The Self-Sufficient Life and How to Live It: The Complete Back-To-Basics Guide

Embrace off-grid green living with the bestselling classic guide to a more sustainable way of life from the father of self-sufficiency.

For over 40 years, John Seymour has inspired thousands to make more responsible, enriching, and eco-friendly choices with his advice on living sustainably.

The Self-Sufficient Life & How To Live It offers step-by-step instructions on everything from chopping trees to harnessing solar power; from growing fruit and vegetables, and preserving and pickling your harvest, to baking bread, brewing beer, and making cheese. Seymour shows you how to live off the land, running your own smallholding or homestead, keeping chickens, and raising livestock.

Featured in pages of this off-grid guide, you will find:

- Detailed advice for achieving a self-sufficient lifestyle no matter your outdoor space, including guides for getting the most from urban gardens, allotments, and larger holdings.
- Encyclopaedic knowledge on cultivating fruits and vegetables, rearing and preparing livestock, foraging, brewing, and home crafts like woodwork and pottery.
- Beautiful illustrated galleries of fruit and vegetables to inspire growers.
- Charming original hand-drawn illustrations accompany step-by-step guides to dozens of home crafts and self-sufficiency skills, including storing crops, saddling horses, butchering a pig, making wine, and making a footstool.
- A new foreword from a high-profile current follower and advocate of his message.

In a world of mass production, intensive farming, and food miles, Seymour's words offer an alternative: a celebration of the joy of investing time, labor, and love into the things we need. While we can't all be able to move to the countryside, we can appreciate the need to eat food that has been grown ethically or create things we can cherish, using skills that have been handed down through generations. With refreshed, retro-style illustrations and timeless advice reviewed to reflect the latest organic gardening guidelines, this new edition of Seymour's classic title is a balm for anyone who has ever sought solace away from the madness of modern life.

Author: John Seymour
Publisher: DK Publishing (Dorling Kindersley)
Published: 09/04/2018
Pages: 408
Binding Type: Hardcover
Weight: 4.00lbs
Size: 10.90h x 8.40w x 1.50d
ISBN: 9781465477354


Review Citation(s):
Booklist 11/01/2018 pg. 9

About the Author
John Seymour is known and respected as The Father of Self-Sufficiency. Educated in England and Switzerland, his worldwide experience of husbandry and the benefits of rural life is unparalleled. After studying at an agricultural college, he worked on farms in England, and then spent some 10 years in Africa, where he managed a sheep and cattle farm and acted as a livestock officer for a veterinary department. His most influential contribution has been to live, teach, and promote self-sufficiency, first on five acres, and then on 62 acres, and then in Ireland, where the School of Self-Sufficiency that he established with Angela Ashe attracts new recruits in increasing numbers. John Seymour was an active campaigner for the countryside and the environment. He died on his old farm in Wales, where he had been living with his family, in 2004.

About the Foreword writer:

Alice Waters is a chef, author, and food activist, and the founder and owner of Chez Panisse Restaurant in Berkeley, California. She has been a champion of local, sustainable agriculture for more than four decades. In 1995 she founded the Edible Schoolyard Project, which advocates for a free school lunch for all children and a sustainable food curriculum in every public school. In 2015 she was awarded the National Humanities Medal by President Obama, proving that eating is a political act, and that the table is a powerful means to social justice and positive change. Alice is the author of 15 books, including The Art of Simple Food I & II, and a memoir, Coming to My Senses: The Making of a Counterculture Cook.