My top 5 books for the homestead that are actually worth reading
I’ll be honest. As much as I like to read and love books, reading can be a struggle for me. These are all books that I easily got sucked into reading late into the night. These are the golden treasure chests of information that have earned there space on my bookshelf. I pull almost all of these down every year if not multiple times a year.
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Polyface Micro by Joel Salatin
Joel get’s you in the right mindest gets you thinking about planning and strategy for your homestead. This is a sequel of sorts to his previous book You Can Farm but with a more relaxed tone. This book was a driving force for how I define my principles about growing food on the homestead.
Grow a Little Fruit Tree by Ann Ralph
This book teaches you how to keep almost any common fruit tree a manageable size. By keeping your fruit trees small it allows you to have significantly more. Aside from having more variety of fruit this let’s you spread out fruiting seasons as well. I am a tree addict and this is a book I go to every fall and spring when I’m thinking about the orchard.
The Frugal Homesteader by John Moody
This is another book about mindset. Yes, there are all sorts of plans for cheap ways to solve all sorts of problems on the homestead. But the biggest value is it gets me thinking about how can I solve more problems, for less, with the things I have on hand.
The Backyard Homestead Guide to Raising Farm Animals by Gail Damerow
Imagine every Storey’s guide on animals distilled down to a single chapter and then wrapped together by Gail Damerow and this is what you get. I highly recommend reading this and Polyface Micro before getting any animals for the homestead. You never know what could be a total nightmare and would could be surprisingly easy to fit into your routine.
The Self-Sufficient Life and How to Live by John Seymour
A bit of everything including: recipes, information on livestock, and homestead design suggestions for various size lots. If you could only have one book, this would be it. It’s an interesting perspective from a previous generation, and honestly, you could do a lot worse.
