The kind of books I love the most are inherently flawed, so let me start with the flaws up front in case they're enough to scare you away (and then I'll tell you why The Resilient Farm and Homestead is tied with Paradise Lot as the best book of 2013 for permaculture homesteaders to read).  Ben Falk's book jumps around between personal experience (which I adore) and rehashed theory from other books (which bores me, since I've read the originals).  The text doesn't entirely hold together and is more like reading back through our blog archives (if they were first sorted by subject), complete with more-frequent-than-you'd-like typos.

Those couple of minor flaws aside, what drew me into The Resilient Farm and Homestead is that the book is 100% genuine.  The author has been experimenting with permaculture techniques on his ten-acre Vermont farm for a decade, and he's up front about what did and didn't work...even if it  flies in the face of mainstream permaculture wisdom.  The book has many beautifully-drawn diagrams, but it's also chock-full of (equally beautiful) photos proving that Falk's methods really work.  Perhaps that's why my notes don't just hit pertinent points from the text, they also include projects the book inspired me to want to try on our own farm.

The Resilient Farm and Homestead is also handy for me, especially, because Falk is farming on my level.  Most permaculture books today focus on the urban or suburban homestead covering a fraction of an acre of land, but how do those techniques fare in more extensive settings?  At the other extreme, there are Sepp Holzer and a few other practitioners who make you want to turn hillsides into terraces and to fence in dozens of acres of pasture...with what heavy equipment?  Falk's book walks right down the middle, presenting techniques you can maintain at the few-acre scale with (primarily) hand tools.

I'm going to highlight Falk's most intriguing suggestions in this week's lunchtime series, but this is one book you owe it to yourself to read from cover to cover.  If Goldilocks were reviewing this book, she'd say, "This is not too big or too small --- it's just right!"

This post is part of our The Resilient Farm and Homestead lunchtime series.  Read all of the entries: The Resilient Farm and Homestead Whole Systems Research Farm Using leverage points to improve a farm fast Turning old fields back into pastures Medium-scale silvopasture systems

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About us: Anna Hess and Mark Hamilton spent over a decade living self-sufficiently in the mountains of Virginia before moving north to start over from scratch in the foothills of Ohio. They've experimented with permaculture, no-till gardening, trailersteading, home-based microbusinesses and much more, writing about their adventures in both blogs and books.



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