A Job for All Seasons: My Small Country Living. Questo articolo non è disponibile.A Job for All Seasons: My Small Country Living

Many smallholders have plunged in at the deep end and learnt the hard way, through experience. But Phyllida Barstow, author of the childhood autobiography My Animals and Other Family, was already involved in animal husbandry when, as a young woman, she embarked on her own smallholding enterprise. Here is her lively, informative and witty account of her first-hand experience throughout her lifetime in Gloucestershire, with chickens, dogs, cats, horses, sheep, peacocks, alpacas and even honey bees. As she points out, smallholding is not a summer idyll but, truly, a job for all seasons, all hours, all weathers. She also has to deal with fallen stock, pest control, disease outbreaks and slaughter. Her tips include those on animal handling, training, breeding and delivery. Her wry and practical attitude towards her animals is imbued with respect and often affection for her charges. This account of the realities of modern smallholding is both entertaining and informative.

Phyllida Barstow has written for for many country magazines and has been a columnist for the Daily Telegraph and Daily Mail. She has had 15 novels published, some historical, under various names. In her early career she worked as sub-editor on Argosy and Woman s Journal, and was fiction-buyer for many Mirror Group magazines. Born in 1937, one of five children, Phyllida Barstow spent much of her childhood on a Radnorshire hill farm. She has lived on farms in Wales, Oxfordshire and Gloucestershire and kept animals on all of them. Married to author and journalist Duff Hart-Davis in 1961, they have two children and four grand-children.