Building Soils for Better Crops, 4th Edition
by Fred Magdoff and Harold van Es · SARE Outreach (USDA NIFA)
A 394-page ecological soil management text, free as a PDF from USDA SARE. Covers organic matter dynamics, soil biology, physical structure, compost, cover crops, rotations, tillage and nutrient management, with farm case studies throughout.
More resources on Vegetable Gardening & Homesteading
Growers Daily
Podcast formerly called The No-Till Market Garden Podcast, hosted by Kentucky organic grower Jesse Frost, on running small no-till vegetable farms. Episodes cover soil biology, cover crops, pest management, pricing and direct sales, so listeners can plan a productive, financially viable market garden.
The joe gardener Show
Gardening podcast hosted by television gardener Joe Lamp'l, focused on organic methods for home food growing. Episodes cover soil building, composting, seed starting, pest management and plant selection, so listeners can plan and maintain a productive backyard garden.
Charles Dowding (No Dig Gardening)
Filmed demonstrations of no-dig vegetable growing from a British market garden: bed making, compost use, sowing and transplant timing, weeding, succession cropping, and side-by-side dig versus no-dig trial beds with recorded yields.
Storey's Guide to Raising Chickens, 4th Edition
Reference for a backyard flock: breed selection, coop and run design, feed and water, brooding chicks, flock behaviour, egg handling, health problems and their treatment, and managing birds kept for meat rather than eggs.
The Encyclopedia of Country Living, 50th Anniversary Edition
A 928-page homestead reference covering over a thousand topics: growing and storing grains and vegetables, dairying, butchering, poultry and livestock, drying and canning, soap, beekeeping and rural land decisions, written from decades of practice. Breadth resource that answers the questions no single-crop guide covers, from a practitioner rather than a compiler.
Four-Season Harvest, 2nd Edition
Home-scale season extension: cold frames, low tunnels and unheated greenhouses, winter-hardy crop selection, timing of autumn sowings, and root cellaring, so a temperate garden yields vegetables through winter without heat.