Reddit reviews Gardening When It Counts: Growing Food in Hard Times (Mother Earth News Wiser Living Series)

IF you already have a bug-in kit covering serious first aid, not just bandaids and Tums, water filtration, fire and cooking without power, etc......

The first two titles assume that you have at least some yard with reasonable sun access, or the potential for access to a community garden. (Could presently be a community park, a church lot, neighbor's land, whatever.) Books are presently roughly in the order that I'd replace them if my copies were lost. Buy used when you can. Some of these are available used for not much more than standard shipping.

The Self-Sufficient Life and How to Live It

Gardening When It Counts: Growing Food in Hard Times

Where There Is No Doctor

Ball Complete Book of Home Preserving

If you have no comprehensive cookbooks that cover a wide range of garden veggies and game recipes, something like Joy of Cooking is probably in order. The point being that one way or another you may have to get used to enjoying whatever can be had, from an abundance of zuchinnis to rabbit, to acorn meal.

If you are not (yet) handy, find an old copy of something like Reader's Digest How to Fix Everything in a used bookshop for maybe $4.

A regionally appropriate guide to edible and medicinal plants such as A Field Guide to Medicinal Plants and Herbs: Of Eastern and Central North America

Preserving Food without Freezing or Canning: Traditional Techniques Using Salt, Oil, Sugar, Alcohol, Vinegar, Drying, Cold Storage, and Lactic Fermentation

optional, but cheap, Emergency Food Storage & Survival Handbook: Everything You Need to Know to Keep Your Family Safe in a Crisis

For those just getting started, Square Foot Gardening is great, it's a good starting point for getting in the habit of maintaining a garden, for making good use of small spaces, and for learning about gardening.

How to Grow More Vegetables is a fantastic book. It is a great reference book on sustainable gardening, and self-sufficiency gardening. It is used by several programs as a textbook to teach sustinence gardening in third-world countries.

Carrots Love Tomatoes is a great book for learning about companion planting.

I just ordered Gardening When it Counts: Growing Food in Hard Times. I haven't read it yet, so I can't give a review, but it is reviewed very favorably. My understanding is that it presents a more old-fashioned, traditional method of gardening that requires less water, less fertilization, etc.

Good luck, and let us know what you think of any books you try!

I don't have a favorite, I have a long list of favorites. Listed below is a good starter selection. Lucifer's Hammer is the book that probably most directly led to the path I am on today. I have always liked science fiction and read it long before I would have ever called myself a prepper.


Fiction, to make you think:

• Lucifer's Hammer by Jerry Pournelle and Larry Niven
  
• Patriots: A Novel of Survival in the Coming Collapse by James Wesley, Rawles
  
• Lights Out by David Crawford
  
  Self Defense:
  
  
• Boston's Gun Bible by Boston T. Party (Kenneth W. Royce)
  
  Sustainable Living:
  
  
• The Encyclopedia of Country Living by Carla Emery
  
• Gardening When It Counts: Growing Food in Hard Times by Steve Solomon
  
• Ball Blue Book Guide to Preserving by Altrista Consumer Products
  
  Health and First Aid:
  
  
• Where There Is No Doctor by David Werner, Jane Maxwell and Carol Thuman
  
• First Aid -- Responding To Emergencies by the American Red Cross
  
  Free Your Mind:
  
  
• The Most Dangerous Superstition by Larken Rose
  

hey, survival noob - everyone knows that the definitive work on this is in this book: Gardening When it Counts

best of luck.

I like Steve Solomon's Gardening When It Counts: Growing Food in Hard Times, especially the parts about gardening when water is at a premium.