The Eskew's Homesteading Weblog
We often come across books that we like that deal with self-sufficiency, homesteading, gardening, survival, back-to-landers, etc. This is a place for us to list the books and hopefully it will be of some use to those who are looking for things to read on these topics.
The Backyard Homestead
With just a quarter acre of land, you can feed a family of four with fresh, organic food year-round. This comprehensive guide to self-sufficiency gives you all the information you need to grow and preserve a variety of vegetables, fruits, herbs, nuts, and grains; raise chickens for eggs and meat; raise cows, sheep, and goats for meat or milk; raise pigs and rabbits; and keep honey bees.
Simple instructions make it easy to enjoy canned, frozen, dried, and pickled produce all winter; use your own grains to make bread, pasta, and beer; turn fresh milk into delicious homemade yogurt, butter, and cheese; make your own wine, cordials, and herbal teas; and much, much more. It truly is possible to eat entirely from your backyard.
Square Foot Gardening
It’s easy to get started with your own square foot garden at home. As easy as 1, 2, 3 and you’ll be harvesting in no time! Requiring no tools, less work and no weeding, square foot gardening has become one of the most efficient and popular ways to grow large crops of fresh produce without wasting valuable resources or space.
Buy The All New Square Foot Gardening Book
The Encyclopedia of Country Living
Practical advice, invaluable information, and collected wisdom for folks and farmers in the country, city, and anywhere in between. Includes how to cultivate a garden, buy land, bake bread, raise farm animals, make sausage, can peaches, milk a goat, grow herbs, churn butter, build a chicken coop, catch a pig, cook on a wood stove, and much, much more.
This is the essential resource for country living, modern homesteading, growing and preserving foods, and cooking from scratch. It has been in print for 30+ years, in a series of editions. There are almost 600,000 copies in print now. Carla Emery’s Encyclopedia of Country Living contains 950,000 words, and 2,000+ recipes and 1,500+ mailorder sources (for everything she tells you how to do, she also tells you where to get the stuff to do it). This Updated 9th Edition features expanded and updated mailorder information, including e-mail, websites, and current phone numbers and addresses.
No home is complete without this one-of-a-kind encyclopedia! For more than thirty years, people have relied on the thousands of recipes, detailed how-to instructions, and personal advice provided in this definitive classic. It is the most complete source of step-by-step information about growing, processing, cooking, and preserving homegrown foods from garden, orchard, field, or barnyard. This book is so basic, so thorough, so reliable, that it deserves a place in every home whether country, city, or in between.
Buy The Encyclopedia of Country Living
The Self Sufficient Life and How to Live It
The Self Sufficient Life and How to Live It is the only book that teaches all the skills needed to live independently in harmony with the land harnessing natural forms of energy, raising crops and keeping livestock, preserving foodstuffs, making beer and wine, basketry, carpentry, weaving, and much more. Our 2009 edition includes 150 new full-color illustrations and a special section in which John Seymour, the father of the back to basics movement, explains the philosophy of self-sufficiency and its power to transform lives and create communities. More relevant than ever in our high-tech world, The Self Sufficient Life and How to Live It is the ultimate practical guide for realists and dreamers alike.
Buy The Self-Sufficient Life and How to Live It
Storey’s Guide to…
The Storey’s Guides are incredible.
Through an array of how-to books, Storey arms readers with practical skills and inspiration on a range of do-it-yourself topics: gardening, cooking, knitting and other crafts, backyard building, animal care, farming, and home improvement.
Readers turn to Storey for accurate, time-tested knowledge on topics from preserving garden-fresh produce to crate-training a dog. Whatever the subject — natural body care recipes, green thumb tips, inspired color choices for hand-knit projects, ways to raise healthy backyard chickens, or ideas for turning kitchen scraps into stunning houseplants — Storey provides the information that fuels readers’ passions.
Buy the Storey’s Guides
Growing and Canning Your Own Food
Jackie Clay’s (amazing individual and seeping of canning knowledge) much anticipated canning book is full of more tried and true canning recipes than you’ll know what to do with.
Jackie offers her treasure trove of advice for growing everything from blueberries and squash to raising poultry and meat.
The book also includes step-by-step water bath and pressure canning directions and recipes for keeping your pantry stocked with the best-tasting food you’ll ever eat.
