Here are 75 books that The Resilient Farm and Homestead fans have personally recommended if you like
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If I'm honest, I became a gardener because I like getting dirty. Beatrix Potter's The Tale of Tom Kitten is the story of my childhood (and my adulthood too, only now I don't have to pretend I'm going to stay clean). Of course, high-quality soil leads to high-quality produce, and I deeply adore the flavors of strawberries growing in deep, dark soil. Biting into a juicy, homegrown tomato still warm from the summer sun is bliss.
First, let me explain where I'm coming from – my husband and I spent over a decade growing nearly all of our own vegetables and a considerable portion of our other sustenance on our homestead. So even though our current smaller plot only feeds us a side dish or three per day, I tend to think of gardening as something that should be good for our wallets as well as our bellies and the earth. Gardening When It Counts is all that and is 100% based on the author's personal experience growing most of his own food. Highly recommended.
The decline of cheap oil is inspiring increasing numbers of North Americans to achieve some measure of backyard food self-sufficiency. In hard times, the family can be greatly helped by growing a highly productive food garden, requiring little cash outlay or watering. Currently popular intensive vegetable gardening methods are largely inappropriate to this new circumstance. Crowded raised beds require high inputs of water, fertility and organic matter, and demand large amounts of human time and effort. But, except for labor, these inputs depend on the price of oil. Prior to the 1970s, North American home food growing used more land…
The dragons of Yuro have been hunted to extinction.
On a small, isolated island, in a reclusive forest, lives bandit leader Marani and her brother Jacks. With their outlaw band they rob from the rich to feed themselves, raiding carriages and dodging the occasional vindictive…
If I'm honest, I became a gardener because I like getting dirty. Beatrix Potter's The Tale of Tom Kitten is the story of my childhood (and my adulthood too, only now I don't have to pretend I'm going to stay clean). Of course, high-quality soil leads to high-quality produce, and I deeply adore the flavors of strawberries growing in deep, dark soil. Biting into a juicy, homegrown tomato still warm from the summer sun is bliss.
If you only grow from the last frost to the first frost, your gardening season is extremely short. But a few simple season-extension techniques can mean you harvest fresh food nearly every day of the year. I've used Eliot Coleman's crop suggestions and his quick hoops and can say from experience that they make all the difference during the cold season.
"Brimming with ingenuity, hope, and eminently practical advice, The Winter Harvest Handbook is an indispensable contribution."-Michael Pollan
"Useful, practical, sensible, and enlightening information for the home gardener."-Martha Stewart
With The Winter Harvest Handbook, everyone can have access to organic farming pioneer Elliot Coleman's hard-won experience. Gardeners and farmers can use the innovative, highly successful methods Coleman describes in this comprehensive handbook to raise crops throughout the coldest of winters.
Building on the techniques that hundreds of thousands of farmers and gardeners adopted from Coleman's The New Organic Grower and Four-Season Harvest, this book focuses on growing produce of unparalleled freshness…
If I'm honest, I became a gardener because I like getting dirty. Beatrix Potter's The Tale of Tom Kitten is the story of my childhood (and my adulthood too, only now I don't have to pretend I'm going to stay clean). Of course, high-quality soil leads to high-quality produce, and I deeply adore the flavors of strawberries growing in deep, dark soil. Biting into a juicy, homegrown tomato still warm from the summer sun is bliss.
I have a love/hate relationship with permaculture. I adore the concept...and when I put most authors' assertions into practice, I find that I get a much lower yield than doing things the old way. That's why I enjoy books like this one from gardeners who walk the walk, not just talk the talk. Warning: You will be sorely tempted to buy ducks. Resist, resist!
Scientist/gardener Carol Deppe combines her passion for organic gardening with newly emerging scientific information from many fields - resilience science, climatology, climate change, ecology, anthropology, paleontology, sustainable agriculture, nutrition, health, and medicine. In the last half of The Resilient Gardener, Deppe extends and illustrates these principles with detailed information about growing and using five key crops: potatoes, corn, beans, squash, and eggs.
In this book you'll learn how to:
*Garden in an era of unpredictable weather and climate change
*Grow, store, and use more of your own staple crops
*Garden efficiently and comfortably (even if you have a bad back)…
When Annie Thornton, midwife and apprentice witch, falls through time to a 15th-century Yorkshire village with her telepathic cat, Rosamund, she befriends Will and Jack, two soldiers returning from the French Wars. Mistress Meg, Annie’s ancestral aunt living in the 15th century, is…
If I'm honest, I became a gardener because I like getting dirty. Beatrix Potter's The Tale of Tom Kitten is the story of my childhood (and my adulthood too, only now I don't have to pretend I'm going to stay clean). Of course, high-quality soil leads to high-quality produce, and I deeply adore the flavors of strawberries growing in deep, dark soil. Biting into a juicy, homegrown tomato still warm from the summer sun is bliss.
This is a different type of book than the ones listed above but is nonetheless essential for the gardener who wants to enrich rather than deplete their soil. Once you learn about the beneficial fungi, bacteria, and other critters that make up the soil food web, you'll think twice about tearing up their landscape with a rototiller.
Smart gardeners know that soil is anything but an inert substance. Healthy soil is teeming with life not just earthworms and insects, but a staggering multitude of bacteria, fungi, and other microorganisms. When we use chemical fertilizers, we injure the microbial life that sustains healthy plants, and thus become increasingly dependent on an arsenal of artificial, often toxic, substances. But there is an alternative to this vicious cycle. We can garden in a way that strengthens the soil food web the complex world of soil-dwelling organisms whose interactions create a nurturing environment for plants. "Teaming with Microbes" extols the benefits…
I earned my teaching certification as an undergraduate. I went to a program in a very rural place, and I did my student teaching in a very rural school—but all we talked about in my college classes were urban schools, urban kids, and urban teachers. There were certainly some similarities, but I was amazed how research, policy, and practice just seemed to overlook rural education (about one-quarter of all U.S. public schools!). So I went into rural education research and advocacy wanting to do something about that gap: to bring attention to rural education so that we can write policies and practices that sustain, rather than undermine, rural schools and communities.
I began my career in education as a student teacher in rural Vermont. Like many beginners, I started off as a terrible teacher, and I was desperate for resources. Yet I found very little about rural teaching specifically—until I happened upon this book.
It was like Keizer was speaking directly to me. As a teacher in rural Vermont, he writes with humor and grace about the challenges and possibilities of rural teaching.
He is definitely an outsider to the Northeast Kingdom, and, occasionally, his descriptions have an air of condescension—and, today, they certainly read as dated. But this book has a special place in my heart—it got me through my first few years of rural teaching.
Weaving anecdotal narrative with trenchant reflections on his profession, Garret Keizer offers one teacher's answer to the hue and cry over the crisis in education. An English teacher in rural Vermont, he writes of the opposing realities he faces every the promise and energy of the young and the oppressive effect of their economic disadvantages; the beauty of the countryside and its people and the harsh, sometimes ugly edge of life there; the need for discipline and the importance of rebellion. In exploring the demands peculiar to his own community, Keizer movingly depicts the difficulties-some triumphantly overcome, some overwhelming-that form…
When I met my husband, he had two dogs—Gus the collie and Charlie the Yorkie. When the collie crossed the rainbow bridge, we brought another big dog into the household—a golden retriever. Charlie let Sam know that my husband was HIS human, and Sam could have me if he wanted. That began a beautiful twelve-year love affair. I knew I had to write about the relationship between man and dog, and chose the mystery novel as my framework. I spend hours every day researching my books – walking my current goldens, Brody and Griffin; feeding them; grooming them; playing with them; and observing how they interact with the world.
This book was short-listed for the Mary Higgins Clark Award and named the Dogwise Book of the Year. It features ex-soldier Mercy Carr and retired military K-9 Elvis, who were both traumatized when Mercy’s fiancé—also Elvis’s handler—was killed on their last deployment.
Paula Munier is another author with a deep connection to the natural world. She is studying for a naturalist certificate in her home state of Vermont, and the books are full of great details.
It may be the Fourth of July weekend, but for retired soldiers Mercy Carr and Belgian Malinois Elvis, it's just another walk in the remote Lye Brook Wilderness - until the former bomb-sniffing dog alerts to explosives and they find a squalling baby abandoned near a shallow grave filled with what appear to be human bones. U.S. Game Warden Troy Warner and his search and rescue Newfoundland Susie Bear respond to Mercy's 911 call, and the four must work together to track down a missing mother, solve a cold-case murder, and keep the citizens of Vermont safe on potentially the…
Chasing Light is a lyrical meditation on grief, memory, and the fragile beauty of everyday life. At its core, it is a story of resilience, forgiveness, and the transformational power of human connection. It sheds light on the overlooked realities of homelessness and addiction, while emphasizing the importance of compassion…
I’ve heard stories of the 1918 Influenza pandemic, how the soldiers returning from WWI were infected and then spread the disease to every town throughout the United States, and that most who died were very young. The Twenties were exciting times and came immediately after the pandemic. With so much death among young people, those who survived wanted to live life recklessly.
This Picoult novel, written close to the time I began to shape my book, asks whether we can love across time. While the theme is much more grounded in practical and natural circumstances, the fact that the question is teased out in this novel helps shape the same question my character, Adelyn, finds herself embroiled in. Is Innis capable of breaking the barrier using the strength of a first love?
THE INTERNATIONAL BESTSELLER 'Compelling, surprising and entertaining' Heat
Since the death of his fiancee Aimee, Ross Wakeman has been unable to fill the hole she has left in his life. Seeking to end his pain, he becomes a ghost hunter, despite never having seen a ghost.
However, when his job leads him to the town of Comtosook, it becomes apparent that Ross isn't the only one haunted by the past. When he meets the mysterious Lia, who brings him to life for the first time in years, redemption seems around the corner.
I lost my mother unexpectedly when I was a young mother myself. Oh, how I missed the gentle wisdom that had guided me my whole life! As I journeyed through the various stages of life, there was so much I wanted to ask her. She would be in her eighties now, but in my mind, she is and will always be fifty-seven. Gone now, but I still feel the influence of her kindness, wisdom, and compassion in my life and decisions. I’m drawn to stories about families and the far-reaching influence a mother has on her daughters’ lives. Though I mostly write romance, many of my novels contain older women who've had such an influence.
This lovely story is one of loss, tragedy, hope, family, and new beginnings that come in the most unexpected ways.
Seventy-five-year-old Sarah has a good life. She’s been married to Charles, a man she adores, for fifty years. She assumes they will live out the rest of their lives together in the tranquil setting of their Vermont country home. But when Charles unexpectedly passes away, Sarah’s beautiful life is shattered.
With her children grown and raising families of their own, she finds herself alone in her big house, no one to nurture, no place to put her love. Until a collection of displaced characters begin to find shelter in her home. Working through her grief, Sarah discovers interests she never took the time to explore, and in pouring into others, soon finds her own cup overflowing.
This story provides perspective on what things are important, and what are not. So…
Sarah Lucas imagined the rest of her days would be spent living peacefully in her rural Vermont home in the steadfast company of her husband. But now, with Charles's sudden passing, seventy-five-year-old Sarah is left inconsolably alone.
As grief settles in, Sarah's mind lingers on her past: her imperfect but devoted fifty-year marriage to Charles; the years they spent raising their three very different children; and her childhood during the Great Depression, when her parents opened their home to countless relatives and neighbors. So, when a variety of wayward souls come seeking shelter in Sarah's own big, empty home, her…
Dogs make great supporting characters, adding drama or humor or pathos, and revealing so much about the humans in the story. I discovered this in writing my first novel: The narrator’s dog keeps her grounded when things go wrong and makes it possible for her to keep going through difficult times. For the reader, he provides levity and depth without turning it into a book about a dog. I had a great model – I used my own dog Boris, even appropriating his name. I think of the fictional Boris as real-life Boris’s best self.
This is a feel-good book with just enough punch to keep it from being cute.
It comes with a building project, some hurricane-induced drama, a bit of romance, and two dogs.
Cooper and Bubba are the canines who wind themselves around the main characters, as most dogs do in real life. Cooper is everyone’s friend, and he orchestrates introductions.
But he’s also a bolter who gets lost just as flooding begins and evacuation becomes unavoidable.
Catherine Drake’s books are always a respite between heavier reading, and this one is one of the best.
A young, determined woman figures out life and love while staying true to herself in this whip-smart and genuinely witty debut.
Twenty-eight-year-old Hannah Spencer wants nothing more than to change everything about her life. After ten years of living in cities, Nathan Wild has just moved back home to Vermont and doesn't want to change anything about his.
Recently laid off from her depressing job in Boston and ready for a challenge, Hannah heads to Vermont for the summer to take care of her sister's kids and do some serious soul searching. There, against the stunning landscape of the Green…
Portrait of an Artist as a Young Woman
by
Alexis Krasilovsky,
Kate from Jules et Jim meets I Love Dick.
A young woman filmmaker’s journey of self-discovery, set against a backdrop of the sexual liberation movement of the 1970s and 1980s. In Portrait of an Artist as a Young Woman, we follow Ana Fried as she faces the ultimate…
My name is Polly Schattel, and I’m a novelist, screenwriter, and film director. I wrote and directed the films Sinkhole, Alison, and Quiet River,and my written work includesThe Occultists, Shadowdays, and the novella 8:59:29.I grew up loving fantasy—Tolkien, Moorcock, Zelazny—but phased out of it somewhat when I discovered writers like Raymond Carver, EL Doctorow, and Denis Johnson. Their books seemed more adult and more complex, not to mention the prose itself was absolutely transporting. In comparison, the fantasy I’d read often felt quite rushed and thin, with get-it-done prose. I drifted away from genre fiction a bit, but dove back to it with my first novel, the historical dark fantasy The Occultists.
There’s a valid argument to be made that Shadowlandis perhaps more of a horror novel than fantasy, but it’s never really out-and-out scary.
It’s certainly more magical than bloody, concerning two friends in the 1950s who spend a hallucinatory summer at an uncle’s place in the Vermont woods. And man do things get weird.
After a long, lovely prelude at a boarding school, Tom and Del have to navigate their failing friendship and the strange happenings in the woods, but most of all they have to look out for Del’s uncle Cole, an old-school magician who, it turns out, is far from an avuncular old guardian.
Full of fairy tales and fables and wonderful digressions (with Straub, the digressions are often the point), Shadowlandfeels timeless in a way Stephen King never does. It might be the best book I’ve ever read.
A classic tale of supernatural horror from the acclaimed author of Koko, The Talisman and Mr X. Now part of the Voyager Classics collection.
IF YOUR SHADOW DOESN'T MOVE WHEN YOU DO, THEN YOU'RE IN SHADOWLAND
In a private school in New England, a friendship is forged between two boys that will change their lives for ever. As Del Nightingale and Tom Flanagan battle to survive the oppressive regime of bullying and terror overseen by the sadistic headmaster, Del introduces Tom to his world of magic tricks. But when they escape to spend the summer holiday together at Shadowland -…
