Made from Scratch: Discovering the Pleasures of a Handmade Life »

Jenna Woginrich is a 25-year-old web designer who works in an office during the day and homesteads in her spare time. She has taught herself how to bake, spin, sew, raise chickens, grow vegetables, and play the fiddle and mountain dulcimer. She shares her home in Vermont, with Jazz and Annie, two exuberant huskies.

Discovering the pleasures of a handmade life was a longtime dream for urban homesteader Jenna Woginrich. At 24 years old, living in an apartment in Knoxville, Tennessee, and working as a computer designer, Woginrich was nurturing her dream of learning to homestead. Now, at 27, she’s settled on a rented farm in rural Vermont, where she cares for two working sled dogs, chickens, a flock of sheep, honeybees, a couple of geese, fluffy Angora rabbits, and a backyard garden that provides much of her own food.

Part memoir and part how-to manual, Made from Scratch recounts Woginrich’s growing independence and the successes and missteps she experiences as she learns to more fully live off the land. By turns upbeat, dramatic, and sometimes sorrowful, her story embodies the experience of the new homesteader one who is committed to reducing dependence on commercially produced goods while still working a day job to pay the rent. Woven into the narrative, readers will find easy-to-follow instructions for making clothing, playing a musical instrument, preserving fruit, brewing the best pot of coffee imaginable, and much more.

Now available in paperback, this new edition features additional material on moving from Idaho to Vermont, a topic that will delight fans of her blog.