This book started out with the purpose of saving and honoring the knowledge of Joy Scott (known in our family as our Mom, Grandma, and Great Grandma). Throughout our lives, our family has relied on her practical knowledge of so many different subjects. Several generations of our family depend every day on this knowledge. We wanted to preserve this heritage for future generations of our family who may need to depend on this common sense knowledge, this country way of life, to be able to survive. As we developed this book, we began to realize that not only our family but also others needed the wisdom found here. More and more people are seeing a need to going back to the basic way of life, a self-sufficient way of life. We started with just gardening, canning, and freezing; bee keeping, and chicken raising. That has grown to include: raising and using herbs, raising beef and milk cows, using deer meat, making home made maple syrup, and much more. Others in our family have added their wisdom to Mom's. This is a rich heritage of over four generations and we are happy to be able to pass this on to you.