Abigail R. Gehring

A lavishly illustrated revision of a top-selling primer invites readers to develop healthier, more environmentally friendly, and self-sufficient living skills that are less reliant on technology, in a resource that shares step-by-step instructions for such capabilities as raising chickens, making cheese, and building a log cabin.

A Complete Guide to Traditional Skills

Back to Basics

Anyone who wants to learn basic living skills--the kind that were common to earlier generations--need look no further than this full-color, eminently practical guide. Created to both inspire and instruct, it returns readers to an era before power saws and fast food restaurants so they can rediscover the pleasures and challenges of a more self-sufficient, economical, and healthy lifestyle. Packed with hundreds of projects, step-by-step sequences, charts, tables, diagrams, and illustrations, it explains how to dye your own wool with plant pigments, graft trees for propagation, raise chickens, create a hutch table with hand tools, and make treats such as blueberry peach jam and cheddar cheese. The truly ambitious will learn how to build a log cabin or an adobe brick homestead.

a complete guide to baking, carpentry, crafts, organic gardening, preserving your harvest, raising animals, and more!

Self-sufficiency

A Complete Guide to Baking, Carpentry, Crafts, Organic Gardening, Preserving Your Harvest, Raising Animals, and More! The inspiring guide to back to basics living, now fully updated! Now, more than ever, people across the country are turning toward simpler, greener, and quieter ways of living—whether they’re urbanites or country folk. Following in the footsteps of Back to Basics and Homesteading, this large, fully-illustrated book provides the entire family with the information they need to make the shift toward self-sufficient living. Self-Sufficiency provides tips, advice, and detailed instructions on how to improve everyday life from an environmentally and organic perspective while keeping the focus on the family. Readers will learn how to plant a family garden and harvest the produce; can fruits and vegetables; bake bread and cookies; design interactive and engaging “green” projects; harness natural wind and solar energy to cook food and warm their homes; boil sap to make maple syrup; and build treehouses, furniture, and more. Also included are natural crafts readers can do with their kids, such as scrapbooking, making potato prints, dipping candles, and constructing seasonal decorations. Whether the goal is to live entirely off the grid or just to shrink their carbon footprints, families will find this book a thorough resource and a great inspiration.

A Complete Guide to Baking, Carpentry, Crafts, Organic Gardening, Preserving Your Harvest, Raising Animals, and More!

Self-Sufficiency

From the author of Back to Basics, this updated guide to green living in the city, country, or suburbs is “a vast wealth of resources for the eco-minded” (Booklist). Who doesn’t want to shrink their carbon footprint, save money, and eat homegrown food whenever possible? Even if you’re very much on the grid, you’ll find lots of useful information in this fully illustrated guide on the basics of living the good, clean life. City, suburb, or wilderness-dweller, there’s plenty you can do to improve your life from a green perspective. Got sunlight? Start container gardening—and make sauce with your own homegrown fresh tomatoes Reduce electricity use by eating dinner by candlelight (using homemade candles, of course) Learn to use rainwater to augment water supplies Make your own soap and hand lotion Consider keeping chickens for the eggs From what to eat to supporting sustainable restaurants to avoiding dry cleaning, this book offers information on anything a homesteader needs—and more.

A Backyard Guide to Growing Your Own Food, Canning, Keeping Chickens, Generating Your Own Energy, Crafting, Herbal Medicine, and More

Homesteading

Anyone who wants to learn basic living skills—the kind employed by our forefathers—and adapt them for a better life in the twenty-first century need look no further than this eminently useful, full-color guide. With hundreds of projects, step-by-step sequences, photographs, charts, and illustrations, The Back to Basics Handbook will help you dye your own wool with plant pigments, graft trees, raise chickens, craft a hutch table with hand tools, and make treats such as blueberry peach jam and cheddar cheese. The truly ambitious will find instructions on how to build a log cabin or an adobe brick homestead. More than just practical advice, this is also a book for dreamers— even if you live in a city apartment you will find your imagination sparked, and there’s no reason why you can’t, for example, make a loom and weave a rag rug. Complete with tips for old-fashioned fun (square dancing calls, homemade toys, and kayaking tips), this is the ultimate concise guide to voluntary simplicity.

A Guide to Buying and Working Land, Raising Livestock, Enjoying Your Harvest, Household Skills and Crafts, and More

The Back to Basics Handbook

Here is a book for every curious, courageous, or desperate person who's willing to set convention aside to earn a living. From fashioning balloon animals to promoting liquor brands to picking berries in Australia, this easy-to-read, entertaining book takes a candid look at over a hundred jobs that don't require you to sit in an office eight hours a day, five days a week. For each job listed, there is a summary of what the position entails; potential pay and hours; start-up costs; qualifications necessary; and more. Interspersed throughout are insiders' accounts of odd job experiences sure to give you an honest and amusing picture of what you might encounter. Yes, this is fun reading, but it is more—a chance to change your life!

101 Ways to Make an Extra Buck

Odd Jobs

Anyone who wants to learn basic living skills--and enjoy a healthier, greener, and more self-sufficient lifestyle--need look no further than this eminently useful guide that features hundreds of projects and old-fashioned fun. Full-color and b&w photographs throughout.

Explains how to grow an organic garden, preserve the food one grows, build alternate-energy devices by hand, identify edible wild foods, conserve water, handcraft household items and much more, in a book with 500 full-color illustrations. Original.

A Back to Basics Guide to Growing Your Own Food, Canning, Keeping Chickens, Generating Your Own Energy, Crafting, Herbal Medicine, and More

The Homesteading Handbook

Whether you’re a suburbanite looking to live more simply or a die-hard homesteader interested in taking your garden to the next level, this guide is packed with step-by-step instructions, useful tips, vintage photographs and illustrations, and time-honored wisdom—creating one of the most comprehensive books on country skills available. This book is compiled of tested and practical experience passed down from generations of farmers and homesteaders. Here readers can learn about: Creating a vegetable garden Canning and preserving Keeping poultry Soap making Natural medicine Bridge building Farm mechanics Crop rotation Cattle and dairying The basics of beekeeping Foraging for wild food Fertilizing, soils, drainage, and irrigation Building a barn And much, much more! Success comes to the person who works the most efficiently—not simply the person who works the hardest. Learn invaluable advice and tips for how to create a sustainable lifestyle and live off the land.

The Ultimate Guide to Old-Fashioned Country Skills

A Mixologist’s Guide to Amazing Tea-Infused Cocktails Seventy-five unique cocktail recipes featuring the hottest trend in mixology—tea! In classy bars and cocktail lounges across America, tea is making a big splash. Absolut has launched a line of tea-infused vodka, companies such as Owl’s Brew are springing up with teas crafted specifically as cocktail mixers, and foodie magazines such as Saveur and Food & Wine are featuring hot chai toddies and gin-spiked iced teas. Here organic tea company Teatulia partners with Gehring to provide a stunning collection of hot and cold tea cocktail recipes sure to impress any mixologist or tea lover. Learn how to balance the unique flavors of herbal and black teas with just the right spirits to create drinks such as: Rooibos Berry Daiquiri Spiked lemonade with thyme Dark and stormy with ginger tea Lemongrass mojito Chai white Russian Peppermint cosmo Jasmine green tea julep Yerba mate smoky martini Riesling jasmine hot toddy And many more! Teatulia brings to the book the same passion they bring to their teas, which are grown in a single USDA-certified organic garden in northern Bangladesh and sold across the United States and Canada. With beautiful photographs and easy-to-follow instructions, this is the perfect gift for the bartender, budding mixologist, or tea enthusiast in your life. Skyhorse Publishing, along with our Good Books and Arcade imprints, is proud to publish a broad range of cookbooks, including books on juicing, grilling, baking, frying, home brewing and winemaking, slow cookers, and cast iron cooking. We’ve been successful with books on gluten-free cooking, vegetarian and vegan cooking, paleo, raw foods, and more. Our list includes French cooking, Swedish cooking, Austrian and German cooking, Cajun cooking, as well as books on jerky, canning and preserving, peanut butter, meatballs, oil and vinegar, bone broth, and more. While not every title we publish becomes a New York Times bestseller or a national bestseller, we are committed to books on subjects that are sometimes overlooked and to authors whose work might not otherwise find a home.

Abigail R. Gehring

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