This video goes over my favorite plant nursery magazines as well as my favorite seed catalogs.  Many of the plants in these magazines are also offered at our nursery at Great Escape Nursery.  Great Escape Nursery offers rooted cuttings of plants at an affordable price.  We are a relatively young nursery and do not have the variety that the nurseries below have, but we are well on our way.  Check out our nursery at http://greatescapenursery.com/

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Raintree Nursery

Raintree Nursery is our first catalog to review.  They offer a very large selection of well-established unique edible plants.  The catalog offers large pictures, a good description and background on each plant and gives good details on the requirements to grow the plants.  They also have a large selection of root stock plants.  These plants are a little pricier than some of the other magazines, but that is because they are generally larger.

Favorite Plant Nursery Magazines and Seed Catalogs – Raintree

Burnt Ridge Nursery

Burnt Ridge Nursery is our next catalog.  Like Raintree Nursery, Burnt Ridge Nursery has a large selection of unique edible plants.  The prices are generally a little cheaper here than Raintree and they do have a few plants not offered by Raintree.  The Burnt Ridge Nursery catalog does not have any pictures, so it is a little more difficult to get a feel for the plant from the catalog.  They make up for this by having beautiful pictures on their website.

Favorite Plant Nursery Magazines and Seed Catalogs – Burnt Ridge

One Green World

One Green World is another nursery that I have purchased several plants from.  They have a nice magazine with lots of pictures.  One Green World does have a few unique plants that the other nurseries do not have and I love variety, so I’m sure I’ll be buying more from them in the future.

Favorite Plant Nursery Magazines and Seed Catalogs – One Green World

Stark Bros.

Stark Bros. is a larger nursery that a number of you have probably heard of before.  I purchased a number of paw paw trees from them this past fall.  Stark Bros. had them a little cheaper than some of the other nurseries and they had them in stock this past fall when other nurseries did not have them.

Terroir Seeds

Terroir Seeds has a large selection of heirloom, non-GMO, and organic seeds to choose from.  They have a large selection of unique edible plants, some of which are perennial.  They also have a large herb selection that includes a number of medicinal plants.  The magazine does not have that many color pictures.

Favorite Plant Nursery Magazines and Seed Catalogs – Terroir

Baker Creek

Baker Creek offers the largest selection of heirloom, non-GMO, and organic seeds.  I have spent many hundreds of dollars buying my annual plants from them as well as many perennial medicinal plants and herbs.  This magazine has loads of color pictures so you can see exactly what you are purchasing.

Favorite Plant Nursery Magazines and Seed Catalogs – Baker Creek

Adaptive Seeds

Adaptive Seeds has some unique perennials and annuals that you won’t find elsewhere.  I have not bought a ton of stuff from them, but have bought a couple of dozen unique seeds from them that I have not found elsewhere.

Favorite Plant Nursery Magazines and Seed Catalogs – Adaptive

Johnny’s Seeds

Johnny’s Seeds is a more well-known seed magazine.  I have found quite a few unique edible plants at their company.

Wrap-up

Well, there you have it.  A list of my favorite Plant Nursery Magazines and Seed Catalogs.  Now is the time to order your seeds and plants before they are all gone.

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Grit Magazine Review

This post is a Grit Magazine Review.  The tag line on Grit’s web site (www.grit.com/) is: “For more than 130 years, GRIT has helped its readers live more prosperously and happily while emphasizing the importance of community and a rural lifestyle tradition. In each bimonthly issue, GRIT includes helpful features, humorous and inspiring articles, captivating photos, gardening and cooking advice, do-it-yourself projects, and the practical reader advice you would expect to find in America’s premier rural lifestyle magazine.”

Grit Magazine Review – Grit Magazine

The magazine has a very colorful cover which outlines the anchor stories for that issue.  The first couple of pages are table of contents followed by two pages that give you the following information: Featured Comment, Reader Stats, Reader Blogs, recent Facebook Conversations and Grit Gear Sweepstakes.

After the above sections you start hitting various Department articles followed by the featured stories of the month.  All of the regular Departments are covered below followed by a sampling of the featured stories.

Departments:

• Our View: This Department is a one-page editorial from the magazine.
• Your View: This Department is one-page of pictures taken by readers. Some pictures are of farms, some of rainbows or waterfalls or kids playing in the country.
• Facts & Folklore: This is a one-page section that consists of a mix of several items. The first that shows up in all the articles is a “Wit and Wisdom from The Old Farmer’s Almanac, always ‘useful, with a pleasant degree of humor’”.  This section also has a Best Days and Calendar section and has a special recipe.  There are also a few areas that change every week.  In the three issues in front of me they have: Cabbage Tips, Skywatch, Weather Proverbs, and Did You Know.
• Mail Call: This Department consist of 3 or 4 pages of mail/letters sent in by users.
• Friends & Neighbors: This Department is broken up into two pages. The first page is kind of a classified section with people that are looking for farm and garden related objects.  The second page goes over two different do-it-yourself self help ideas on how to make farm and garden chores easier.
• Gazette: This 3-page section gives farm and agriculture news and information on festivals and educational events.
• Heart of the Home: This is a reader share section where the readers share stories on a given subject. The subject could be restoration projects, dream careers, adventures or anything else.
• Comfort Foods: This section gives cooking hints and ideas as well as some recipes.
• Looking Back: This section covers life lessons learned and how they can be applied or used by us.
• Recipe Box: Recipes from readers and staffers are shared here.
• American Heirlooms: This section goes into heirloom plants and seeds. This means non-hybridized and non-GMO.  An heirloom is a plant that has offspring that is largely the same as the parent plant and has been around for many plant generations.

I’ll list the the headline featured stories from the magazines I have in front of me so you can get an idea of what GRIT offers:

• May/June 2015 Magazine: Farming Lavender, Practical Pest Control, Outstanding in Your Field, In the Shop: Simple Homemade Fruit Picker, Country Tech: Blacksmithing on a Budget, Feed the Flock, Preparing Grain Corn for Cooking, Sow Hoe: All About Growing Sweet Corn.
• July/August 2015 Magazine: Nectars in Nature, Fantastic Forage, The Incorrigible Caterpillar, About to Sprout, A Beginner’s Guide to Building With Cob, Ditch the Itch, Making Camp, Sow Howe: Sentinels and Signals, In the Wild: Helpful Hunter – The Black Ratsnake, In the Shop: Build Your Own Sprout Racks
• November/December 2015 Magazine: Cordwood Construction: How to Build Your Dream Home, Arming the Homestead, Build Trust With Your Horse, Earthworms: Nature’s Compost Engineers, Keeping Cattle on the Small Farm, Holly Brings Joy to All Seasons, Unique Garden Plants

Near the rear of the magazine they have a Market Place section, a Livestock Exchange section, and a Classified section.

This magazine is my second favorite.  My favorite is Backwoods Home.  Like Backwoods Home, Grit constantly offers new ideas on how to grow things, do things, and introduces me to new plants that I had not run into before.  This magazine is a great education resource for anyone starting out with gardening, farming, and homesteading.  But it still has new and interesting information for the experienced gardener, farmer, and homesteader.

One-year subscription consists of 6 issues.  The subscription price is $14.95 if you order online at www.grit.com.  The cover price per issue is $4.99.

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Backwoods Home Magazine Review | A Homesteading Magazine

This post, titled Backwoods Home Magazine Review | A Homesteading Magazine, is a review on Backwoods Home Magazine. Their tagline is “practical ideas for self-reliant living”. They have articles on how to grow food organically, how to store and preserve that food, how to build green houses and root cellars, firearms and hunting information and much more.

Backwoods Home Magazine Review

Backwoods Home generally has a dozen or so articles featured plus eight department columns that are in each magazine. The articles are anywhere from two to six pages each and are very informative. If the article is a how-to article it has lots of pictures and a good explanation of the steps. The department columns are anywhere from one to three pages long. The articles and columns are very different from issue to issue so you won’t get bored.  You can see the magazine in the picture titled “Backwoods Home Magazine Review”.

Below I list the department columns and give a brief overview of what is covered in each column.

Regular Departments Columns

• Editorial – This section is the Editors take on a given subject. Sometimes this is by Dave Duffy (Editor) and sometimes it is by Annie Tuttle (Dave’s daughter). This section gets into political views, world events, and life in general or any other subject.
• Ayoob on Firearms – Massad Ayoob, a retired police officer, firearms trainer, and hunter writes regular articles dealing with firearms. Sometimes he writes about how to safely carry and sometimes he writes about hunting.
• The Irreverent Joke Page – pretty much a collection of various unrelated jokes.
• Ask Jackie – Jackie Clay-Atkinson is the ultimate homesteader. She writes articles regularly for the magazine and has the “Ask Jackie” department which features questions asked by readers and she gives answers. She is an expert on food preservation, cooking, and building homestead devices such as compost boxes.
• Letters – This sections covers letters from readers. Many of the readers have wonderful ideas and they are allowed to share those ideas in this section.
• The gee-whiz! page – This department picks a subject, such as trees or reptiles, and gives you little known facts about that subject. They go into the biggest, smallest, heaviest, fastest and whatever other facts are pertinent to a subject. Not must know stuff, but very “gee-whiz” I didn’t know that.
• The Last Word – John Silveria picks a topic and then delves into the facts, gives some opinion and then gives facts to back his opinion. Recently he has hit on subjects such as ‘corporations, profits, and taxes’ and ‘climate change’
• Classified ads – Classified ads like you would see in a newspaper. They are related to subjects in the magazine for the most part.

The articles are different in each magazine. In the September/October 2015 issue they have the following articles:

• Turning a $10,000 house into a home
• Building Feed Boxes for Cattle
• Harvesting and cooking giant puffball mushrooms
• Indispensable homestead kitchen tools
• Currants & gooseberries
• Be A Viking: Brew Wild-Crafted Mead
• Three MORE ways the world can end
• Bowhunting: The instinct and the arrow
• Spicy organic salsa
• Oatmeal sausage – A treat from days gone by
• A decorative garden from and old stump
• Build a vertical storage rack for cans
• A tale of two wasp traps

In between the articles are advertisements. This is the only magazine I have ever read where I actually like the advertisements. They are nicely done and not pushy, but the reason I like them is they each have unique products that you don’t see elsewhere. I learn a great deal about what is available on the market that I otherwise would not have known about.

I have been a subscriber for three years now and just renewed for another two years. Of the 8 subscriptions I have right now, Backwoods home is my favorite.

The magazine is published every other month. It sells for $26.95 a year (6 issues) or $49.95 for two years (12 issues). According to their statistics in the October 2015 magazine they have 36,000 subscribers and sell 10,500 on newsstands. Backwoods home has been selling for 26 years now. Their website is www.backwoodshome.com.