Magazines : Mother Earth News

Rating: - Mother Earth News
This is a great magazine! I have it on automatic renewal & it only costs me $10 a year because I choose to renew it this way! What savings on a amazing magazine! Loaded with information. It will take you a long time to read it's so packed! It has everything! Going solar, solar projects, hybrid cars, homesteading, recipes, livestock, reader insight & more! Check out Countryside & small livestock journal (I think that's the full name, I think of it as Countryside) it's great & has a heck of a lot less advertising than Mother. It's a more rugged type of magazine that is simply fantastic. I have a subscription to it as well & am very happy with it. I find that both of these magazines have much to offer!

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Rating: - Love it but...
Love the down-home thinking with a modern twist. I didn't rate it a 5 star because it doesn't come 12 months. Some of the suggestions are also hard to do for those of us who work and have children and live in the city. Many articles are pertinent and do-able for city dwellers.

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Rating: - "lost its compost" for a while but slowly getting back to nature
Somehow, the Mother became more like something else... Sunset? I dunno, but it really lost its way from the down-to-earth, get-down-in-the-dirt, raise-chickens-in-your-backyard-&-fertilize-with-the-rest viewpoint.

I miss the newsprint, non-glossy paper, the substantive articles for people who really are living off the land, not cruising over it in SUV's and entertaining themselves with dreams of organic lavender.

That said, it seems to be coming around the corner to its old self again, but it's a long, slow, return I think. I am heartened by the direction it is taking, and subscribe once more to hope it'll keep going that way. I mean, just the glossy paper alone makes it suspect amongst my crew! I'll hide it when the purists come, and hope it keeps getting back to the Earth.

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Rating: - good solid info
A great magazine for self-reliant living. Neither preachy nor superficial, this gives you a good grounding in how to be self-reliant.

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Rating: - Getting better
When I first subscribed to Mother (as fans refer to it) it was an excellent back-to-the-earth journal inspired by the flight of so many 1960s people back to the earth, to rural communities, and to a kind of self-sufficiency. It was pretty much a handbook foir the beginning farmer, homesteader (rural or urban) or communitarian. But during the 1980s and 90s Mother took a very different turn.

Gardening and self-sufficiency became, well, fashionable, for want of a better word and Mother was transformed into a sort coffee table book for yuppie wannabe farmers. Gone were practical articles on recycling animal waste, replaced by colorful spreads with little practical information of any kind. I dropped my subscription as did many other old-timers.

A few years ago Mother rediscovered its original roots. It's still a thin, glossy mag rather than the thick, plain paper handbook of self-sufficiency it once was, but it's getting better. I haven't resubscribed but at least I buy the occasional issue now.