Dick Strawbridge is a proper national treasure – ex army Lieutenant Colonel and team leader on the superb Scrapheap Challenge from the 90s. He is also an accomplished self-sufficiency expert who made a fascinating BBC2 series “It’s not easy being green”. He also sports an enormous moustache, allegedly the biggest in showbusiness!

The Practical Self Suffiency book is in essence a book of the series published by Dorling Kindersley and a great read it is too.

It covers a lot of aspects of trying to be more self-sufficient for the urban dweller like me right up to the full on DIY farming types. As you’d expect from Dorling Kindersley it is well designed with lots and lots of photos and printed on lovely glossy (but probably not very green paper)

The fact that it covers so many topics, means it is often not that detailed (the chicken keeping section runs to 8 pages, but has an excellent step by step guide to making your own chicken ark and very clear steps to killing and preparing a table bird.

 

The book is very good on vegetable growing, storing and preserving and has fascinating sections on making biodiesel yourself (as I write this a lot of panic fuel buying is happening!), making a solar dryer to preserve food, a smoker, generating electricity, nettle beer even a compost loo!

I would heartily recommend this book as a great intro to being more self-sufficient. It’s main function though is not to give you all the information you need on a topic but whet your appetite and get you hungry for more information and off researching further. As an example the make your own pizza oven section neglects to mention the benefit of an insulation layer and the ratio of sand to clay (that can be found at our sister site www.buildyourownpizzaoven.com), but having a clay base is something I will add to mine -so I did learn something new after all!

All in all, Great Stuff! I Will be putting it in my hand luggage to read more on a long flight tomorrow!

Disclaimer: Dorling Kindersley sent me a free copy for which I thank them and the button below will earn me a small commission from Amazon. So if you want to buy it without me benefiting – just google “Practical Self Sufficiency by DIck and James Strawbridge”!

From addled to wind egg, croosed back to zygote, if it concerns chickens, it’s covered in this comprehensive encyclopedia. Now you can find answers to all your chicken questions quickly – and accompanied by illustratuions.

Author Gail Damerow has been captivated by chickens for more than 40 years, writes regularly about them in Backyard Poultry magazine and is the author of Storey’s guide to Raising Chickens,The Chicken Health handbook and Your Chickens. She and her husband operate a family farm in Tenessee, where they raise chickens, guinea fowl and dairy goats.

My thoughts…

The Chicken Encyclopedia is a 310 page well illustrated mine of information for the poultry keeper. It’s the kind of book you need to keep on the coffee table to dip into again and again rather than read through cover to cover! The Mini Encyclopedia was half  a normal book and half  encyclopedia. This one is a genuine A-Z encyclopedia with entries on every hen keeping topic I could think of! The pages drip with golden nuggets of information. Did you know the brown seed coat of an avacado is deadly poisonous to chickens? You do now! (p267 entry on Table Scraps).

A lot of breed information is given with photos and illustrations – and you can find average weights of table birds, egg colourings and large appendix of breed traits.

Every now and again there are guides on common tasks that go into more detail than the average three paragraph entry – topics like cutting spurs, causes of low fertility, comb styles and washing a chicken are given a fuller and very useful treatment.

It is an American book, so suffers from the poor spelling that our over the pond cousins inflict on the English language (color, flavor, honor…) and statutory information refers to US agencies. I doubt a bobcat will ever kill a UK hen too! But those America-centirc references in no way harm this fascinating encyclopedia.

Gail Damerow’s “The Chicken Encyclopedia” is a must have for every hen keeper!

We have one copy to give a way to a UK reader over on the competition page.

This is a nice design house style coop with integral run and nest box – the only downside is the felt roof which can be a harbour for red mite.

Features

• Dims* incl nest box and roof overhangs approx: (190cm x 75cm x 113cm)
• New locking arm for inner door allowing fast and easy closure of roost at night without entering the run
• Metal lined pull out tray for easy cleaning
• An inner sliding door between roost and run for added fox security
• Nest box & perches included

There are several neat features to the Wentworth that make it a great buy.

• The pull out metal tray to make it easier to clean.
• A divider in the nest box so two hens can lay at the same time in privacy
• Long handle on the pop hole door so you don’t have to climb in to open it.

The only con that I can see is the felt roof, which is notorious hiding place for red mite – the fact that the roof opens will mitigate that so you can get in with Poultry Shield and kill the blighters!

Product Features

• Totally fox proof – reinforced galavanished mesh
• Made from animal friendly treated timber, designed to last for years
• Comes flat packed, requires assembly, clear instructions
• Dimensions incl nest box: 203cm x 75cm x 103cm
• Galvanised metal pull-out tray for very easy cleaning.
• Suitable for 3-5 chickens

I like the house deign of this coop and no red mite hiding felt too!
It has a back door for thorough cleaning and a pul out metal floor for more frequent cleaning jobs.
A separate nest box for checking for eggs.

This style of coop is ideal for the owner with enough space to completely free range your chooks or build a large enclosed run around it!

Features

• Dims* incl nest box and roof overhangs approx: (130cm x 66cm x 110cm)
• Metal lined pull out tray for easy cleaning
• Legs covered by rot free adjustable plastic cap / leg
• water proof roof layer embedded
• Nest box & perches included

Keeping some Poultry Shield for weekly cleaning is a must for keeping chickens! This 5l bottle represents excellent value – buy yourself a small garden sprayer and fill it with 10% Poultry Shield and 90% water and spray in the coop weekly to kill off red mite and keep it clean.

Poultry Zest is specially recommended for improving all-round condition and performance. It acts as a nutritional supplement that helps your birds recover quickly after moulting. Poultry Zest is invaluable for rearing poultry, ducks, geese, turkeys and game birds.

New Poultry Zest is enriched with Turmeric, Ginger Root, Fenugreek and Aniseed with added Sunflower Oil on a Micronised Ground Wheat

It has the added convenience of being pelleted and every pack contains a dispensing spoon.