My Favorite Homesteading and Gardening Books

Among rows of seedlings and the hum of bees, a few well-loved books sit on the windowsill, always within reach. On the homestead, where time is measured in seasons and growth rings, books become more than sources of knowledge—they’re trusted companions. These are the volumes that whisper wisdom—books flecked with soil, their pages smudged with fingerprints and persistence. From mastering compost alchemy to nurturing tomatoes that taste like summer itself, these books offer more than how-to advice; they cultivate mindset, ignite creativity, and nurture resilience. Whether sowing a new garden or building a life off the land, there’s a kind of grounding magic in turning real pages filled with hard-won insight.

In an age of endless tabs and digital overwhelm, there’s just something special about holding a book in my hands versus reading on the computer or phone. The texture, the smell, the sound of pages turning—it creates a tactile intimacy that deepens focus. A real book can be taken to the greenhouse, tucked into a canvas apron, or left open on a rain-speckled table. It becomes part of the environment it teaches about. Unlike screens, these books don’t ping or scroll; they wait quietly, ready to be read by lamplight after the day’s work is done.

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Now let’s get your hands dirty and mind inspired with my favorite homesteading and gardening books.

First, we’ll start with my all-time favorite homesteader that I follow everywhere on social media, listen to her podcast weekly, and own all of her books. Melissa K. Norris, a fifth-generation homesteader, author, and host of the Pioneering Today podcast. She focuses on modern homesteading, simple living, and traditional skills, with the goal of helping people create self-sufficient homes.

Her first two books I purchased were The Made-from-Scratch Life and Hand Made. Both these books live on my kitchen counter and are used regularly for looking up her recipes. Her newest book, Home and Hand Made: A Homesteader’s Recipes to Help You Cook, Clean, and Care for Your Family, is the newly updated edition of both The Made-from-Scratch Life and Hand Made. “With even more time-tested wisdom and practical skills for creating a home filled with homemade meals, natural remedies, and simple living traditions. Including:

20 Brand-New Recipes – 100+ recipes from wholesome meals to old-fashioned baked goods, discover fresh recipes to nourish your family.
Expanded Herbal & Beauty Section– More step-by-step guides on crafting your own natural remedies, beauty products, and home essentials.
Updated Food Preservation & Fermentation Methods – New techniques and troubleshooting tips to make fermenting, canning, and storing food easier than ever.
More Money-Saving & Frugal Living Strategies – Learn how to stretch your grocery budget, repurpose ingredients, and make the most of what you have.
Refined & Enhanced Content – Based on reader feedback, this edition includes clearer instructions, additional insights, and even more inspiration for embracing a simple, homemade life.” (Melissa K Norris)

The Garden

Also from Melissa K Norris, we have The Family Garden Plan: Grow a Year’s Worth of Sustainable and Healthy Food and The Family Garden Planner: Organize Your Food-Growing Year •Helpful Worksheets •Weekly Tasks •Expert Advice Sharing the same practices and techniques from her homestead, Melissa shows you how easy it can be to raise a year’s worth of produce at home. Simple-to-follow charts, worksheets, and photographs are provided throughout to help you through every phase of the gardening process. Her Garden Plan Book covers everything from choosing where to place your garden beds, sowing seeds, fertilizing, and all the way to harvesting. Then her garden planner is a notebook for you to plan out your year-to-year of gardening, from calculating how much you need to grow to your daily and weekly tasks to keep your garden healthy and producing a bountiful harvest to feed your family for the year.

There are many methods of gardening, including Conventional Gardening, Permaculture, Container Gardening, Hügelkultur, Back to Eden, Hydroponics, Aquaponics, and Lasagna Gardening. I prefer to use a mix of different methods of gardening that suits my overall organic gardening approach. Lasagna Gardening is one I use when preparing a new garden space, whether in-ground gardening or starting a new raised bed. Lasagna Gardening: A New Layering System for Bountiful Gardens: No Digging, No Tilling, No Weeding, No Kidding! By Patricia Lanza, has been my go-to book for all things Lasagna gardening for my new beds.

When focusing on an organic approach in the garden, keeping up with soil amendments, and pest control, The Family Garden Plan, by Melissa K Norris has a lot of great information. When focusing on plant by plant, I go to The Backyard Homestead Guide to Growing Organic Food: A Crop-by-Crop Reference for 62 Vegetables, Fruits, Nuts, and Herbs by Tanya Denckla Cobb, the latest addition to the bestselling Backyard Homestead series, I’ll mention more soon.

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Food Preservation

The last book from Melissa is Everything Worth Preserving: The Complete Guide for Food Preservation at Home. This book is amazing.  She covers 9 different home food preservation methods to safely store your harvest. Cold storage (aka your freezer), water bath/steam canning, pressure canning, dehydrating, fermenting, freeze-drying, root cellar, infusion, and salting and curing meat. Learn how to preserve fruits, vegetables, and meats for year-round eating with over 80 delicious recipes listed from A to Z.

Another on food preservation, The Farm Girl’s Guide to Preserving the Harvest: How to Can, Freeze, Dehydrate, and Ferment Your Garden’s Goodness (The Homesteader’s Guides), by Ann Accetta-Scott. This book covers all the basics on canning, dehydrating, freezing, fermenting, curing, and smoking, including how to select and use the right tools for each method, along with more than 30 delicious and healthy recipes. Ann also blogs at www.afarmgirlinthemaking.com and shares her homesteading journey on Facebook, Instagram, and YouTube.

The Homestead

Homesteading is an extensive range of skills, from canning heirloom tomatoes to building rain catchment systems. The Backyard Homestead: Produce all the food you need on just a quarter acre, by Carleen Madigan, covers all that and more. This book demonstrates how this can be done on half an acre or less! And if animal husbandry for food production is part of your homestead, then also check out The Backyard Homestead Guide to Raising Farm Animals