John Seymour’s Complete Guide to Self-Sufficiency is the best book I’ve yet read on the subject of self-sufficiency. It’s a comprehensive guide to growing your own food, raising animals and maintaining your home and property on your own, largely using natural resources.

The Concise Guide to Self-sufficiency is a slimmed-down, but no less useful version of that same book. It has the same beautiful production values, with hand-drawn and coloured illustrations on every page illustrating the management of a fruit and veg plot, showing how to build a farm gate, the differences between different chicken breeds, and which mushrooms you can pick and safely eat.

Much of what it covers is forgotten by the vast majority of homeowners these days. The In the Kitchen section, for instance, tells not only how to bake bread and preserve fruit, but also how to clamp potatoes, keep carrots and build an outdoor storeroom to keep your produce fresh and edible through the winter without using a fridge or freezer.

At the same time, though, the book has been sensitively edited to keep it up to date. Kilos and Celsius take precedence over ounces and Fahrenheit, and there is acknowledgement that most of us now have a freezer, so it’s by no means a book for dreamers alone. Instead, it’s a practical, helpful and relevant guide for the aspiring self-sufficientist of the 21st century, and as such is required reading.

We’d not hesitate to recommend The Concise Guide to Self-sufficiency as it covers most bases, but check out our review of the larger, fuller edition, The New Complete Book of Self-Sufficiency, also by John Seymour. The Concise edition will cover most bases for the majority of small-scale homesteaders, but for comprehensive coverage the Complete version is hard to beat.

Price £12.99 (£9.09 from Amazon)
Author John Seymour
ISBN 1405320206

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1. The New Complete Book of Self-Sufficiency: review
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3. Review: The Rough Guide to Ethical Living