Learning to Homestead can come with a lot of different skill sets to think and learn about. I have come up with the best homesteading book resources for beginner or intermediate homesteaders that will help you get clarity on the topic as a whole. These books will help you get started no matter what kind of land you have right now. It could be a small apartment or an acre of land. You can start your homestead right now by learning these skills with these 12 books!
1. The Encyclopedia of Country Living
If there is one book out of these 12, this is the best investment. It tells you how to navigate all the things! From canning to bees, you can trust this book will have the how-to in it on the skill you want to learn. This book is best for those that want to know more about homesteading but don’t want to commit to one particular topic just yet.
2. The Urban Homestead
This book is best if you live in an urban setting and are looking for ideas on how to homestead where you are. It has a lot of great information on canning, gardening, and much more.
3. The Self-Sufficient Life and How to Live It
This book is best for those that want to learn how to live a self-sufficient life. It has a lot of great information on homesteading, including gardening, canning, and raising animals.
4. The Backyard Homestead & Planner
This book is best for those that want to start a homestead in their backyard. It has a lot of great information on gardening, canning, and raising animals. It shows you how to set up many profitable things on less than an acre of land! It can tell you the best times to plant and when to start your garden. This is a perfect book for someone who has a small space and wants to produce things to become more self-sustainable.
The planner is a step-by-step plan for what chores need to be focused on in that time of the year.
5. Back to the Basics: A Guide to Traditional Skills
This is one of the best homesteading books for learning traditional skills such as crafting things for homestead sustainability. Even if you live in a little apartment in the city this book will help spark interest and ideas on how to start with what you have.
6. Restoration Agriculture
Restoration Agriculture is a book that’s more on how to take care of the land and soil. It will show you how to use a natural ecosystem to create agricultural systems that imitate nature. This is very much the topic of Regenerative Agriculture that I share about often.
7. Polyface Micro
This is a Joel Salatin book on a homestead level of farming. He talks a lot about how to make a small piece of land work for you when it comes to pasture-raised livestock! This will help you set a system up on how to make your land work with a rotation process called polyface farming so you don’t need to buy 100’s of acres to raise livestock.
8. You Can Farm
Does homesteading or farming seem impossible? All this industrialized Agriculture has made people think you need to grow up with a farm of many generations to own a farm today. That’s just not true. Joel Salatin shows you how you can farm TODAY with the space you have right now. This book has really opened my eyes to how I can be a first-generation farmer today.
9. The Frugal Homesteader
This book will show you how you can save money and DIY projects around your homestead. It is a full guide on how to save money in every aspect of homesteading. It is one of the best homesteading books I recommend. Many homesteaders think today that they need to spend a huge amount of money on things for them to work and it just doesn’t have to be that way. You can do so many things cheaply and make them look brand new!
10. 40 Projects for Building Your Backyard Homestead
40 Projects for Building Your Backyard Homestead is best for those that want to build things on their homestead. It has a lot of great projects, including how to build a chicken coop, how to build a greenhouse, and how to build a root cellar. This will help you DIY some good systems for your homestead.
11. The Rooted Life
This book is best for those that want to learn how to live a more sustainable life. It has a lot of great information on homesteading, including gardening, canning, and raising animals. It also has information on foraging and living off the land. This is a perfect book for someone who wants to learn how to be more self-sufficient. If you’re looking for inspiration to start a homestead, this is the book for you!
12. The Homestead Handbook
This handbook is for someone wanting to start their homesteading journey! You can avoid a lot of mistakes by reading this first. It will give you a glimpse on what you’re getting into.
13. The Independent Farmstead
This is an in-depth book on systems for your farmstead. Success with your homestead comes from the systems you set in place. They are essential for working less. This book is one of the best homesteading books for creating systems on your homestead!
Scribd Books
One of the best audiobook companies I use for a lot of homesteading books, in general, is Scribd! They don’t have all of these books, but they have a good number of homesteading books. It’s an investment to purchase all of the books you need right now in your journey. Most of the time I am in need of learning how to do something right now and using Scribd helps me get the answer sooner! I still however love books for in-hand copies but some days I can multi-task on a homesteading project while I listen to an audiobook. They also have books you can read instead of listening as well. It has really helped me up my skills as far as homesteading because I have a huge variety of books to look things up, I can’t just learn from google. It’s only $9.99 a month and it has been one of the best resource investments we have made! You can read for free here for 14 days.
There are many great homesteading books out there that can help you on your journey to self-sufficiency. These are just a few of the best homesteading books that I recommend for helping you navigate whatever part of your homesteading journey you are in!
You’re Probably wondering how much land to be self-sufficient?
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A lover of all things Western Fashion, Homemaking, Cultured Foods, & Making Homemade Dog Food! I share a lot here on this Lifestyle blog. Whether you're interested in just one of my passions or all of them, I'm excited to have you here.
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