What's in your Homestead Library?

I was given my favorite gift from my awesome husband, an Amazon gift card.I decided to use it to add to our homestead library. There are so many great books out there that it is usually way to hard to decide. Here is what I came up with this time.

         In her book, Natural Goat Care, Pat Colby takes us on her journey of caring for her goats. She tells us of preventative ways to keep livestock healthy, without the medicines

Storey's Guide to Raising Chickens, 3rd Edition
“Everything you need to know about chickens, all in one easy-to-understand volume: Breed selection, health issues, care and maintenace, incubating, hatching, feed and shelter, egg and meat production, and more.


Storey's Guide to Raising Dairy Goats: Breeds, Care, Dairying


The Complete Book of Butchering, Smoking, Curing, and Sausage Making: How to Harvest Your Livestock & Wild Game

Build a Smokehouse: Storey Country Wisdom Bulletin A-81

How to Build Animal Housing: 60 Plans for Coops, Hutches, Barns, Sheds, Pens, Nestboxes, Feeders, Stanchions, and Much More

Fences for Pasture & Garden

Gail Damerow

Animal, Vegetable, Miracle: A Year of Food Life (P.S.)

Barbara Kingsolver,

 These were already in our library,

The Encyclopedia of Country Living: An Old Fashioned Recipe Book by Carla Emery

Country Women: A Handbook for the New Farmer by Jeanne Tetrault and Sherry Thomas

The Backyard Homestead: Produce all the food you need on just a quarter acre!

        Small-Scale Livestock Farming: A Grass-Based Approach for Health, Sustainability, and Profit

          How to Raise Goats by Carol A. Amundson

 These are just a few of the books that I think every homsteader should have in their library.This list doesn't include the gardening and herbal medicine books in our library. I plan on getting all the Storey's Guides that we will need.What are your favorite books you think should be in a homesteaders library?

Conversations from Nowhere!

 
  Have you ever called someone up that you didn't know about something and ended up having a wonderful conversation with them? Tonight I answered an add on craigslist for some books. The add was really for an amazon bookstore and when I looked I found several books that I wanted. I e-mailed the person asking since we were local would she be interested in selling directly, she was and sent me her phone number.
 Turns out she is a first grade teacher who had switched schools and wanted to clear out her shelves. We talked about Amazon, what kinds of books we sold and then she asked where I taught. I told her we were homeschoolers and she sounded delighted to meet someone who homeschooled. We went on to talk about teaching styles, teaching to the test, and the freedom in teaching kids that she wished she had, I told her about the baby hummingbirds and barn owls we were watching
,http://www.sportsmansparadiseonline.com/Live_Hummingbird_Cam.html,http://www.sportsmansparadiseonline.com/Oceanside_Barn_Owls.html
she was really excited about these and planned to show her kids. We then started talking about teaching again and I told her about the Waldorf style of teaching. This style of teaching sounded very intriguing to her and she planned on finding out more about it. I think we only ended our conversation because according to my kids they were Starving!! How fun it is though to call someone out of the blue and have such a great informative conversation with a complete stranger. We didn't even exchange names until the very end. This has only ever happened to me once before. I had called our local Alpaca farm to get some manure from him. I said we had been there with our homeschool group and loved his alpacas. He asked if I would answer some questions for him and I said yes. Since he had so many homeschool groups to come thru his place he was curious about them. He wanted to know why people homeschooled, were there regulations to follow, who decided the curriculum and was it legal. Also what about college? He was really surprised when I told him the colleges and University were actively recruiting homeschool graduates! Now this gentleman wasn't planning to homeschool, his kids were his alpacas. He just wanted to understand more about the families that came to see him.
  What a concept, to actively seek out information on a group you had dealings with but didn't understand but wanted to! How would our world have changed if lets say the Indians and the Pilgrims,had done this, the Israelis and the Palestinians', or maybe just you and your neighbor, you and your kid. Trying to keep and open mind and see and understand where another person is coming from is one of the hardest things a person can ever learn in my opinion.
 Have you ever had a conversation like that, what did you think about it?

 ps. I know people are reading this, I see it in the stats everyday. I would really like
to get some feedback or comments about whatever the subject is sometimes.