Three Books To Read When You Can’t Garden Yet

Oh my goodness, Guys! I’m DYING to get my toes in that warm soil. But that soil is cold and buried in snow at the moment, so aside from a few beautiful little herbs in my window, and the seeds I just started today, (EEEP!) gardening must wait.

Sad face.

To tide myself over for the next few weeks I’m binge watching YouTube videos, doing lots of research, planning my garden, and reading, reading, reading.

Orchard House, by Tara Austen Weaver is a memoir which I Could. Not. Put. Down. The author chronicles how rehabilitating a neglected garden helped to bring her family back from the brink of dissolution, and bridge a mother-daughter gap. It spoke to me on many levels.

Starting Over, by Jackie Clay (now Atkinson) Is one that I’ve read multiple times and often return to for inspiration as well as practical how-to information. In the book Jackie shares her family’s journey to self-reliance while scratching a modern day homestead out of bare land in the Minnesota woods. Jackie is also a regular contributor to Backwoods Home and Self Reliance magazines and has long been a major inspiration to us.

How To Store Your Garden Produce, by Piers Warren is not so much a page turner as a good, solid primer/refresher. Now is the perfect time to be thinking about which preservation and storage methods will be best for you, and brushing up on your skills. You don’t want to wait until you have just harvested fifty pounds of tomatoes to decide what you’ll be doing with them.

Getting lost in a good book next to the fireplace is the perfect way to pretend it’s not freezing and snowing again outside. And since there’s nothing I want more than to be tackling all those promising outdoor projects right now, reading about them is the perfect salve.

How will you pass the time waiting for spring?

Shared at the Homestead Blog Hop  and The Homemaking Link Up Hop on over and check out all the great content they share each week!