In this episode of Prepper Dan, I am sharing some of the resources that I have acquired over the last couple of decades. I began acquiring these resources a number of years ago when I purchased my first home in southern Ontario back in 1988. The reason why I want to share those with you is because there has been whisperings in the last little while that the internet may need to go through a period of cleansing from all of the misinformation and disinformation. And if that happens, you will need some good paper resources in which for you to rely on. But the second reason is because, as you know, a lot of things can be censored and changed on the Internet.
00:02:10.220Our canning ventures expanded to where we would put in about 1,000 jars of preserves and bottled meat.
00:02:19.720Every year, we would become pretty much self-sufficient.
00:02:23.820All of my children learned survival skills.
00:02:26.840And actually, that farmhouse, you know, needed a new foundation, so we picked up the house, moved it down the road and into the woods about half a kilometer.
00:02:35.140I taught all of our children how to do plumbing, electrical, concrete work, roofing, and drywall, which, by the way, to this day is not one of my preferable things to do.
00:02:45.580Eventually, even working full-time as a pastor and missionary and paramedic, I purchased an agricultural farm feed store.
00:02:55.920Then we got into a bakery and then an outfitters and gun shop.
00:03:01.700I didn't know anything about owning businesses.
00:03:04.360But I tell you all this, not to brag, but to tell you that with good resources, I was able to expand my skill set and my businesses.
00:03:15.660So today, I want to share with you about a dozen or so resources that I've acquired over the last couple of decades.
00:03:21.420Most of them will be about our farming and agricultural and gardening.
00:03:25.580But I want to share these with you for a couple of reasons.
00:03:27.940Number one, there has been whisperings that the Internet may need to go through a period of this cleansing.
00:03:33.540And if that happens, you will need some good paper resources in which for you to rely on.
00:03:38.600But the second reason is because, as you know, a lot of things can be censored and changed on the Internet.
00:03:44.780These books have been tried and true and been found to be accurate over the last couple of decades.
00:03:50.700I have literally dozens and dozens of these resources, but this is just a sampling to whet your appetite.
00:03:57.620I want to encourage you that if you have good resources to go ahead and list them in the comments section down below so we can all enjoy those while we can and have access to this Internet.
00:04:07.120So I hope that this is encouraging for you.
00:04:13.100It's kind of hard to put these in any kind of order at all, but I'm just going to start with one of the ones that is kind of known to be the Bible of any homesteading at all.
00:04:23.700And I went ahead and put a hardcover on this one here.
00:04:28.380And if you can still get it, this is one that I would definitely recommend.
00:04:33.620And this one is called The Encyclopedia of Country Living by Carla Emery.
00:04:39.340And it's been around for quite a while.
00:04:44.040And this book really covers everything at all about, well, it's called The Encyclopedia of Country Living for a Reason.
00:04:55.300Introduction to plants, grasses, grains, canes, garden vegetables, herbs, flavorings, tree, vine, bush, bramble, food preservation, introduction to animals, poultry, goats, cows, home dairying, bee, rabbits, sheep, and pigs, and then on and on.
00:05:11.200And, well, it's got close to 900 pages, actually.
00:06:17.060You know, a 54-acre farm is not really that small.
00:06:19.840A 200-acre farm is not really that small.
00:06:21.880But this is one of the resources that we've had that has really been helpful to us.
00:06:26.940If you're just going to have a little farmstead backyard kind of thing, here's another excellent book that you may want to get.
00:06:35.120It's called Barnyard in Your Backyard, and literally it covers a lot of the same kind of things, but it also covers more like in housing.
00:06:44.500If you're going to have a little chicken coop, if you're going to have a little building for your pigs or for your goats, it covers everything from sheep shearing and what to feed them, the gestation period of different things and all that kind of neat things.
00:06:59.580How to build rabbit cages, choosing different breeds of rabbits and ducks and geese and all that things, you know.
00:07:07.380And ducks and geese is something else we used to have.
00:07:09.600We used to raise pheasants and all that.
00:07:12.160So now some of you may be thinking at this point, wait a minute, now I live in a city.
00:07:15.440You know, I may not be able to do that.
00:07:17.020If you have friends that live in the country and you may want to go in on them for some of these things, these are all things to consider in this day and age.
00:07:24.680You know, the powers that be want everybody to move into these 15-minute cities in that, but there are still some people that live out in the country, and so you may want to go in on them.
00:07:35.100And so you may not know anything about them, but get some of these resources and start reading up on it, and this will help you kind of decide.
00:07:42.820You may want to just get one or two or three of these types of animals and that kind of thing.
00:07:48.280A classic that you can still get today is Reader's Digest put out some really good books a number of years ago.
00:07:56.260Back to Basics is one that covers a lot of information as well.
00:08:01.660It covers a lot of the old studying type of tools as well as some of the things that they used to do around the farmstead, how to repair old things.
00:08:11.720You know, sometimes you go to yard sales and you find some old hand tools.
00:08:14.440Well, if the power goes out, your power tools are not going to work.
00:08:18.320You know, I've got a ton of power tools, and they're great to have, but if the electricity goes out, they're useless to me.
00:08:24.280So I have a collection of hand tools that I use, you know, axes and some hand drills and different things.
00:08:35.320But this Back to Basics one here tells you all about, you know, the natural things you can do with plants and different things, homemade ice cream, horses, and like livestock, different kinds of livestock.
00:08:50.460Anyhow, it's got a lot of wealth of information in here.
00:08:56.740And at the end of this presentation, I'm going to give you a couple of hints as to where you may be able to find some of these books.
00:09:02.500Like you may watch this video and leave your house and go right away to a couple places that I'm going to suggest to you.
00:09:08.420But if not, there may be some places online that I'll suggest to you as well.
00:09:11.880Also by Reader's Digest is this illustrated guide to gardening.
00:09:15.660And some of the principles in here never go out of style, okay?
00:09:20.320And so you may have a patch in your yard or in your property that's 10 feet by 10 feet.
00:09:26.820It's amazing what you can grow in a patch of land like that.
00:09:30.520And you may say, well, I don't, you know, I don't have a rototiller.
00:09:33.380I don't, I don't, my soil is rocky or whatever.
00:09:36.660Where we live here in Cape Breton Island in Nova Scotia, our house is up on a hill here and we're on a river.
00:09:42.720But we're basically in a gravel patch and on a, you know, in a gravel yard.
00:09:47.980And so all of my gardening is done besides the greenhouse.
00:10:57.180If you only have one or two acres available to you, you can use a lot of the principles from this book into the little patch of land that you may have.
00:11:06.880Because it talks about how to set up your land, how to put your, where to put your garden, where the sun is facing, where the prevailing winds are.
00:11:19.300So it gives you all of the do's and don'ts about like the shape of your land and how to set up your land.
00:11:25.440If you're going to plant some fruit trees, you know, plant dwarf fruit trees as opposed to the ones that, that grow full size and take like five to 10 years to produce fruit.
00:11:34.360So it's got a lot of good principles in here.
00:11:36.880How to deal with weeds, soil surface and management, fertilizers, saws in their care, greenhouses.
00:11:43.140You know, we have a small greenhouse here that's 10, I think 10 by 16, and we grow all kinds of food in here.
00:11:50.200And we actually grow food in there year round without any heat, frost damage and prevention, poultry, irrigation, functions of water, water supply, windbreaks, pros and cons.
00:12:00.360So there's all kinds of information in here, five acres and independence.
00:12:04.520Here's another little book that it's not a must, but it's a fun one.
00:12:10.580There's actually a few books in this series.
00:12:13.180This was originally published in 1914 by D.C. Beard.
00:12:17.220There's lots of photos in this particular book here.
00:12:20.820And, you know, sometimes we go in the woods here.
00:12:22.720Now we have a few acres in our property, but, you know, you can cut down a few trees and make yourself a little shelter in case the weather gets bad or you just need to find shelter somewhere.
00:12:33.020And it's good practice just with an axe or a hatchet just to build yourself an emergency shelter because you never know what may happen.
00:12:41.520You can put this book on your coffee table and there's tons of pictures in here, like literally like hundreds of little photos on how you can build yourself a little shack, a shanty, a shelter.
00:12:51.660And you can even incorporate some of these ideas into like a little animal shelter in that.
00:15:17.260But this book explains exactly how to do all that because you don't want to miss out a growing season by having bad seed or GMO-laden seed that you have to buy from the store.
00:15:27.120So this is another good book, again, by Rodale.
00:15:32.140So, again, this will be in the description.
00:15:51.320And this book will show you how you can actually grow food year-round in polytunnels, in greenhouses, and how you can harvest in summer and how you can harvest in the winter.
00:16:06.740So, again, it's a very good book to have and I would highly recommend it.
00:16:10.940And Nikki is very knowledgeable in everything that she talks about.
00:16:14.280She used to have a radio show here in the Maritimes.
00:16:17.140This last one I'm going to share with you here is by the Creative Homeowner Series, Backyard Homesteading, A Back-to-Basics Guide to Self-Sufficiency.
00:16:26.420And it covers a lot of different topics, how to set up your land, how to set up your water systems, how to grow, raising vegetables and herbs, fruit trees, plant-by-plant, shrubs, grapevines, brambles, and how to set up your yard.
00:16:42.060If you have chickens, if you have different small animals, ideas for coops, and how to set up all your structures so that they make sense in your yard.
00:16:52.260And one of the things we did when we had that old farmhouse there up on the mountain that we had to move is because we moved it so far from its original location, the well that we had, the water was so good.
00:17:05.260Rather than drill a new well, we kept the old well.
00:17:08.380We had to run quite a bit of water line.
00:17:11.400But the old barn that we had, it was a huge barn that was built in 1881.
00:17:15.880We ended up actually having, we kept the water line, but we piped water into the barn.
00:17:21.660And we hit some bedrock, but we drilled through the bedrock and piped water into the barn, which made having the animals in the barn so much easier.
00:17:29.860You know, we had pigs in there, we had horses, we had chickens, we had cows, and we had goats.
00:17:35.200And so rather than get water from the stream that ran next to the barn or get it from the house and run a hose in the wintertime, now we had water in the barn.
00:17:46.140And so a book like this will show you exactly how you can do something like that and make life so much easier.
00:17:51.840If you have a shallow well, you know, it shows you how to put one of those pumps, a shallow well pump that the water will go down and not freeze in the wintertime.
00:18:02.300So anyhow, so this is just about, I don't know, 10 or 12 resources that I have used faithfully.
00:18:09.340I've got a couple of shelf loaves really of books that I have used, and I don't want to take time to show you all of them.
00:18:16.540But this kind of gives you an idea that, you know, you have power.
00:18:19.840Power, you know, you've heard it said, Tanya Gar, the founder of Action for Canada, often says knowledge is power.
00:19:01.640And as a matter of fact, at one point, besides working full time as a paramedic, I had been a pastor and missionary for 17 years.
00:19:10.380I purchased a farm feed store and then ran, also purchased or ran, started a bakery.
00:19:17.640And then we had an outfitters and gun shop.
00:19:20.640I didn't know anything about running a business, but we learned.
00:19:23.480And so if you have a little bit of ambition and you can learn to do something, I want to encourage you, get some resources and get some books.
00:19:33.340And while you can, maybe learn some things off the Internet.
00:19:37.100OK, so where do you get some of these resources?
00:19:41.320You can go to Value Village and there should be a section or two in the book section there.
00:19:48.940One of them should be like gardening or outdoors or whatever and look through that and visit that section often because sometimes I'll find some of these books.
00:19:58.920Now, their prices kind of vary, but, you know, you'll find a book like this and it'll go for like two or three or four dollars, which is this one here was $19 Canadian.
00:20:16.280Now, our library here in Sydney has an entire section of books that they're selling out or discounting, and they're like two or three or four dollars.
00:20:25.120So go to your your public library and see what they're selling off.
00:20:29.500There's a couple of websites that you can go to.
00:20:32.120One of my favorite is thriftbooks.com.
00:21:03.940So, okay, so check Amazon, check thriftbooks.com, and then there may be some other sites in Canada that you use.
00:21:11.540So please put those in the description.
00:21:13.180I hope you take some of these colder months to go ahead and acquire yourself some of these good hard copies of these resources that I've been sharing with you.
00:21:22.240It's a good time to curl up by the fire or the warmth of your home to go ahead and read and acquire yourself some knowledge, some wisdom, and some understanding with what's going on, not only in our world,
00:21:32.580but how to get better prepared for your gardening season in the spring and in the summertime.
00:21:36.540And just in case the Internet happens to get cleansed of all of our good dis and misinformation, you'll be well prepared.
00:21:45.300So I'm just going to sit here by the fire for a little while, enjoy my chaga, and I hope you found this video resourceful and helpful to you.
00:21:53.340So until I see you again, God bless you, and God bless Canada.