The Resilient Gardener Book Review

The Resilient Gardener by Carol Deppe is a fantastic book for living off your land and depending on your garden for food. I borrow a few books every month from my local library, and have now borrowed The Resilient Gardener four times!

A large book, it is packed with so much practical information about growing large quantities of food dependably to feed your family for the year. Carol has spent her life researching and experimenting with various gardening techniques and specific heirloom vegetable varieties.

 

The Resilient Gardener: Food Production and Self-Reliance in Uncertain Times

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If you are wanting to take your garden to the next level, and really depend on your homestead for food production, The Resilient Gardener is a fantastic read!

Although she grows other vegetables for fun and for diversity, Carol focuses on 5 staple crops to supply most of her calories. These include field corn, dry beans, potatoes, squash, and duck eggs. 

I’ve already talked about some of these in prior blog posts. You can find my blog post on raising laying ducks here. For us, ducks are a huge part of pest control in our garden. They do a better job of eating bugs without destroying the entire garden like chickens do.

 

What Exactly is in The Resilient Gardener

Carol goes into a lot of detail about exactly how to grow, store, and use all five of these crops. She gives tips for more easily planting larger quantities of seed. She also includes plans for some homemade planting tools to make your job easier. Planting can become quite the chore when you are planting a larger area than a garden, but not enough to warrant buying commercial planting equipment.

The Resilient Gardener gives lots of details about watering and weed control. It includes some information on dry gardening, or gardening without irrigation. 

There is a lot of information about specific varieties, and how each is better for specific recipes. For example, Carol has spent years experimenting with different types of corn. She has found that some types and colors are better for cornbread or savory dishes. There are others who have mild flavors and can be used to bake sweets such as cake. Her Johnny Cake recipe is a fun (and delicious) way to use your homegrown flour corn.

For potatoes, she gives detailed information on what colors go best with different recipes and food combinations.

When it comes to pole beans, the Resilient Gardener explains how to properly grow pole beans with corn and which heirloom varieties you should pick.

Finally, she talks about how to efficiently harvest, process, and store each crop so that it will last for months.

The book includes a variety of simple recipes focusing on duck eggs, potatoes, corn, dry beans, and squash. I’ve tried some of them and really enjoyed them!

Summary

As an expert plant breeder, Carol has numerous open pollinated vegetables varieties offered through the Open Source Seed Initiative. I grow her improved Oregon Homestead Sweet Meat Squash in my garden. It’s not only one of the best tasting winter squash I’ve grown, but thanks to her breeding efforts it is mostly meat with a tiny seed cavity compared to other squash.

I’d highly recommend The Resilient Gardener for any homesteader who wants to take their gardening to the next level and depend on their homestead for food production! I learned so much helpful, practical information from this book!

You can check out more of our gardening and homesteading book reviews here!