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The complete book of self sufficiency by John Seymour

[on line e-book]

http://www.scribd.com/doc/6449749/The-complete-book-of-self-sufficiency-by-John-Seymour

Self-Sufficient Gardening
by: John Seymour
[Deep Bed method- on line e-book]

The Self-Suffkient Gardener is a unique, detailed guide for the home gardener who wants to provide for all his own food throughout the year. Wherever you live and whatever the size of your garden -whether it be a large country plot, a small back. rrd or just an average suburban yard -*John Seymour’s practical, common sense advice will work for you. He shows you how to make the best use of your...

http://www.scribd.com/doc/8618639/SelfSufficient-Gardening

gardening secrets

Time for good old gardening tips now.
[on line e-book]

http://www.scribd.com/doc/2264384/gardening-secrets

The Practical Organic Gardening Guide
http://www.cleanairgardening.com Learn about the basics of organic gardening.

[on line e-book, with links for soil and compost]

http://www.scribd.com/doc/2074632/The-Practical-Organic-Gardening-Guide

Organic Gardening and soil

http://www.scribd.com/doc/9164754/Organic-Gardening-Soil

Organic Insecticides - Garden

Organic Insecticides For The Garden; Home & Garden
[a quick look says this is a good list of insecticides, I cannot copy this one. granny]

http://www.scribd.com/doc/8226741/Organic-Insecticides-Garden

Intensive Gardening For Profit And Self Sufficiency

Peace Corps Information Collection And Exchange, PROGRAM & TRAINING

http://www.scribd.com/doc/8301731/Intensive-Gardening-For-Profit-And-Self-Sufficiency

Note:

There are others here, also check the search for more subjects to take to google.
granny

http://d.scribd.com/docs/2e5s3y2wuz3ki54opfud.pdf

From your Self-Sufficiency book:

Goats
In some dry countries the goat is called the “desert-maker” because it destroys what scrub there is and prevents more from growing. But where the goat is controlled it can fill a place in a mixed ecology, and if you want to discourage re-afforestation it has a very useful part to play. In cut-over woodland, for example, the goat can go ahead of the other animals as a pioneer, suppress the brambles and briars, prevent the trees from coming back, and prepare the way, perhaps, for the pig to come and complete the process of clearing the old forest for agriculture.

Goats will thrive in deciduous woodland (perhaps one to an acre), and give plenty of milk, but they will, have no doubt of it, prevent any regeneration of trees. In coniferous woodland goats will find very little sustenance, but on heather or gorse-covered mountainsides they will thrive, and there is no doubt that a mixture of goats and sheep in such situations would make better use of the grazing than sheep alone. Goats, concentrated enough, will clear land of many weeds, and they will eat vegetation unsuitable for sheep and leave the grass for the sheep.

For the self-supporting smallholder the goat can quite easily be the perfect dairy animal. For the person with only a garden the goat may be the only possible dairy animal. This is because goats are very efficient at converting roughage into milk and meat. Goat’s milk is not only as good as cow’s milk, in many respects it is better. For people who are allergic to cow’s milk it is much better. For babies it is very good. It makes magnificent cheese because its fat globules are much smaller than those of cow’s milk and therefore do not rise so quickly and get lost in the whey. It is harder to make into butter, because the cream does not rise within a reasonable time, but with a separator butter can be made and is excellent. On the other hand, milking goats takes more labour per gallon of milk than milking cows, however you do it, and so does herding, or fencing, goats.

Toggenburg Anglo-Nubian
A fairly small Swiss goat. Yields well Gives very rich milk, but in and can live on grass. relatively low quantities.

Fencing and tethering
Restraining goats is the goat keeper’s chief problem, and we all know goat keepers who also try to be gardeners and who, year after year, moan that the goats have-yet again-bust into the garden and in a few hours completely ruined it. Young fruit trees that have taken years to grow are killed and the vegetables absolutely ravaged. But this annual experience has no effect whatever on the beliefs of the true goat keeper. Next year he will win the battle to keep goats out of his garden. What he forgets is that the goats have twenty-four hours a day to plan to get into his garden, and he doesn’t.

Three strands of electric fence, with three wires at 15 inches (38cm), 27 inches (69cm) and 40 inches (102cm) above ground level, will restrain goats, and so will a 4-foot (1.2m) high fence of chain link with a support wire at 4-foot 6 inches (1.4m) and another support wire lower down. Wire netting will hardly deter goats at all.

Tethering is the other answer. Where you can picket tether goats along road verges, on commons, and so on, and thus use grazing where you could use no grazing before, you must be winning. But it is unfair to tether any animal unless you move it frequently; above all, don’t keep putting it back on the place where it has been tethered before except after a long interval. Goats, like sheep, soon become infested with internal parasites if they are confined too long on the same ground. By tethering you are denying the animal the right to range and search for clean, parasite-free pasture. Picket tethering is very labour-intensive, but for the cottager with a couple of goats and plenty of time it is an obvious way to” get free pasture.

Another form of tethering is the running tether. A wire is stretched between two posts and the tether can run along the wire. This is an obvious way for strip-grazing a field, and also a good way of getting rid of weeds that other animals will not touch.

Saanen
A large goat of Swiss origin capable of high yields, if given good grazing.

Feeding
A kid should have a quart (1.1 litres) of milk a day for at least two months, but as he gets older some of this may be skimmed milk. A reasonable doe should give from three to six pints (1.7 to 3.4 litres) of milk a day In the winter a doe in milk should have about two pounds (0.9kg) a day of very good hay (you should be able to raise this - about 750 lbs or 340 kg a year - on a quarter of an acre) one or two pounds (0.5-0.9kg) of roots or other succulents, from one to two pounds (0.5-0.9kg) of grain depending on milk yield. Goats should have salt licks available. It is a mistake to think that goats will give a lot of milk on grazing alone: milking goats need good feeding. They will, for example, thrive on the silage you can make by sealing grass clippings in fertilizer bags (see pp. 80-81). As for the grain you feed to
your goats: a good mixture, such as you might feed to dairy cows, is fine, or you can buy “cake,” or “dairy nuts” from a merchant (and pay for it too). All debris from the market garden or vegetable garden can go to goats, but it is better to crush, or split, tough brassica stems first. Feed them their concentrates individually or they rob each other.

Housing
Goats are not as winter-hardy as cows and cannot be left out all the time in north-European or North American winters and expected to give any milk. They don’t like cold and hate rain. High-yielding goats (which personally I should avoid) need very high feeding and warm housing, but medium yielding ones must have shelter from the rain, and an airy but fairly draught-proof shed to sleep in o’nights. Giving them a table to lie on, with low sides to exclude draughts, is a good idea and if they are lying in a fierce down-draught of cold air adjust the ventilation until they are not. Maybe a board roof over the table to stop down-draughts would be a good idea.

Otherwise you can treat milking goats much the same as you treat cows. Dry them off eight weeks before kidding. But a goat may milk for two or three years after kidding without kidding again.

Milking a goat
You can milk a goat that is standing on the ground, just as you would milk a cow (see p. 94). But because goats are so much smaller a stand helps. Coax her into position with some hay or grain.

Rearing orphans
One possible good use for goats is rearing orphans of many kinds. Goats are excellent for suckling other animals: calves thrive better on goat’s milk than they do on their mother’s, and it would be reasonable, if you kept cows, but had some wilderness or waste land on which cows could not thrive, to keep a flock of goats on the bad lands and use them for suckling the calves so that you can milk their mothers. Goat
milk is very digestible, and pretty good milk anyway, and orphan piglets, for example, which don’t take very kindly to cow’s milk, will thrive on goat’s. Calves will suck straight from the nanny. Lambs will too but don’t let them-they may damage her teats and give her mastitis. Milk her yourself and bucket feed the lambs. Milk the nanny and feed the milk to piglets through a bottle. You can rear foals on goats. The suggestion has been made that a suitable person could make a living - or half a living - by running a goat-orphanage - not for orphan goats but for other animals. Neighbours soon get to know such things, and orphan lambs are ten a penny in the lambing season in sheep districts and very often a sow has too many piglets.

It goes on to talk about raising goats for meat, so I didn’t include that part.
10th