Which Homestead Skills Books Earn Shelf Space?

If a neighbor asked me where to start with canning this fall, I’d point them here. It has 150+ recipes and covers both water bath and pressure canning, and that matters because low-acid foods like green beans need the pressure canner. With a bestseller rank of #3 and Prime shipping, it’s the easiest recommendation in the post.

The Prairie Homestead Cookbook is built around heritage cooking, and the subtitle says the recipes work in any kitchen, so you don’t need a farm to get use out of it. It costs the most of the cookbooks here even after the markdown, but a rank of #28 says plenty of people think it’s worth it. If you’d rather cook from recipes rooted closer to home, our list of West Virginia cookbooks for Appalachian home cooking is a good companion.

Local Dirt is part of a farm-to-table cookbook series, and it organizes recipes by season. That’s how anyone with a garden or a farmers market habit already cooks. It’s more about what to make for supper with what came in this week than a skills manual, and that’s fine.

The Taste of Home Ultimate Baking Cookbook has 575+ recipes plus tips and hints for getting bakes right, and Taste of Home recipes come from home cooks, not test-kitchen chefs. A rank of #38 heading into pie season makes sense. If you have a newer baker in the house, pair it with our roundup of easy cookbooks for anyone learning to cook.

Taste of Home Soups, Stews and More has 325+ comfort food recipes and a rank of #2, which makes it the best-selling book in this post. It’s also the cheapest, so it’s an easy add-on to a bigger order. For a whole shelf of cold-weather cooking, the cookbooks we tracked for wood stove season pick up where this one stops.

This Skyhorse collection covers household hints for cleaning, gardening, cooking and sewing, all short enough to read in one sitting. Its rank of #1,434 means it sells slower than the cookbooks, but tips books like this tend to stay on the kitchen shelf for years. It’s a good fit for someone who just moved out to a place with more land than they know what to do with.

Half of homesteading is keeping the house standing, and this Family Handyman book is about that half. It has 100 expert tips on saving money and solving problems around the home, and a rank of #17 is strong for a how-to book. In an old farmhouse where something always needs fixing before the first hard freeze, this is the book I’d want on hand.

Restore. Recycle. Repurpose. is a Country Living book about building a home out of pieces you fix up or reuse. It leans more toward decorating than hard skills, and at a rank of #3,729 it’s a quiet seller. If the use-what-you-have side appeals to you, our farmhouse decorating books worth the shelf space go further in that direction.

This WVU Press book is about the back-to-the-land homesteaders who settled in West Virginia, and the crafts and music that came with them. It has the smallest discount in the post, but it’s the only book here about homesteading in this state specifically. Buy it for the history more than the how-to.

This is Home: The Art of Simple Living is more philosophy than instruction, so don’t expect canning charts. It ranks #33 and has one of the deeper markdowns in this group. If simple living is why you got into homesteading, it fits, but if you want step-by-step skills, stay with the first section.

This is the 2022 edition, and that is why the markdown is so steep, because annuals drop hard once newer ones come out. The holiday menus still work no matter what year it is, and the homemade gifts section is the homestead angle. With Christmas three months off, it’s a cheap way to start planning if you give canned goods or handmade gifts.