Celebrate spring with ‘Backyard Farming’ series

This spring, whether planning to grow food for the family or for sale at the local farmers market, “Backyard Farming” (written by Kim Pezza) is a series of easy-to-use guides to help anyone turn their home into a homestead.

The paperback series include “Raising Chickens,” “Home Harvesting,” “Growing Vegetables & Herbs,” “Keeping Honey Bees,” “Raising Goats” and “Raising Pigs.”

Additional titles include fruit trees, homesteading, growing garlic, raising cattle, canning & preserving and composting.

Here are some tips for building a farm in your own backyard from this informative series:

--Choose chickens. Chickens are multifunctional animals. You can eat their meat and eggs, they help control the bugs in the garden, and their feathers can be used for pillow making.

--Preserve the harvest. You do not have to restrict yourself to just one method and you do not need to process your foods into just plain fruits and vegetables. For example, if you use tomatoes for sauce often, make sauce and then preserve that.

--Make your garden grow. Make a plan and consider your garden’s development; site, size, and what the plot will be able to hold to maximize yield of vegetables and fruits.

--Benefit from bees. The honeybee is an amazing feat of nature that is extremely well organized and that produces one of the healthiest foods in the world: honey. They are also important for pollinating our own food supply, so keeping them in your garden can be extremely beneficial.

--Get a goat. Goats are available in a number of colors, sizes, and varieties, and can be used as dairy, meat and working animals. They can even be used as lawnmowers in places where mowing can be difficult.

--Pick pigs. Pigs are great animals for food on the farm. Easy to keep, feed and raise, these animals produce abundant meat supplies with minimal effort.

The books, published by Hatherleigh Press, sell for $5.95.

Information: www.hatherleighpress.com.