Is Backwood Home Magazine any good?

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Alaskajohn

Alaskajohn

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Its been decades since I’ve gotten a subscription magazine delivered to my mailbox. I keep seeing advertisements for the magazine and am wondering if it, and it’s sister magazine Self-Reliance is any good.

My thought is that I can probably just get as good of information here, but am curious since I am looking for something positive to focus on verses all the crap. When I bought this old homestead it came with a stack of the Backwoodsman Magazine and I didn’t see anything of real value in it, so I am wondering if the above magazines are the same. The Backwoodsman, from what I can see, is a different publication altogether. So I am using this as a reference.

Any thoughts on if the Backwoods Home and it’s sister magazine is any good?
 
The original publishers/owners retired a few years back and they stopped publication. Came back as a print publication under their kids, who had been doing Self Reliance Mag. The content is ok, but I found them overpriced for content and publication frequency, I did not renew my discounted 1 year subscription :(

You can read the blogs from their best contributors/authors on their website, Jackie Clay, Massad Ayoob and see some of the article they have had in the magazine, you may find it right up your alley.

The one print magazine I still subscribe to is "The Backwoodsman".
 
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Caribou said:
Ayoob publishes there and I read everything I can of his. I read it online rather than print but I haven't seen it recently.
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I get an email when he posts something new. Of course, you have to put up with other emails from them, but a mouseclick makes those disappear :)
 
I kinda agree w/ @dademoss as far as I thought it was better when the original folks ran it. I get Countryside (gifted to me each year) and I have seen Grit magazine - I think they are all pretty similar. Quite a bit on goats of course. Like most magazines anymore, things are focused on cheap and easy rather than labor-intensive quality. I think if there is a specific area/skill you are seeking, it might be more advantageous to find a publication in that specific field. That said, if you just want some light reading and to see what others are up to, it's generally light reading. What I have found enjoyable is finding such magazine issues from the early 70's and before - they tend to have done things "the old way." I like that and the projected they spoke of were (to me) of a higher caliber. Of course the hunt if part of the fun. I have found a couple of Yankee magazines from way back that were enjoyable. Grit has been around a long time - not sure of others.
 
I have the years and years of Backwoods in the book form. I love them, and always find something of value going through them. You can read Backwoods on line, I check it every couple of weeks for new articles. Jackie Clay is one of my old favorites, and then there's Ayoob, too. Love the basic recipes, too. Backwoods Home and Rainbows and Sunshine are the only mags we get. The last is a publication for little ones, written for little ones, and is alot of fun.
 
I have about 15 years of accumulate BWH magazine and a few of their anthologies before that. As others here, we enjoyed reading Ayoobs and Jackie Clays articles. We ended our subscriptions a few years ago, not because we didn't enjoy the magazine, but the accumulated boxes of decades worth of BWH mags, Countryside mags, NRA mags, military vehicle mags, etc. started to take over our basement.
 
Amish Heart said:
I bought all the anthologies, then gave the loose magazines to my cousins. They enjoy lots of reading in the wintertime.
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I am behind on the anthologies, other resources have used my available income.:brewing:
 
I've never subscribed to it, or any others like it. But I have picked up a copy of it and others when I see a article or more that fits in with what we do or like doing. I've always enjoyed reading them and have saved most of all I have purchased for reference in the future. Prices have about doubled over the last several years. Due to that I don't get near as many any longer.
 
I'm the oddball. I subscribed to a bunch of 'em at one time. And I enjoyed them, for a while. But after a few years, it just seemed like the same subjects rehashed, over and over. I kinda got bored.

I still do have a collection of old magazines in a cabinet somewhere collecting dust. I suppose I could get them out and reread them if I wanted to.

Honestly, I much prefer books of a particular subject matter anymore. And from time to time, I'll order a new one. For me, that usually means some kind of greenhouse or gardening kind of book but not always.
 
PopPopT said:
I'm the oddball. I subscribed to a bunch of 'em at one time. And I enjoyed them, for a while. But after a few years, it just seemed like the same subjects rehashed, over and over. I kinda got bored.

I still do have a collection of old magazines in a cabinet somewhere collecting dust. I suppose I could get them out and reread them if I wanted to.

Honestly, I much prefer books of a particular subject matter anymore. And from time to time, I'll order a new one. For me, that usually means some kind of greenhouse or gardening kind of book but not always.
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You gotta toss in the odd cookbook so you know what to do with that garden produce.
 
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Terri9630 said:
You gotta toss in the odd cookbook so you know what go do with that garden produce.
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I do get the occasional cookbook. I'm pretty finicky about buying them but once in a while, something will look good enough to get me to spring for one. Quite a lot is freely available online and I often print from there.

I'm more into baking then cooking and since we went low-carb / keto, baking isn't quite the same. There are a LOT of keto cookbooks out there and I have a handful. But I tend more to collect individual recipes. And I often find that I make them and then tweak them to suit my tastes. I ended up with a 3-ring binder full of recipes printed off from various sources. I like working with a page (or occasionally two) out of my binder rather than an actual book, most of which won't stay open... and if they're on a tablet, the tablet will go to sleep about the time my hands are covered in wet dough of some kind. I've even been known to hand copy a recipe out of a cookbook, sometimes adjusting the size of it so that I can make a 5" mini cake rather than a 9" cake like the recipe calls for, that kind of thing. (I've tried doing it in my head on the fly and just about always mess it up. Maybe men really aren't as good at multitasking...)
 
PopPopT said:
I do get the occasional cookbook. I'm pretty finicky about buying them but once in a while, something will look good enough to get me to spring for one. Quite a lot is freely available online and I often print from there.

I'm more into baking then cooking and since we went low-carb / keto, baking isn't quite the same. There are a LOT of keto cookbooks out there and I have a handful. But I tend more to collect individual recipes. And I often find that I make them and then tweak them to suit my tastes. I ended up with a 3-ring binder full of recipes printed off from various sources. I like working with a page (or occasionally two) out of my binder rather than an actual book, most of which won't stay open... and if they're on a tablet, the tablet will go to sleep about the time my hands are covered in wet dough of some kind. I've even been known to hand copy a recipe out of a cookbook, sometimes adjusting the size of it so that I can make a 5" mini cake rather than a 9" cake like the recipe calls for, that kind of thing. (I've tried doing it in my head on the fly and just about always mess it up. Maybe men really aren't as good at multitasking...)
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I have several binders with hand written or printed out recipes. I keep telling my husband I'm going to copy all the recipes I like from the cook books and then get rid of them but.... Maybe some day I'll get to it.
 
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