Book Review: Little House in the Suburbs

Book Review: Little House in the Suburbs

by: Deanna Caswell & Daisy Siskin

Summary:

Little House in the Suburbs: Backyard farming and home skills for self-sufficient living is not a book about getting away from it all to live an independent life in the backwoods. Instead, it presents different ways that little pieces of the backwoods lifestyle can be pulled into modern life, no matter where a persons’ house happens to be located.

Sources:

The authors used their own personal experiences, information from their blog and local beekeeping experts are resources. 

Depth:

There is plenty of information on various forms of gardening, along with chapters on goats, chickens, bees, gift making, creating your own cleaning products and tips on sharing the workload with these kinds of projects. For topics such as goats, there are enough tips and information for the reader to decide if this is something that they are interested in trying and then links for those who feel that they need more details. 

Overall:

  This is a great book to add to your library if you live in the city and want a taste of the country life, without moving to a rural area. Also, much of the information provided would be useful to anyone looking to do more with their backyard. The authors have a very entertaining style and this book is a fun read. There are plenty of practical tips and stories of their own misadventures sprinkled throughout. They do a good job making you feel that the topics covered are things that you could actually do and be successful.

  I’d like to see a wider variety of topics covered, but perhaps that will be a future volume. Also, there is plenty of good, useful information in the appendix section of the book, some of which could have been included in the chapter, as an organizational choice. For example, there are plans for raised bed gardening that detail everything down to a diagram of where to put each kind of plant in the beds. Make sure you flip to the back so that some of this good stuff doesn’t get missed.