, and food self-sufficiency for themselves and their goats and chickens too. Included are copies of their homestead master plan plus revisions, homegrown vitamins and minerals for goats, and several of Leigh's favorite homestead recipes.
Author: Sheldon Russell Publisher: University of Oklahoma Press ISBN: 0806182016 Category : Fiction Languages : en Pages : 295
Book Description
On a fateful day in 1889, the Oklahoma land rush begins, and for thousands of settlers the future is up for grabs. One of those people is Creed McReynolds, fresh from the East with a lawyer’s education and a head full of aspirations. The mixed-blood son of a Kiowa mother and a U.S. Cavalry doctor, Creed lands in Guthrie station, the designated Territorial Capital, where he must prove that he is more than the half-blood kid once driven from his own land. In recounting the precipitous rise and catastrophic fall of the jerrybuilt city of Guthrie, author Sheldon Russell immerses us in the lives of Creed and other memorable characters whose ambitions echo the taming of the frontier—and whose fates hold lessons as important today as they were more than a hundred years ago. Among the people McReynolds must contend with is Abaddon Damon. A ruthless newspaper publisher, Abaddon is quick to strike any bargain that will bring him the power he craves, and like many others, Creed McReynolds is swept into his whirlwind of greed and deception. Creed becomes the wealthiest man in the Territory—but at an unbearable cost to himself, the dreams of others, and the dignity of his mother’s people. Dreams to Dust takes readers back to the early days of Oklahoma Territory—a sometimes dangerous place filled with nefarious dealings, where violence lurks behind even casual encounters—to tell the story of frontier men and women gambling everything to find their fortune on the windswept southern plains.
Author: Mark Arax Publisher: Vintage ISBN: 1101875216 Category : Nature Languages : en Pages : 577
Book Description
A vivid, searching journey into California's capture of water and soil—the epic story of a people's defiance of nature and the wonders, and ruin, it has wrought Mark Arax is from a family of Central Valley farmers, a writer with deep ties to the land who has watched the battles over water intensify even as California lurches from drought to flood and back again. In The Dreamt Land, he travels the state to explore the one-of-a-kind distribution system, built in the 1940s, '50s and '60s, that is straining to keep up with California's relentless growth. The Dreamt Land weaves reportage, history and memoir to confront the "Golden State" myth in riveting fashion. No other chronicler of the West has so deeply delved into the empires of agriculture that drink so much of the water. The nation's biggest farmers—the nut king, grape king and citrus queen—tell their story here for the first time. Arax, the native son, is persistent and tough as he treks from desert to delta, mountain to valley. What he finds is hard earned, awe-inspiring, tragic and revelatory. In the end, his compassion for the land becomes an elegy to the dream that created California and now threatens to undo it.
Author: Carol Ekarius Publisher: Fox Chapel Publishing ISBN: 1937049450 Category : Gardening Languages : en Pages : 273
Book Description
This beautiful book offers an intimate look at life on a hobby farm. From finding a farm to creating a business, to choosing what to plant to canning fruits, Hobby Farm will teach readers how to reap the benefits of rustic life with sound guidance.
Author: Bill Powers Publisher: New World Library ISBN: 1577318978 Category : House & Home Languages : en Pages : 298
Book Description
Why would a successful American physician choose to live in a twelve-foot-by-twelve-foot cabin without running water or electricity? To find out, writer and activist William Powers visited Dr. Jackie Benton in rural North Carolina. No Name Creek gurgled through Benton’s permaculture farm, and she stroked honeybees’ wings as she shared her wildcrafter philosophy of living on a planet in crisis. Powers, just back from a decade of international aid work, then accepted Benton’s offer to stay at the cabin for a season while she traveled. There, he befriended her eclectic neighbors — organic farmers, biofuel brewers, eco-developers — and discovered a sustainable but imperiled way of life. In these pages, Powers not only explores this small patch of community but draws on his international experiences with other pockets of resistance. This engrossing tale of Powers’s struggle for a meaningful life with a smaller footprint proposes a paradigm shift to an elusive “Soft World” with clues to personal happiness and global healing.
Author: Jeanne Marie Laskas Publisher: Bantam ISBN: 0307754553 Category : Biography & Autobiography Languages : en Pages : 289
Book Description
Jeanne Marie Laskas had dreams of life on a farm that she couldn't get out of her head. A dream of fleeing her otherwise happy urban life for fresh air and open space. A dream she would discover was about something more profound than that. A dream she never ever expected to come true. Until a hot summer afternoon led to a drive in the country, where a place that had existed only in her fantasies turned out to be real--and for sale. Fifty Acres And A Poodle The place is almost too perfect to be believed, but there it is: a pretty-as-a-picture-postcard farm, with an Amish barn, a chestnut grove, and vistas so beautiful, they take her breath away. And in that moment she knows that this is the spot where her future begins. So she drags her boyfriend Alex, a committed urban dweller with zero agricultural awareness who owns a poodle, into her scheme, hoping that love will somehow conquer all. But buying a postcard--fifty acres of scenery--and living on it are two entirely different matters. The questions seem endless: How long before the barn roof collapses? Should they buy sheep? Will the place be good for her writing, and for her relationship with Alex? And is there any way to keep Betty the mutt and Marley the poodle from rolling in mud, leaves, and unidentified smelly remains? In this funny yet tender tale, Laskas shares what happens when you follow your dream--and what happens when it's almost snatched away. Fifty Acres and a Poodle is a charming and surprisingly poignant memoir of Jeanne Marie Laskas's first year on Sweetwater Farm. It is a journey peopled by unforgettable characters: Billy, the local contractor who bulldozes her briars, takes her shopping for tractors, and advises her on buying a mule; Tim, the FedEx driver whose truck becomes Marley's obsession and nearly his downfall; the local hunters who present her with an entire wardrobe of blaze-orange hats; and Bob the cat, whose valiant fight for life gives her the courage to love. Jeanne Marie Laskas writes with exhilarating wit and extraordinary wisdom about life, love, and finding your true self on a farm. It's hard to say how a dream forms. Especially one like mine, which at first seemed so utterly random. It could have been a sailing-a-boat-to-Tahiti dream, a quit-your-job-and-hitchhike-to-Alaska dream. It was a fill-in-the-blank dream, born of an urge, not content. An urge for something new. I was thirty-seven years old. I lived on Eleventh Street, the last house on the right,in South Side, a gentrified old mill town on the banks of the Monongahela River. I rented an office in downtown Pittsburgh, a fifteen-minute bike ride away, which is where I spent my days writing stories and magazine articles. I had a garden. I had a cat. I had a dog. And I had a farm dream, a fantasy swirling around in my head about moving to the country. Where in the world was this coming from? That's what I wondered. It might have made sense if I was a miserable person, sick of my life. But I was not.I had a good life; it had taken me a long time to get it that way. A farm dream would have made sense, I supposed, if I was at least the farm dream type. A person with some deep personal longing to churn butter. A person who had had city life forced upon her and now was determined to go be true to herself and live among the haystacks. A person who wore her hair in long braids, used Ivory soap, and liked to stencil her walls with pictures of little chickens and cows. A person who, at minimum, had a compost pile in her yard where she diligently threw lawn clippings and coffee grounds and eggshells and earned the right to use the word organic a lot. But I was not that person. I was not even sure what hay was, or why anyone would stack it. And if I composted anything, it was only by mistake.
Author: Leigh Tate Publisher: ISBN: 9780989711142 Category : Languages : en Pages : 260
Book Description
The homesteading dream, is it still alive? In 2009, Leigh and Dan Tate bought a 1920s farm house on five neglected acres in the foothills of Southern Appalachia. They had a dream but very little money. All was going well until an unfortunate accident forced them to rethink everything they were about. 5 Acres & A Dream The Sequel is the second book in Leigh Tate's homesteading series. It follows 5 Acres & A Dream The Book, and takes a hard look at what happened to their dream. Has it changed? Are their goals and priorities still the same? Leigh updates their progress toward food, energy, and water self-sufficiency, sharing how their self-reliance goals have expanded and changed. She shares how they've learned to prioritize projects in spite of distractions and discouraging times, and how they deal with feeling overwhelmed. She discusses how their relationship with their land and animals has changed the way they see themselves and their homestead.
Author: Lou Ureneck
Author: Leigh Tate
Author: Sheldon Russell
Author: Mark Arax
Author: Carol Ekarius
Author: Bill Powers
Author: U.S. Department. of Agriculture
Author: Jeanne Marie Laskas
Author: Leigh Tate
Author: Renata Bowers