The Grow System

Book excerpt: Grow your own food and medicine with a step-by-step guide from the founder of The Grow Network Imagine cultivating enough food to slash your grocery shopping in half--all in less than an hour a day in your own backyard. Sounds impossible, right? Marjory Wildcraft says it's not: She's been homesteading for almost twenty years and founded The Grow Network to teach hundreds of thousands of others--some with very little space or time, some city dwellers with rooftop gardens--how to do the same, from gardening, to raising chickens, to composting, to medicine-making. Wildcraft started her homesteading journey in search of a more sustainable and financially secure way of life. As she says, self-sufficiency offers practical rewards, but the real payoff is "true wealth": health, family, community, meaningful work, and living a life with purpose. This empowering way of life is possible for anyone who has a patch of dirt, small or large. The Grow System includes: • Essential advice for creating a balanced ecosystem in your backyard, with a basic recipe for homemade fertilizer • Step-by-step instructions for setting up a chicken coop and information on choosing the right breed • Home remedies for 12 common ailments, with 8 must-know medicine preparations. The Grow System provides a comprehensive strategy for producing healthy food and herbal medicine at home, and reclaiming the skills our ancestors used every day. It helps connect us to the environment and empowers us to lead healthier lives, without relying on big systems that are out of our control and insecure. It offers a path to a rich, reliable, and deeply satisfying life.