Countryside & Small Stock Journal (better known as just "Countryside") is more than a magazine: it's a network where homesteaders share a wide variety of experiences and ideas about simple, sustainable, country living.
There are no guidelines and no paid writers. Instead, there is an open atmosphere of neighborly sharing.
Major, more-or-less regular departments are patterned on a walking tour of an "ideal" or composite homestead that goes something like this:
We'll meet you at the front gate and exchange brief ideas and comments in Country Conversation.
Then, depending on the weather and season, we might stroll through The Garden, inspect The Beehive, and take a look at the Henhouse and Rabbitry. We'll visit The Sheep Shed and The Goat Barn, The Pig Pen and The Family Cow.
On some homesteads we might see rare, exotic, or new breeds: Miniature, Devon, or Scotch Highland cattle, for instance, or perhaps fallow deer or emus. On others the highlight of the tour might be The Greenhouse, the wind or solar power installation or other forms of Alternative Energy, or The Root Cellar.
In most cases we'll visit The Workshop, where we might learn how to build a solar oven, a pea sheller or a high-quality food dryer-or how to repair or even make a tool or part such as an ax handle.
We'll discuss such topics as Home Business, Home Schooling, and home health care or Alternative Medicine.
Back in The Country Kitchen we'll enjoy a bit of hospitality-and recipe sharing, including canning, freezing, drying and root cellaring hints.
While the bread dough is rising we'll probably pick up some new ideas on recycling, conservation, or ways to save a little money-or to use it more wisely.
We'll also visit other Country Neighbors all across the country (and sometimes beyond), hearing and seeing-in their own words and pictures-what they're doing and how they're doing it.
And finally, After Chores, maybe sitting on the porch swing on a warm summer evening or around the woodstove on a wintry one, we'll discuss all those things that seem to crop up when good neighbors get together-as long as they fit Our Philosophy which appears in every issue:
Our Philosophy
It's not a single idea, but many ideas and attitudes, including a reverence for nature and a preference for country life; a desire for maximum personal self-reliance and creative leisure; a concern for family nurture and community cohesion; a belief that the primary reward of work should be well-being rather than money; a certain nostalgia for the supposed simplicities of the past and an anxiety about the technological and bureaucratic complexities of the present and the future; and a taste for the plain and functional.
Countryside reflects and supports the simple life, and calls its practitioners "homesteaders."
History
Small Stock Magazine was founded in 1917 by Wallace Blair. Countryside was founded in 1969 by Jerry (Jd) Belanger... author of Raising Milk Goats the Modern Way, Homesteader's Handbook to Raising Small Livestock, Raising the Homestead Hog, Country Living, Soil Fertility, and The Place Called Attar. The two merged in 1973 to become Countryside & Small Stock Journal, usually shortened to Countryside.
Countryside continues to be published by the Belanger family near the Chequamegon National Forest in Northern Wisconsin.
Countryside Publications, Ltd. also publishes:
Click Here to contact Countryside
