--- title: Vegetable Gardening & Homesteading description: Growing food and keeping a homestead builds self-reliance. You will learn vegetable gardening, soil and compost, season extension, preserving, small livestock and planning a productive plot. category: trades-crafts subcategory: specialty-crafts difficulty: beginner, intermediate, advanced url: /subject/vegetable-gardening-and-homesteading --- # Vegetable Gardening & Homesteading Growing food and keeping a homestead builds self-reliance. You will learn vegetable gardening, soil and compost, season extension, preserving, small livestock and planning a productive plot. ## Available Resources 5 Books • 2 Websites ## Podcasts ### 1. The joe gardener Show **Author:** Joe Lamp'l 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. **Difficulty:** Beginner | **Language:** en-us | **Price:** Free **Link:** https://joegardener.com **Tags:** organic-gardening, vegetable-gardening, soil-health, composting, home-garden ### 2. Growers Daily **Author:** Jesse Frost 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. **Difficulty:** Intermediate | **Language:** en | **Price:** Free **Link:** https://notillmarketgardenpodcast.libsyn.com/website **Tags:** market-gardening, no-till, soil-health, cover-crops, small-farm-business ## Youtubes ### 1. Charles Dowding (No Dig Gardening) **Author:** Charles Dowding 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. **Difficulty:** Beginner | **Language:** English | **Price:** Free **Link:** https://www.youtube.com/@CharlesDowding1nodig **Tags:** no-dig-gardening, vegetable-growing, composting, succession-planting, market-gardening ## Books ### 1. Storey's Guide to Raising Chickens, 4th Edition **Author:** Gail Damerow 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. **Difficulty:** Beginner | **Language:** English | **Price:** Paid **Link:** https://www.amazon.com/dp/1612129307?tag=edmonddante07-20 **Tags:** backyard-chickens, poultry-keeping, chicken-coops, flock-health, egg-production, homesteading ### 2. The Encyclopedia of Country Living, 50th Anniversary Edition **Author:** Carla Emery 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. **Difficulty:** Beginner | **Language:** English | **Price:** Paid **Link:** https://www.amazon.com/dp/1632172895?tag=edmonddante07-20 **Tags:** homesteading, self-sufficiency, food-preservation, livestock-keeping, vegetable-growing, rural-skills ### 3. Four-Season Harvest, 2nd Edition **Author:** Eliot Coleman 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. **Difficulty:** Intermediate | **Language:** English | **Price:** Paid **Link:** https://www.amazon.com/dp/1890132276?tag=edmonddante07-20 **Tags:** season-extension, winter-gardening, cold-frames, unheated-greenhouses, root-cellaring, vegetable-growing ### 4. The New Organic Grower, 3rd Edition **Author:** Eliot Coleman Coleman's manual for productive vegetable growing on 2.5 acres or less: bed layout, crop rotation, soil blocks, hand tools, succession planting, greenhouse work and per-crop notes, based on decades of trials at his Maine farm. **Difficulty:** Intermediate | **Language:** English | **Price:** Paid **Link:** https://www.amazon.com/dp/1603588175?tag=edmonddante07-20 **Tags:** market-gardening, small-scale-farming, organic-vegetable-production, crop-rotation, season-extension ### 5. Building Soils for Better Crops, 4th Edition **Author:** Fred Magdoff and Harold van Es 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. **Difficulty:** Intermediate | **Language:** English | **Price:** Free **Link:** https://www.sare.org/resources/building-soils-for-better-crops/ **Tags:** soil-health, soil-organic-matter, cover-crops, composting, nutrient-management ## Websites ### 1. USDA Complete Guide to Home Canning **Author:** USDA / National Center for Home Food Preservation Home canning is the one homestead skill where bad information causes botulism, and the internet is full of untested heirloom recipes. The federal reference for safe home canning, in seven parts: principles, fruits, tomatoes, vegetables, meats and seafood, fermented and pickled vegetables, jams and jellies. Gives lab-tested processing times, pressures, and altitude adjustments for each product. **Difficulty:** Beginner | **Language:** English | **Price:** Free **Link:** https://nchfp.uga.edu/resources/category/usda-guide **Tags:** home-canning, food-preservation, pressure-canning, food-safety, pickling ### 2. Cornell Vegetable Growing Guides **Author:** Cornell Garden-Based Learning Cornell Cooperative Extension's crop-by-crop reference covering roughly sixty vegetables, from artichoke to zucchini. Each guide gives site and soil requirements, spacing, planting dates, variety notes, and diagnosis of the pests and diseases that crop actually gets. **Difficulty:** Beginner | **Language:** English | **Price:** Free **Link:** https://gardening.cals.cornell.edu/garden-guidance/foodgarden/ **Tags:** vegetable-gardening, crop-guides, garden-pest-management, plant-diseases, planting-schedules --- *This content is part of Dantes.io - Your Treasure Map to Knowledge* *Curated by humans at Dantes.io. Personal study use welcome; republishing this curation requires permission (team@dantes.io).* View this page online: https://dantes.io/subject/vegetable-gardening-and-homesteading