@kiaraantonoviche is back with a new homesteading challenge! While this is a contest with a prize, I feel it's a challenge even more and a great prompt to write. I'd encourage any gardener, homesteader or even future gardener or homesteader to give it a go. This time she is asking what your favourite or most informative source of knowledge has been in your journey.
There are lots of things from all sorts of places that have helped me learn to garden. Time spent with my parents as a child at their allotment, although I was usually more interested in playing with the fire to burn off the perennial weeds! A tip from my grandfather to throw the discarded leaves straight on the ground around the plants. At the time I thought he did it to get rid of the waste without binning it, but now I know that it was to put the nutrients back without having to compost, as he didn't have the strength to haul compost any more.
Then there have been multiple sources of information found online. The internet's a fantastic go-to source for if I have a specific question. So as you can see, putting my finger on one favourite source has been rather difficult. I have, however, managed to boil it down to two books I was given.
I would probably never have bought these books myself so they have truly been great gifts.
One is the Complete Book of Self Sufficiency by John Seymour. While this isn't my favourite book I can't escape the fact that it was the book that taught me exactly how soil fertility works and was pivotal in making me realise why I was struggling so much in our dry South Australian climate, when things came so easily in England. Yes, it was all about water, but, at the same time, not just about water!
The second book has to be my favourite. It's The Small-Scale Poultry Flock by Harvey Ussery. This is the book that helped me find the best ways to use our chickens to the best advantage in the garden and start to overcome that fertility problem. They are doing it faster than I ever could have alone. When it comes to informational books I tend to skip a lot of them because they will have large areas which aren't relevant to me, but I read this book from cover to cover.
Initially, as much as I loved devouring the content on those pages, I was struggling to see how his methods could work for me. He lives on a much larger plot of land and has more issues with over fertility than under fertility these days; but he promised to have ideas to cover all circumstances and he didn't disappoint! Because of our land size, some of his ideas haven't worked out for us, but others have and others are still being worked on.
So if you're ever planning on having poultry as well as growing your own food I highly recommend reading this. I loved it so much that I bought my friend a copy and I'm not big on buying books when you can borrow them from the library. To me this is worth the money spent and the space taken up!
