77 books like The Self-Sufficient Life and How to Live It

One November evening in 1831, Rebecca and John Burlend, three children in tow, stepped off a riverboat. Emigrants from England, they had reached Phillip’s Ferry, Illinois, the end of a dangerous journey. But instead of the village they expected, they found only forest. They burst into tears.  

The couple eventually buys land and clears it by “girdling”—stripping bark so trees die and drop their leaves, letting in enough sun for growing crops. Those include “Indian” corn whose stalks support beans. Indoors, a rag strip in a dish of lard burns with enough light to sew by. But farm life is perilous: While harvesting, a pregnant Rebecca rests by a sheaf, from which a startled rattlesnake crawls out. She kills it with her rake. 

I’ve read this book several times. It’s a saga worth relishing. 

I’m a sucker for any book about vanishing skills. Shopwork is loaded with such lore. For example, the section on harness repair reminds us “thread should be torn instead of cut, in order to give a long tapered end.” Why? The better to thread a needle. The “Ropework” chapter has detailed options for making splices and loop ends—and enough knots to challenge any sailor. How many books offer on steps on knife whetting or how to set the teeth of a crosscut saw?

This book can brighten a winter’s evening with things you can be glad have vanished, like spooning toxic white lead to mix paint or soldering with a gasoline-fueled blowtorch. Overall, it equips you to follow the maxim, “Use it up, wear it out, make it do, or do without.”

Setting up and maintaining a backyard homestead is honest, fulfilling work. For those who prefer productive labor as exercise (rather than heading to a gym), this book is an inspiring look backward at satisfying, useful skills. Take Seymour’s wattle hurdle. Used as a herding panel, the hurdle is woven entirely from hazel sticks. Any supple wood will do. The result is a portable fence panel that cost nothing but a bit of labor.

Many of the projects featured are out of reach (like millstone dressing or coopering or charcoal burning) but all are fascinating and most still relevant today. For example, Seymour demonstrates that engineering a wooden gate that wouldn’t sag was worked out a long time ago—in several variations. Like all of Seymour’s books, this one is exquisitely illustrated.

Anyone intrigued by the ingenuity involved in farming will be fascinated by this time in American history when farming moved from mere subsistence to offering a marketable surplus. Initially, a farmer's concern was modest: first to “raise sufficient corn for the family and their livestock; next, to be assured of an abundant supply of pork.” But as methods improved, there was soon plenty to take to market. A flatboat traveling from Indiana to New Orleans in 1826 could boast 18 barrels of whiskey, 70 barrels of oats, 8,000 pounds of pork, and 300 barrels of corn. 

Unfortunately, demand could tempt producers to abuse: Milk delivered to New York might be shamefully watered down and colored with chalk. World demand for sugar, tobacco, and cotton production fueled slavery, whose brutal conditions this book does not ignore.

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.

Most of us who took action on our ache to “get back to the land” gave ourselves over to a rustic bucolia we’d created in our minds. And, yes, as it turned out, it was all of that, the harmony of seasons, the deep peace, the night sky, the quail, and deer. It was other things, too, things we hadn’t reckoned on—isolation, endless labor, and the hourly rate of the well man. Readable and entertaining, Get Your Pitchfork On! eases the urban to rural transition with hard-won practical advice. It will infuse your dream, whatever its scale, with a healthy dose of preparedness to assure its best chance of success. 

This is an introduction to natural farming. This Japanese farmer was a spearhead for how to work with natural pathways and create a system that flows with the land. He was an inspiration for the Permaculture design for Bill Mollinson. He adapted a design that worked with animals, insects, native plants, and water to form a biological series of self-reliance.

This book is inspirational and lays the groundwork for growing with nature. This book opened me up to using biomimicry in my design.

Gabe Brown didn’t set out to change the world when he first started working alongside his father-in-law on the family farm in North Dakota. But a series of weather-related crop disasters put Brown in desperate financial straits. He decided to quit the industrial model of food production and began experimenting with regenerative agriculture instead. He stopped using herbicides, insecticides, and synthetic fertilizers. He no-tilled diverse crops into his fields and changed his grazing practices. By doing so, Brown transformed a degraded farm ecosystem into one full of life. Brown has grown several inches of new topsoil in only twenty years and turned the farm into a diverse, profitable enterprise. This book is a great introduction for all readers.

Jackson has devoted his career to reforming agriculture by applying ecological principles garnered from prairie lands of the Bread Basket of North America. Based in Kansas, Jackson has worked toward generating perennial crops that don’t need to be seeded annually, and could be grown in mixtures (a grain, an oil seed, and a legume), to support healthy soils that will sustain food production for many generations. This book lays out the arguments for his approach and challenges the basis of our agricultural systems. 

In this book, Australian farmer Charles Massey takes a ‘big picture’ view of regenerative agriculture. It’s full of personal stories but it also goes deep into the history of industrial agriculture, the damage it continues to do, and how we can heal the planet. Massey lays out an inspiring vision for a new agriculture and the vital connections between our soil and our health. It’s a story of how a grassroots revolution can help turn climate change around and build healthy communities, pivoting on our relationship with growing and consuming food.