Description:
A decent summer will bury you in vegetables. The problem is March.
Nobody starves in November. The hungry gap - late winter into spring, when the stores are nearly gone and nothing new is ready - is where self-sufficiency actually fails. Growing food is the easy half. Still having it eight months later is the half the books skip.
This is Volume Two of Rebuilding Without Power, and it assumes there is nothing to buy: no fertiliser, no seed catalogue, no feed store, no refrigeration, no electricity. It works from the soil forward, and most of it is about keeping rather than growing.
Inside:
- How much food is actually enough - the calorie arithmetic, honestly done, with a full worked year for a family of four
- Building soil with nothing bought in: compost, manure, green manure, ash, bone and charcoal
- Beds, rotation, water and pest control with nothing to spray
- Grain by hand - threshing, winnowing and grinding
- Saving seed that comes true, drying it, and testing it before you stake a season on it
- Root cellars, clamps, drying, salting, smoking and fermentation
- Hens, rabbits, a dairy animal, pigs and bees - and what each one really costs to keep
- Hay and winter fodder, the job that decides whether animals work at all
- Firewood, rocket stoves, masonry heaters, hayboxes, candles and lamps
- Water wheels and wind pumps
34 step-by-step line diagrams throughout, plus a reference section collecting every number in the book.
It is also blunt about danger, which most of this category is not. Botulism, saltpetre and cured meat, raw milk, trichinella, ergot and mycotoxins in stored grain, rabbit starvation, carbon monoxide, spontaneous combustion in damp hay. These are real documented risks and you are told about them plainly.
Volume One covers shelter and water. Volume Three covers the workshop and tools.