The Accidental Homesteader: What I’ve Learned About Chickens, Compost, and Creating Home

Lipp (The Clutter-Free Home) explains how she and her husband traded a comfortable Silicon Valley townhouse to live in the Northern California mountains in this approachable homesteading guide. After their friends purchased a vacation home, Lipp and her husband began dreaming of living a more remote lifestyle themselves, and despite minimal outdoors knowledge, bought 33 wooded acres in the mountains. In sections divided by season, Lipp shares hard-won wisdom on stockpiling buckets of snow for toilet flushing during winter power outages, starting a vegetable garden in the spring, completing home projects during the summer, and stockpiling food in the fall. In sections describing the couple’s second winter in the mountains, Lipp reflects on the trial and error of their first year, assessing priorities that proved essential (keeping sufficient firewood on hand) and those that didn’t (butchering their own meat). Lipp weaves together nuts-and-bolts tips, encouragement (“It’s amazing what you can accomplish with a little space and a dream”), and a faith element that sometimes feels incongruous—“God is our first thought instead of our last resort when a crisis comes up,” she writes before launching into a section of practical advice on prepping for power outages. Still, those seeking to reconnect with nature will find this informative and inspiring. (Aug.)