Resilient Living: 12 Must Have Books
Are you looking to grow and prepare your own food, conserve energy, and be more resilient? Maybe you’re looking for ways to simplify your life. Wherever you find yourself, there are things you can do today to become more resilient. We’ve compiled our favorite books about all aspects of resilient living to get you started.
Typical books about preserving garden produce nearly always assume that modern “kitchen gardeners” will boil or freeze their vegetables and fruits. Yet here is a book that goes back to the future—celebrating traditional but little-known French techniques for storing and preserving edibles in ways that maximize flavor and nutrition.
Preserving Food Without Freezing or Canning offers more than 250 easy and enjoyable recipes featuring locally grown and minimally refined ingredients. It is an essential guide for those who seek healthy food for a healthy world.
Featured Excerpts:
Four Ways to Preserve Your Green Bean Bounty
How to Preserve Food Without Nutrient Loss
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2018 James Beard Foundation Book Award Finalist
Rachael Mamane takes us on a culinary journey into the science behind fundamental stocks and the truth about well-crafted bone broths, and offers over 100 complex and unique recipes incorporating stocks as foundational ingredients. Readers will turn to this book when they find themselves wondering what to do with the carcass of a store-bought roast chicken and they want to learn how to make every inch of their vegetables go further.
Mastering Stocks and Broths is the comprehensive guide to culinary stocks and broths that passionate home cooks and innovative chefs have all been waiting for.
Featured Excerpts:
The Fundamentals of Stocks and Broths
A Good Stock Takes Time: Setting Up Your Kitchen for Making Stocks and Broths
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The Organic Seed Grower is a comprehensive manual for the serious vegetable grower who is interested in growing high-quality seeds using organic farming practices. It is written for both serious home seed savers and diversified small-scale farmers who want to learn the necessary steps involved in successfully producing a commercial seed crop organically.
Written by well-known plant breeder and organic seed expert John Navazio, The Organic Seed Grower is the most up-to-date and useful guide to best practices in this exciting and important field.
Featured Excerpts:
Choosing the Right Seed Crop
A Short History of Agricultural Seed
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Scientist/gardener Carol Deppe combines her passion for organic gardening with newly emerging scientific information from many fields — resilience science, climatology, climate change, ecology, anthropology, paleontology, sustainable agriculture, nutrition, health, and medicine.
Both a conceptual and a hands-on organic gardening book, and is suitable for vegetable gardeners at all levels of experience.
Featured Excerpts:
Food in Uncertain Times: How to Grow and Store the 5 Crops You Need to Survive
How to Plan the Best Garden Ever
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Both a business guide and a farming manual, The Organic Medicinal Herb Farmer will teach readers how to successfully grow and market organic medicinal Western herbs.
Whether you’re trying to farm medicinal plants, culinary herbs, or at-risk native herbs exclusively or simply add herbal crops to what you’re already growing, successful small-scale herb farmers Jeff and Melanie Carpenter will guide you through the entire process—from cultivation to creating value-added products.
Featured Excerpts:
Why Grow Medicinal Herbs?
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Since its original publication in 1989, The New Organic Grower has been one of the most important farming books available, with pioneer Eliot Coleman leading the charge in the organic movement in the United States.
A must-have for any agricultural library!
Featured Excerpts:
Garden Planning: 48 of the Most Promising Veggies
Ditch the pots, use soil blocks!
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In Wildcrafted Fermentation, Pascal Baudar describes in detail how to create rich, flavorful lacto-ferments at home from the wild and cultivated plants in your local landscape or garden. From sauerkrauts and kimchis to savory pastes, hot sauces, and dehydrated spice blends, Baudar includes more than 100 easy-to-follow, plant-based recipes to inspire even the most jaded palate. Step-by-step photos illustrate foraging, preparation, and fermentation techniques for both wild and cultivated plants that will change your relationship to the edible landscape and give you the confidence to succeed like a pro.
Featured Excerpts:
Wild Spicy Forest Paste
How to Make Naturally Fermented Raw Soda
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The first edition of The Small-Scale Poultry Flock helped thousands of small-scale farmers and homesteaders successfully adopt a practical and integrative model for working with chickens and other domestic fowl based on natural systems. In this expanded and thoroughly revised edition, readers will find plenty of all-new material. Author Harvey Ussery introduces readers to his new favorite breed of chicken, Icelandics; describes how he manages his breeding flock using a clan mating system; presents detailed information on the use of trapnests and record-keeping spreadsheets for evaluating breeding hen performance; and provides step-by-step instructions for construction of an ingeniously designed mobile poultry shelter.
Featured Excerpts:
How to Choose the Right Breed for Your Poultry Flock
Manage Your Chicken Manure: The Joys of Deep Litter
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In Organic Mushroom Farming and Mycoremediation, Cotter not only offers readers an in-depth exploration of best organic mushroom cultivation practices; he shares the results of his groundbreaking research and offers myriad ways to apply your cultivation skills and further incorporate mushrooms into your life—whether your goal is to help your community clean up industrial pollution or simply to settle down at the end of the day with a cold Reishi-infused homebrew ale.
Featured Excerpts:
Grow Mushrooms on Your Jeans. Seriously.
Drill, Plug, Wax, Wait: Four Easy Steps to Growing Mushrooms Outdoors
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The Holistic Orchard demystifies the basic skills everybody should know about the inner-workings of the orchard ecosystem, as well as orchard design, soil biology, and organic health management. Detailed insights on grafting, planting, pruning, and choosing the right varieties for your climate are also included, along with a step-by-step instructional calendar to guide growers through the entire orchard year. The extensive profiles of pome fruits (apples, pears, asian pears, quinces), stone fruits (cherries, peaches, nectarines, apricots, plums), and berries (raspberries, blackberries, blueberries, gooseberries, currants, and elderberries) will quickly have you savoring the prospects.
Featured Excerpts:
Bramble On: The Ins and Outs of Growing Raspberries
The Six Pests Plaguing your Fruit Trees — and How to Control Them Organically
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The Resilient Farm and Homestead is more than just a book of tricks and techniques for regenerative site development, but offers actual working results in living within complex farm-ecosystems based on research from the “great thinkers” in permaculture, and presents a viable home-scale model for an intentional food-producing ecosystem in cold climates, and beyond. Inspiring to would-be homesteaders everywhere, but especially for those who find themselves with “unlikely” farming land, Falk is an inspiration in what can be done by imitating natural systems, and making the most of what we have by re-imagining what’s possible. A gorgeous case study for the homestead of the future.
Featured Excerpts:
Optimize Your Soil with Cover Cropping
Perennial Power: Why You Need Them in Your Garden
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In Will Bonsall’s Essential Guide to Radical, Self-Reliant Gardening, Bonsall maintains that to achieve real wealth we first need to understand the economy of the land, to realize that things that might make sense economically don’t always make sense ecologically, and vice versa.
In a friendly, almost conversational way, Bonsall imparts a wealth of knowledge drawn from his more than forty years of farming experience. “My goal,” he writes, “is not to feed the world, but to feed myself and let others feed themselves. If we all did that, it might be a good beginning.”
Featured Excerpts:
How to Make Your Own Mulch With Fallen Leaves
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