Viggies Veggies

Reference Books

I’ve always adored books and have a good collection.  So when I started working on new skills, the first thing I thought of was getting some good reference books.  But a lot of them were borrowed and returned leaving my reference shelf bare.  So I’ve slowly been adding to my collection and trying to fill in gaps.  Here is what I have now.

Do you keep a reference collection?  I’d love to hear what you have or hear any feedback if you think I’m missing anything.

UPDATED 6/20/10 Now that I’m buying dry goods in bulk and have all those home dehydrated and canned goods in my pantry, I’ve added a bunch of pantry cooking books to the collection.
UPDATED 4/12/10 Thinking of the upcoming garden and added a couple books on cooking vegetables.

• Adventures in Sourdough Cooking & Baking
• The Amazing Wheat Book – Info on: gluten (wheat meat), grains, breads, cookies, seasonings, sauces, breakfast cereals, vegetarian dishes, and more! Details … and hundreds of healthy nutritious recipes.
• Back to Basics: A Complete Guide to Traditional Skills, Third Edition
• The Backyard Homestead: Produce all the food you need on just a quarter acre!
• The Candlemaker’s Companion: A Complete Guide to Rolling, Pouring, Dipping, and Decorating Your Own Candles
• Chickens: A Beginner’s Handbook (from backwoods home)
• The Complete Book of Small-Batch Preserving: Over 300 Recipes to Use Year-Round
• Cookin’ with Home Storage
• Country Beans – 2nd Edition
• Dinner Is In The Jar: Quick and Easy Dinner Mixes in Mason Jars or Mylar Bags (bw)
• Edible Wild Plants: A North American Field Guide to Over 200 Natural Foods
• The Encyclopedia of Country Living
• Four-Season Harvest: Organic Vegetables from Your Home Garden All Year Long
• Home Cheese Making: Recipes for 75 Delicious Cheeses
• The Joy of Pickling, Revised Edition: 250 Flavor-Packed Flavor-Packed Recipes for Vegetables and More from Garden or Market
• Natural Meals In Minutes – High-Fiber, Low-Fat Meatless Storage Meals-in 30 Minutes or Less!
• The New Organic Grower: A Master’s Manual of Tools and Techniques for the Home and Market Gardener (A gardener’s supply book)
• Ortho’s All About Herbs (Ortho’s All About Gardening)
• Respect the Spindle: Spin Infinite Yarns with One Amazing Tool
• Seed to Seed: Seed Saving and Growing Techniques for Vegetable Gardeners
• Soapmaker’s Companion: A Comprehensive Guide with Recipes, Techniques & Know-How (Natural Body Series – The Natural Way to Enhance Your Life)
• Vegetable Love
• Where There Is No Doctor: A Village Health Care Handbook
• The Winter Harvest Handbook: Year Round Vegetable Production Using Deep Organic Techniques and Unheated Greenhouses

Homesteading Forum

One of my friends started a homesteading forum a little while back, Homestead Hearth.  This is the same friend who made the crockpot soap video and has inspired me so much on my journey.  She’s contributed a lot of great information to the site and invited a bunch of other really knowledgeable people.  Now that it’s well off the ground I wanted to invite anyone who was interested to join us there.  It’s all about homesteading; urban homesteading; gardening; cooking and baking; raising animals; frugality; off grid living; fishing; camping; foraging; hunting; working with wood or leather;  or just making some friends and finding out what more you can do to be a little more self sufficient than you currently are.

Continuous improvement

I had yesterday off and spent some time working around the house.  This morning I find myself looking back and wishing I’d accomplished more over the long weekend.  Sure, I did the minimum…finishing my chores and a making a few meals with enough leftovers for my lunches during the week.  But there was so much more I wanted to do.  Could have done.  Had energy to do but didn’t.

A big part of that is the amount of time I spend on the computer.  As a professional computer nerd, the internet and computers in general are a built-in weakness of mine.  Some of it is research and updates but most is just time wasted.

This point of this post wasn’t to whine about my failings, but to identify a place I could improve.   There’s always something for everyone to  work on and this is the time of year most of us are thinking about them.  I’ll need all that spare time if I want to accomplish all of my goals in the upcoming year.  So although I’ll keep the blog and myfolia updated, you’ll *hopefully* be seeing less of me around the rest of the internet as I work on this area of improvement.

One thing that will help me with this is the fact that my sound stopped working after moving the furniture yesterday to vacuum.  After poking at it and not seeing anything obvious wrong, I stepped back and I decided not to try to fix it. Although I stopped watching tv some time ago (and don’t get any reception..yay!) one of the time waste-y things I did was watch a couple shows on hulu.  Now I can’t

Contributor

I received an exciting invitation to be a contributor at Simple, Green, Frugal Co-op. My first post was today and I thought you might want to check it out.  It’s a very cool group blog about everything a homesteader needs to know: simple living, self reliance, organic gardening, sustainability, cooking, menu planning, baking, preserving and canning, stockpiling and food storage, reusing repairing and recycling, green cleaning, sewing, mending, knitting, community building, budgeting, living well on less, and livestock.