Need Titles to New and Older Books about Homesteading, Smallhold Farming. Favorites?

01.25.10 | chickensoup

[ApplegateRanch]

Henley's Formulas for Home & Workshop. A good read, as well as who knows what you'll find that is just what you need; makes a wonderful "bathroom book", too.

click me

Ca 1900 formulas for just about anything around a farm or homestead, though A) some ingredients are now practically impossible to come by; B) some of the formulas will be explanation enough for shorter life expectancies!

Leather tanning to shoe repair, harness making, to shoe polish; cleaning solutions & furniture finishes, and the polishes to keep them bright & shiny. Dyes, soaps, liniments, "remedies"; making & using photo papers & developers; mixing and casting alloys for the shop & barn; and much more.

[Chickensoup]

SOunds great, never heard of it..

[Richard Kimball]

I had the original Foxfire book years ago. I don't know how much useful information it gave, but it was an excellent hippy dippy look at the Appalachian farmers and families.

[Chickensoup]

Thank you , I will check them all out

[Chickensoup]

I didnt know that thank you

[piroque]

Try this lot of third world literature ,

http://www.cd3wd.com/cd3wd_40/CD3WD/INDEX.HTM

[kalee]

ping

[palmer]

The Self-Reliant Homestead by Charles A Sanders, very broad but still detailed in many sections. Acres USA has a catalog chock full of books, mostly for farmers.

I also recommend getting a book on passive solar heating and cooling before you build or buy any house anywhere.

[RegulatorCountry]

Mother Earth News has their entire, 40 year archive on CD for $40.00.

Everything from their Chevy pickup that runs on wood chips, to build-your-own electric Porsche 914, to build your own solar hot water, small scale hydroponic farming, budget greenhouse plans, etcetera.

My parents subscribed for many years. It’s not the same since it was bought out and moved from Hendersonville, NC, but all of those issues are in there, too.

[blue-duncan]

"I don't know how much useful information it gave, but it was an excellent hippy dippy look at the Appalachian farmers and families." They were good "bathroom" (pc 'coffee table') books. Have you seen this one?

I bought it for both my grown boys and they are sharing it with their sons.

[Kush]

bfl

[CenTex]

I am going to recommend the Foxfire books also. We started reading them as they were issued way back when. Our last volume was #8 in the series. We lived in the Houston area at the time and had hopes to make our escape. We did about 25 years ago and now live on 250 acres on the edge of the Texas Hill Country.

The Foxfire books give a very strong delivery of the lifestyle of the Scotch-Irish (Scot-Irish alternate spelling) in Appalachia but their descendants settled much of the area west of the Mississippi. The series might also give the metrosexuals an insight into the independent attitudes of the ‘red-necks’ ‘Okies’ and ‘Texans’, a combination of my heritage (with a little German thrown in to cement the hard head).

I ordered the rest of the Foxfire series on Amazon before I posted this just in case there is a run on them.

[blue-duncan]

After I finished Law School at Baylor and moved back to Connecticut I started a garden and fooling around with some of the stuff in the first Foxfire book when it first came out. My sons were in boy scouts and understood a lot of what was there but my wife who was raised in Plainview, Texas wanted none of it. She had had enough of dirt storms, cotton and alfalfa farms and anything that smacked of country or blue grass music. She wanted city life!