My Top 5 Homesteading Books To Read
I’m asked questions about homesteading all the time. And I absolutely love it. Animals, vegetables, flowers, homesteading with kids, you name it. While I don’t claim to be the know it all of all things homesteading, I have had plenty of successes and failures with it. Honestly it’s more failures than success. But who’s keeping count right? Not me, I can’t count that high:)
So I wanted to give you my top 5 homesteading books that I would recommend.
These are books for the beginner and up. No need to be a farmer or own a million acres. They are great for reading or reference. Sometimes I have to get extra books because I’ve ended up giving away my own copy.
Here’s my top 5 homesteading books to have on hand:
The Self-Sufficiency Handbook by Alan and Gill Bridgewater
This is a sweet and simple book that has an organic feel. It covers your land, home, garden, animals, and even your pantry. I appreciate how it approaches the topics in a bit of an outline form. It makes using it as a reference very quick and easy. Want to know what it says about controlling weeds?…Go to the chapter on Garden, then Weed control, then you even have your choice of subsets under that of different techniques of controlling weeds(ex. mulches, fabrics, and hoeing). It’s not just a good book to have but it’s also pleasing to the eye with its black and white drawings inside.
The Backyard Homestead edited by Carleen Madigan.
If ever a homesteader needed the Cliff Notes on homesteading, this would be it. The publisher has taken excertpts from different previously published books and combined them in this one. This book also covers gardening, animal husbandry, pantry, food preservation etc. But what I love most from this book is in the drawings of three homestead examples. They have a bit of an angled aerial view of a home and how a homestead could be on a one-tenth of an acre, a quarter acre, and a half an acre. AND they even give calculations of what that in particular homestead can produce. Like how many chickens it could handle, how many vegetable beds it could fit, or how many pounds of meat it could produce. Lots of good information in there.
All New Square Foot Gardening by Mel Bartholomew.
If I could sum up this book in one word for why I’d have it on hand for reference it would be: Efficiency. This book does cover how he builds his garden boxes and what all he uses etc. But the core to the book to me is that it’s making the most of the space that is available. You don’t need fields of long rows to have a garden. You’ll learn how you can grow so much more per square foot. And your garden doesn’t even have to be on the ground. One big take away for me was (Spoiler Alert) that you don’t need any more than six inches in depth for even the longest of vegetables. It does go into specific crops. How close you can plant the seeds/transplants is great to know and refer back to.
Back To Basics edited by Abigail R. Gehring.
Back to Basics is the perfect name for this book. I enjoy this book for the wholeness of homesteading it gives. It covers topics from what to look for before buying land, how to build a log cabin felling your own trees, techniques for ways to work the earth for your trees and garden, animals, preserving food, making cheese, making jellies, crafts like making a braided rug, how to make a handmade broom, welding, stenciling walls and floors, how to canoe a river, how to read a map with a compass, how to make your own soap etc. This book certainly has a “from scratch” approach. I love how diverse it is. I really appreciate having this book around.
The Encyclopedia of Country Living by Carla Emery.
Encyclopedia is the key word in the title of this book. It is a large book in size and information. The subjects covered are too many to list but they are all there. There’s not many drawings throughout the book but it is packed full of plenty of words of knowledge and wisdom from experience.
Even if you think you’re not interested in any topics in these books, let me give you a secret of how I use them sometimes. Even if I have no need to look up a certain topic or a solution to a problem I use these books kinda like a magazine. I thumb through them. I’ll see sketches of topics of how to do something an old fashioned way. Then my mind may go down memory lane. Or I may start imagining how it would have been in the old days. Even making up history as a movie in my head. This gives me a moment of appreciation for the time period I live in and the conveniences I have available. A thankful heart is a happy heart.
Bonus Book:
Farmer Boy by Laura Ingalls Wilder. If you haven’t read this book you are missing out. It’s a great book to use as a read aloud to children of any age too. I learned a lot from this story.
So there you go. Those are my top 5 homesteading books I’d recommend.
Email me and let me know if any of these books are helpful for you too.
I’ll even give you bonus points if you can tell me what happened with the weather during the Fourth of July in Farmer Boy;)