The Seven-Step Homestead: Create a Backyard Microfarm and Grow Your Food Security

Perfect for any aspiring backyard gardeners, this book offers a doable, incremental program for turning any yard into a primary food source with vegetables, fruits, chickens, pollinator plants, and medicinal herbs.

Today’s gardeners want a bit of everything--vegetables, fruit, medicinal herbs, flowers for pollinators, and even chickens for eggs. The dream is to build a diverse landscape that serves multiple functions, but achieving that goal can be intimidating and overwhelming. Homesteader Leah M. Webb shares her strategy for implementing a homestead plan in seven stages by starting small and gradually adding more features each year.

The Seven-Step Homestead takes readers through the process with a series of doable steps, beginning with establishing one or two raised beds of the easiest vegetables to grow, and gradually building up to the addition of fruit trees and berry bushes on hugelkulture mounds, a coop full of chickens, and a winter’s worth of storage crops. Step-by-step photos from the author’s own homestead, accompanied by her hard-earned advice and instruction, make this a one-of-a-kind guide for anyone who aspires to grow more of their own food.

Leah M. Webb, MPH, CHC, is a garden consultant who holds a Master of Public Health in Environmental Health Sciences and Bachelor of Science in Environmental Ecology. She was the children’s garden manager at the Georgia Southern Botanic Garden and spent two years studying nutrient cycling in a soil lab. Motivated by the desire to supply her family (including two children who have serious health challenges) with as much fresh, healthy food as possible, she developed the seven-stage implementation plan for her own homestead and gardens in western North Carolina. Find her online at leahmwebb.com.