‘We are all natural navigators.’ That’s the premise of this book: it’s even written in large, elegant letters on the back cover.

It’s true, too, but without a bit of background information there’s not much we can do to navigate beyond the local areas we all know well. The idea of this chunky, rather nicely-designed volume is to teach you the basics of finding your way by the stars, wind, temperature, waves and so on. Basically, navigation by observation.

It’s an ambitious aim and on the whole it does it well, but unless you’re going to take the time to sit down and not only run your eyes over what it has to say but actually learn and later recall what it says then you’re not going to get much out of it.

Perhaps that’s why it’s a slower read than I’d expected. Quite a bit slower, actually, with each fact and method discussed in some depth.

Sadly it’s already become a bit of a curiosity rather than a necessity. GPS devices are approaching ubiquity, now appearing on many smartphones, some of which can be had for nothing with a reasonable monthly contract. Nonetheless, if you want to know more about the world about you, and how you can use natural features when you’ve got your hiking boots on, there are few competing titles to be had.

Author: Tristan Gooley
Price: £14.99 (£8.61 on Amazon)
ISBN: 1905264941
Publisher: Virgin Books

Related posts:

1. Cheese Making by Rita Ash: Review

I wasn’t going to buy this book. I saw it in Waterstones, picked it up, made a note and then put it down again, intending to buy it when (and if) it came out in paperback. Well, best laid plans and all that… the next day I went back and bought it, and I’ve spent the last couple of weeks indulging fantasies of countryside escapes.

The credit crunch put a stop to Nick Weston’s career in catering and set building, so he took the opportunity to get out of London and build himself a home in the country. As the title suggests it was pretty unconventional.

He spent the last of his savings on the wood for his floorboards, scavenged his remaining building supplies and built a treehouse in a Sussex wood. It all sounds pretty idyllic, and at times it clearly was, but the diaries also detail weeks of mosquito infestation, the most basic of sanitary facilities (a bucket in a tree for a shower; a pit for a loo) and an admirable (although not entirely enviable) commitment to eating off the land – and only off the land.

Weston’s larder was the woods and river close to his treehouse. He shot pheasant, rabbit and squirrels, filleted a dead badger knocked down on the road and set night lines to catch eels for smoking or cooking. He built his own clay oven, baked bread, and picked the hops and nettles from the local hedgerows to provide his veg.

The daily entries are peppered with useful boxes on identifying mushrooms, paring rabbits, making nettle wine and so on, which break up the flow of the story and make for a more engaging read. Unfortunately, though, they’re also the part that just slightly lets it down. Very few of the pictures are in colour, and are instead rendered in a sepia brown. That’s fine when it’s just pictures of the treehouse, but when the photo is supposed to help you identify some edible goodie from the hedgerow it’s a bit of a let down.

That was clearly a publishing decision, though, and has no impact on the quality or value of the content itself. The Treehouse Diaries is a perfect dose of escapism for frustrated townies who would rather swap their office for a home in the trees.

Rating:
ISBN: 1843405644
Price: £16.99 (£9.72 from Amazon)

Related posts:

1. Our nettle wine has finished fermenting
2. Making our first batch of nettle wine
3. Frugal Christmas tree

A lot of retro reprints are pretty useless as anything other than curiosities. This one, though, is genuinely useful. First published in 1945, it is a week-by-week guide of what you need to be doing and when in your vegetable garden.

Dig for Victory was a big wartime drive to get the population digging up their gardens and communal green spaces to grow the produce so vital to keeping the country fed in the face of German blockades. There was always a risk as the war drew to a close that the country’s new army of gardeners would hang up their shovels and forks and shortages would follow. This book – Dig On for Victory – worked towards ensuring that didn’t happen.

Split by month and by week, it is perfect for first-time gardeners who won’t know what they should be looking out for, or whether they are planting their seeds too soon or too late. It’s full of common sense advice, and at the back there’s a short almanac taking you through seeds and crops, outlining how much seed you need to plant for a given area and what each one will be when it has grown.

For the nostalgic reader there are also more than a smattering of vintage ads scattered throughout. They’re dated, but look great on account of the more primitive design tools available at the time.

Pair this with our other retro favourite, Keeping Poultry and Rabbits on Scraps and you have the only two books you need to start on the road to self-sufficiency.

ISBN: 978-1-84513-499-0
Price: £9.99 (£5.76 from Amazon)

Dig on for Victory

Related posts:

1. Victory Cookbook by Marguerite Patten
2. Free seeds from BBC Dig In
3. Starting with Chickens, A Beginner's Guide: Review

If it wasn’t for this book, I would never have knit that scarf. It’s the ultimate beginners’ guide, written in such a clear and concise way, and so well illustrated that you’d have a tough time getting it wrong.

Stoller is clearly a knitting devotee. Her enthusiasm for the subject really shines through the witty prose and amusing sidebars that talk as much about the culture and history of knitting as they do about how to knit yourself.

Stitch ‘n Bitch isn’t expensively produced – there are only two colours on its square pages – but the mix of orange and black line art is clear and well drawn, making it easy to follow the flow of the yarn and copy it on your own needles.

It’s billed as ‘instructions, patterns and advice for a new generation of knitters’ and it really does start from the absolute beginning with bags of information on needle gauges, different styles of knitting and, most importantly, casting on. It’s the next best thing to having your grandmother standing over you showing you how it’s done.

Stitch n Bitch

Stitch n Bitch has become something of a phenomenon, with groups of the same name meeting around the world, and it’s been followed up by two companion volumes: Stitch ‘n Bitch Nation and Stitch ‘n Bitch Crochet: The Happy Hooker, the latter of which I’m very keen to try out.

Rating
Author Debbie Stoller
Price £10.99 (£6.20 from Amazon.co.uk)
ISBN 0761128182

Related posts:

1. I’m knitting a scarf
2. Crocheting is surprisingly difficult
3. I’ve finished my scarf

Sometimes you need something straightforward, no-nonsense and down to earth. That’s exactly what you get with Keeping Poultry and Rabbits on Scraps. Written in 1941, when wartime rationing meant that every scrap of food had to be put to good use and throwing out your trimmings was an unforgivable waste, it’s a crash course in cutting down the amount of paid-for chicken food you use while at the same time making sure your hens don’t go hungry.

To keep them in optimum laying condition, your chickens need to get a large part of their daily nutrition from dedicated poultry feed – most often layers pellets or mash. Supplementing this with kitchen offcuts greatly enhances the quality of your eggs, giving you richer yolks and tastier cakes. This books switches that around, though, explaining how to massively cut your food bill by upping the scrap quantity without depriving your flock of its essential nutrients.

From a practical standpoint, it’s excellent. It isn’t sentimental (who could afford that during the war?), explaining how to identify and deal with chickens that aren’t producing an adequate supply of eggs in return for their food, and how to raise your own flock, either from eggs or from very young chicks.

It’s as relevant today as it was when it was first written, and massively under-sells itself with that title. We only knew how wide-ranging it was because we found a copy in a shop and had a flick through, or else we might have thought it was literally about managing your hens’ feed. In reality it covers housing, illness, injuries, how to humanely kill your birds and so on.

All of this is done without frill or fuss, explaining all you need to know in a slim 97 pages, with the rest of the book given over to keeping rabbits.

For the first time chicken keeper it’s essential reading, along with Henkeeping by Jane Eastoe (click the link for review).

Price £6.99 (£4.45 from Amazon)
Authors Claude Goodchild and Alan Thompson
ISBN 0141038624

Related posts:

1. Henkeeping: Inspiration and Practical Advice for Would-be Smallholders : Review
2. Your chicken-keeping questions answered
3. Hen and the Art of Chicken Maintenance: review

Self sufficiency wasn’t a fad during the war. It was a necessity. People had to make do, to use whatever they had to hand, and to battle waste wherever they could.

During World War Two, the Ministry of Food made sure the nation was fed, keeping the distribution lines open and showing people how to make best use of the limited ingredients at their disposal. Its most famous employee, whose influence has lasted longer than the ministry itself, is Marguerite Patten, latterly TV cook, author and brains behind Victory Cookbook: Nostalgic Food and Facts from 1940-1954.

This is an excellent guide to low-cost meals that use very few ingredients, perfect for less ambitious or truly penny-pinching chefs.

There are plenty of old favourites, like currant buns, egg custard and apple turnovers, plus a lot of dishes we don’t generally cook any more, such as sheep’s head roll, black pudding hot pot and piquant tripe.

But it’s more than just recipes. This is a fascinating history book that explores wartime conditions, the points system that ensured everyone received the same amount of food, and the way that some of the dishes came about. For example, Patten explains as follows how (and why) she came up with a recipe for stuffed pigeons:

In the early 1950s when grain was so very precious there was a plague of pigeons, who were eating it.

Farmers asked me to demonstrate pigeon dishes to persuade the public to make use of this very edible but, at the same time, tiresome bird.

Halve young pigeons lengthways; remove as many bones as possible; spread sausagemeat against the cut side, then coat in beaten egg and crisp breadcrumbs.

Fry in hot fat until crisp and brown all over; lower the heat and continue cooking for 10 – 15 minutes. Serve with creamed potatoes and a green vegetable.

It sounds like a heart attack on a plate, doesn’t it. I like the way that all the fat and meat is balanced out by ‘a green vegetable’. Fortunately not all of the recipes are quite so old fashioned, and there’s plenty here that you’d happily cook and serve up for visitors today.

This book is a bit of an anomaly. Amazon has a copy under this cover for £13 (or used for just under £3), but it’s also available as ‘Feeding the Nation‘ for £6.22.

You’ll probably also find it in second hand bookshops as We’ll Eat Again (1985), The Victory Kitchen (1995) or Post-War Kitchen (1998). So, it’s got staying power, which is testament to the value of its content.

Rating
Price £6.22 under the title Feeding the Nation at Amazon UK

Related posts:

1. Dig on for Victory by C H Middleton
2. Tender by Nigel Slater
3. The Allotment Cookbook : review

Tender – never has a food book been more appropriately named. It took writer and TV cook Nigel Slater five years to write this two-volume homage to fruit and veg, the fruit part of which will be published later this year, and it’s a work in which his tenderness towards the subject in hand shines through.

Slater is no less accomplished a writer than he is a cook. How many other cook books could evoke such imagery as this when introducing a starkly simple recipe for slow-roasted tomatoes with thyme and mozzarella?

Late summer, the sun high, the vegetable patch is filled with slow-moving bees and tiny, piercing-blue butterflies. The day stands still, baking in the sunshine. The cats lie silently on the dusty stone terrace, too hot to move. It is the day for a lunch of melting softness. I wander into the kitchen on bare feet to roast tomatoes and break open a milky, silky buffalo mozzarella.

Who could resist any recipe that follows an introduction like that?

The layout is as beautiful as the prose. Lavishly illustrated, laid out using Adobe Garamond, and even with a font note at the back, it is almost too good for use in the kitchen, and I’m sure I’ll end up copying out the recipes I want to follow onto scraps of paper rather than propping it open on the worktop.

Tender: A Cook and His Vegetable Patchis a book for reading more than using, so it’s as well that the prose is as flowing as a well-written novel.

But it’s more than just a cook book. Tender is organised vegetable by vegetable, each chapter opening with a short essay on the vegetable in question, followed by advice on both growing and cooking. It is a wonderful inspiration for anyone who – like me – wants to try new vegetables in their garden but isn’t sure which to choose. Perhaps that’s because you know you can trust Slater’s advice. He’s been there and done it himself: he famously dug up his lawn to plant a series of vegetable beds although, as he himself admits, not quite enough of them to be truly self-sufficient.

There is a refreshing honesty to what he writes, too, that should give us all hope, as if he can’t grow a decent cauliflower, then why should we?

The cauliflower is regarded as a bugger to grow, or at least to grow well… With luck and a fair wind, you could have a vegetable to be truly proud of. I have never grown one good enough for a soup, let alone a show. But I will keep trying.

My copy of Tender was a gift, and one that was so well chosen. It is beautiful, engaging, and an inspirational read through the darker winter months.

Rating
Price £30 (£12.99 from Amazon UK)
ISBN 0007248490
Publisher Fourth Estate Ltd

Related posts:

1. Nigel Slater on growing your own
2. Victory Cookbook by Marguerite Patten
3. Popular Blagger posts of January 2010

One of the projects we’re going to start in the new year (or before the end of December this year if we get time) is making our own cheese. We’ve bought a press, which we can also use for cider making next autumn and, apart from a goat or cow, that’s pretty much all the equipment we need (pans and thermometer aside).

So, obviously, we’re reading up on the subject beforehand, and this book – Cheese Making by Rita Ash – is proving to be an excellent starting point. It’s written with beginners in mind by someone with over 60 years’ experience.

It’s split into two distinct halves, with a general interest backgrounder to kick it off, and then specific recipes for various cheeses in the second. There are a lot of familiar favourites to try, such as Cheddar (one of the most difficult, it warns), camembert and halloumi. I hadn’t expected so many cheeses to be suitable for home making, so it’s been a real eye-opener.

We’ll probably kick off with House cheese, which it says is an easy one to start with, but I have to admit to being very tempted by the idea of Wensleydale, which is a Christmas favourite in our house as it goes so well with fruit cake.

It’s not all the recipes that make this book so good, though, so much as the enthusiasm of the author, and the fact that she makes it sound so easy and approachable. That, as much as anything, will give us the confidence to give it a go, and that makes it a good buy indeed – especially at less than a fiver.

Rating:
Author: Rita Ash
Title Cheese Making
Price: £4.98 from Amazon
ISBN: 978-1-84773-461-7

Related posts:

1. We have a cheese-making deadline
2. The mould on our cheese
3. Our home made cheese is getting mouldy as it matures

I could probably live without my car more easily than my bike. Quite simply it’s my primary means of transport. It gets me to the station and back each work day, and it takes me to the market and back at the weekend.

Love it though I do, my car gets driven twice a fortnight, and then sits on the drive for the next two weeks, looking pretty but feeling a little forgotten.

The bike is a key component in the whole idea of self-sufficiency. It doesn’t take petrol, doesn’t eat oats like a horse would, and is an efficient, low-impact means of transport. The shocking thing, though, is how little I know about how bikes work and what to do when things go wrong.

This book fixes that.

Its 192 full-colour pages walk you step by step through common tasks like fixing a puncture and replacing a chain, and tackle more complex tasks – like changing your gear cogs – with well-delivered, easily followed advice that gives even a dunce like myself the confidence to tackle the job. It could be a real money-saver, keeping you away from the nearest repair shop.

Perhaps the best thing about it, though, is the fact that it’s completely model-agnostic. This isn’t like a Haynes car manual, which relates to only one line from a set period from a single manufacturer; instead it treats bikes as a general mode of transport, meaning that whether you’re riding a mens’, womens’ or kids cycle you’ll still be able to follow along and get years of use out of the book.

I’ve got the fifth edition here and while it’s unlikely I’d be upgrading every time a new edition comes out, it’s good to know that should I want to buy some new kit for the bike it’ll most likely be covered in this single volume.

Highly recommended.

Title: The Bike Book
Author: Fred Milson
Publisher: Haynes
ISBN: 978 1 84425 421 7
Price: £14.99 (£10.49 from Amazon)

Related posts:

1. The rebuilt bike
2. A bike to build
3. Bike trailers

You can grow your own fruit and veg, and keep chickens in the garden to make great strides towards self-sufficiency. But it’s not nearly so easy to cater for yourself when you want to treat an illness.

It wasn’t always that way. Mass-produced drugs are a relatively recent phenomenon, as for centuries anyone with an ailment would look to nature for a fix. It’s those fixes, handed down from generation to generation, that Grandma’s Remedies records.

The range of problems it tackles is impressive: from diarrhoea to dog bites, earache to flatulence, and asthma to leg ulcers. And the fixes aren’t always as simple as ‘stew up some nettles and drink the liquid’, often requiring several ingredients from a store cupboard or gathered from the hedgerow.

Each remedy has been collected from someone who was given it by an older family member, or who remembers them from their childhood, and the most impressive thing is how many times several treatments for any one particular problem use similar ingredients, despite coming from all around the country.

Most of these remedies were handed down from grandmother to mother to daughter, hence the name, and over time the measures in use have changed. Chappell has updated these measures, retaining the original inscriptions and accompanying them with the modern-day metric equivalent.

An excellent how-to section at the back gives instruction on making a tincture, poultice and so on to dispense your home-made drugs, and there’s an interesting biographical section highlighting women who made a big contribution to the development of traditional medicine through the ages. There’s also a directory of places to visit to further your understanding, with an impressive British focus.

Even if you don’t use any of the suggested remedies, this book is a fascinating read, and for anyone who wants to be truly self-sufficient it’s a must-have addition to your bookshelf.

Price £14.99 (£9.69 from Amazon)
Pros Truly comprehensive, a great piece of research, and genuinely interesting.
Cons None.
Verdict A fascination addition to any bookshelf, and doubly so for anyone who wants to be truly self-sufficient.

Related posts:

1. How to Store Your Garden Produce: review
2. Electricity monitor