If you dream of growing, harvesting and eating your own produce, here's how to begin. Author Nicki Trench, who has created her own backyard 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 natural life inside and outside your home. The benefits of creating your backyard farm are not just economic--the energy you once obsessively expended on the exercise bike can now be channelled more productively by digging your vegetable patch, turning your compost, or cleaning out the hen coop. Communitites are reappearing over backyard fences as neighbors share their harvest of zucchini, spinach, or eggs. Whatever you choose to grow or rear on your backyard farm, this book offers a taste of the good life that is easy, satisfying, and inexpensive to achieve.