HomeMade: 101 Easy-to-Make Things for Your Garden, Home, or Farm
Here are complete, easy-to-follow directions for 101 homemade items that will save you time and money. Projects include things for your home (such as a tool box, a basement closet, a fuel sled, a solar drier, and a window greenhouse), your garden (compost boxes, cold frames, soil sifters, fences, and tomato supports), and your farm (a moveable shed, a corral gate, a watering trough, a chicken feeder, and an incubator).
With easy-to-follow directions and a materials lists, this is a book of projects that any beginner can take on and successfully complete. Among the titular 101 are designs for lawn furniture, movable sheds, cold frames, garden shelves, and a compost bin. You will save time and money by “building your own.”
3 Comments;
Love this little book The pictures in this book are just terrific- clear, well-drawn, and simple in that pre-digital, 70’s pen-and-ink style that makes me downright nostalgic. And there are a lot of things in the book that I didin’t know I needed until I saw them- how about a tool cleaner? Put sand in a large container, mix in used oil, and store your tools in the sand/oil mix. They come out not just cleaned, but already oiled, too. Also inside: multiple composters, a cold frame, a root cellar, feeders, brooders, bird houses, chairs, benches, fencing, gates- and you can probably build them most of them just by looking at the pictures. It’s like having a cool great-uncle teach you old farm tricks.
Fill in the blanks If you build things, this book is great. It’s not very detailed so you have to fill in the blanks, a beginning builder may need a little help. What a cool book for ideas on “farm life” type of items. Movable pig styes, horse sheds, chicken coops and even an incubator. My Aunt & Uncle owned this book when I was a teenager. My uncle built an incubator for me from the plans in this book. I gathered a dozen duck eggs from the haystack (after installing a dimmer switch to regulate the temperature from the light bulbs, because I couldn’t find a thermostat) I incubated a dozen duck eggs, diligently turning them twice a day, watching the thermometer, keeping the water pan full. Every egg hatched. What a triumph! It is 20 years later and I still pull that book off the shelf. It’s a keeper.
Coffee Table Book I am a DIY type and was looking forward to this book. The project that initially caught my eye after going through the book was the Portable Horse Stable (pg. 151). The illustrations and list of materials seemed sound and the blurb about the project says the stable was designed at Rutgers University. The design is published by the U.S. Dept. of Agriculture as Plan 6082. After looking over the plans and materials in the book, I looked up the published plans from the U.S. Dept. of Agriculture to compare, and discovered where the plans diverge. The plan in the book leaves out many pieces of hardware that would not only make assembly easier but the structure more durable, and the dimensions in the book are also incorrect.The book is a nice place to get ideas, but is lacking in the “how-to” if you want to actually build any of the items in the book. I would not recommend buying it for the plans. Check out publications at Home Depot or the library or online if you want to…