Carla Emery's Encyclopedia of Country Living
Backwoods Home Magazine Anthologies
Old canning/preserving guides
Old army field manuals
Add yours...
Must Have Books/Reference Material
Carla Emery's Encyclopedia of Country Living
Backwoods Home Magazine Anthologies
Old canning/preserving guides
Old army field manuals
Add yours...
Why can't everybody else leave everybody else alone?
Emergency War Surgery
Where There Is No Doctor: A Village Health Care Handbook
Any of the Foxfire series of books
Physician's Desk Reference (the paperback version, obviously)
The Merck Manual (same thing, except I've got this one on a pocket PC)
US Army Survival Manual FM 21-76
The Rifle Rules
Originally Posted by Uncle Emanuel Watkins
Off the top of my head...
For health and medicine:
Prescription For Nutritional Healing
A Field Guide to Western Medicinal Plants and Herbs
A Field Guide to Medicinal Plants and Herbs: Of Eastern and Central North ...
These books, depending on where you live, combined with a basic herbalism manual (such as The Herbal Handbook: A User's Guide to Medical Herbalism or Rosemary Gladstar's Family Herbal: A Guide to Living Life with Energy, Health, and Vitality) will give you a good starting point to understand herb actions and applications. I include the field guides because I think it's very important to know what is growing where you live. Many common weeds are powerful medicines. Take for instance broadleaf plantain. If you are stung by a bee or wasp pick a leaf, chew it up and put it on the sting. It's miraculous how it makes the pain go away.
Gardening:
Carrots Love Tomatoes
The Ruth Stout No Work Garden Book
Excellent books for beginners and old hands.
I second Carla Emery's Country Living Encyclopedia. FANTASTIC book.
Only you can ignite freedom fires!-- phill4paul
I don't live to fight. I fight to live.
http://www.ronpaulvermont.com/
www.facebook.com/vermontfoodsovereignty
www.vermontfoodsovereignty.net
For you Pennsylvania people this book is pretty helpful.
Edible Wild Plants of Pennsylvania and Neighboring States
You already mentioned Ruth Stout's "No Work Gardening" book, add the next book and add lasagna gardening and you are good to go.
"Square Foot Gardening"--Mel Bartholomew--good ideas for packing the plants in a small place, fewer weeds also
The American Horticultural Society "Plant Propagation." If you have ever wanted to save seeds or get another plant from your original, this is the book. Say you have a fig tree that is awesome, this book will tell you how to propagate a new plant. Layering, seed saving, how to sprout seeds the whole nine yards...
Two Herb books--Earl Mindell's "Herb Bible" and "Growing and Using Herbs Successfully" by Betty E.M. Jacobs Mindell's book tells you how to use the herbs and Jacobs' book tells you how to grow them.
"The Big Book of Self-Reliant Living" edited and compiled by Walter Szykitka
This book is incredible, picked it up at books a million for $20 and it would have been cheap at twice the price. Headers in the Contents (each section has hundreds of entries) --First Aid--I've seen field manuals before, having been a medic in the army, but this one is the best, Survival-- survival on land, weapons, making fire,survival in the city, disasters on water, etc, Health How to keep yourself healthy with what you have in your bug out bag and what you can find--descriptions of deseases and what you can do about them. (from lupus to cataracts) Food and Nutrition nutritive value of foods, storage life, making jams and jellies, keeping food safe, etc Farm and Home radon, organing food and farming, beekeeping, raising livestock, trout farming, lighting-heating-cooling home and farm, solar systems, etc Tools how to use and care for tools, forging and welding, some older tools are shown in detail, a handy person could make a tool from the pictures in this section. Construction How to build almost anything, surveying, field structures, logging, adobe, wells and septic tanks and rope.
I like this book a lot, it has a lot of the information I find online, what I've ended up doing is printing out stuff and referencing it to this book, by either sticking the printout in the book, or putting it in a separate folder and referring to pages in the book at the top of the page. It's kind of like a Fire Fox book, but they don't really show you how to make tools from scratch. I do have one FireFox book, about smithing and other assorted good stuff.
Very nice--thank you!
"Masterful and arrogant wealth, created largely by Government protection of its profits, not content with its domination and influence within a single party, had sought to corrupt them both, and to that end had insinuated itself into the primaries, in order that no candidates might be nominated whose views were not in accord with theirs." (‘Colonel’ Edward Mandell House in 'Philip Dru: Administrator', circa 1912)
The Self-sufficient Life and How to Live It
I keep this on my night stand. I've probably read the thing cover to cover 3 times now.
All of the PDFs on this page.
Well worth printing out and putting in the scrapbook.
http://www.savingourseed.org/index.html
Pandora's box is not only open but its sides have been split with a razor and it now resides in a dumpster.
communal living
http://www.thefarm.org/lifestyle/cmnl.html
- The Freedom Manifesto: Frugal Living and avoiding extravagance / simplified lifestyle.
- When Technology Fails: A Manual for Self-Reliance and Planetary Survival - I am buying this book, I haven't read it yet though.
"Do not, however mistake me. It is not to my good friend's heresy that I impute his honesty. On the contrary, 'tis his honesty that has brought upon him the character of heretic." - Ben Franklin: On Religion
"Enlighten the people generally, and tyranny and oppressions of vanish like evil spirits at the dawn of day." - Thomas Jefferson
The awful truth is that, what people Do Not know will hurt them.
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