The Nourishing Homestead: One Back-to-the-Land Family’s Plan for Cultivating Soil, Skills, and Spirit

The Hewitts moved to their hilly Vermont homestead-to-be in 1997 with some farming experience, but it was only by living through 17 years of “experimentation, triumphs, failures, simple curiosity, and… passion” that they discovered “how radically different true nourishment looks” from what Hewitt calls “the captive economy” of commercialism and consumerism. This book is both the story of their bucolic life and an introductory guide to homesteading skills they’ve gleaned along the way. A comparison to Scott and Helen Nearing’s Living the Good Life is inevitable, and the books are strikingly similar in their combination of personal narrative, practical advice from house-building to soil-building, and sermon-y philosophizing on the ills of contemporary mainstream culture. Unlike the Nearings, the Hewitts benefit from 21st-century developments like permaculture, rotational grazing, and nutrient-dense farming, and they incorporate livestock as an essential and beloved element of their farmstead—almost a third of the book is devoted to animal husbandry. Best of all, adorable photos of the Hewitts’ two young sons lounging on cows, curing hides, and harvesting garlic leaven the earnest prose. (Mar.)