The Illustrated Lost Skills of Self-Reliance Handbook: 200+ Step-by-Step Survival, Homesteading and Off-Grid Skills to Feed Your Family, Stay Warm and Fix What Breaks, Even If You Live in Town

Your grandparents could purify water, put up a winter's food, keep a house warm with the power out and fix what broke. So can you: with the numbers written down, and the drawings that show how.

Do you own a shelf of survival skills books that turned out to be lists? Have you closed one because it said learn to can and never told you how many pounds of pressure, for how many minutes? Do you live on a quarter acre, in a rental or an apartment, and get tired of books written for people with forty acres and a barn?

That is not your fault. Most of the books on this shelf were written fast, without the figures, and without a single diagram. A skill you cannot see and cannot measure is not a skill. It is a headline.

The Illustrated Lost Skills of Self-Reliance Handbook is built the other way around. Two hundred and ten numbered skills, in twelve chapters, each one written so that you can put the book down, walk out to the kitchen, the garage or the yard, and do the thing.

Inside you will learn: How to store two weeks of safe water for your household and make more with the CDC's exact bleach dose, a rolling boil or a bucket filter you build in an afternoon How to start a fire in the rain, lay it so it burns without you, run a wood stove clean, and the carbon monoxide rules that decide who survives an outage How to build a raised bed, make compost that heats, grow the calorie crops, keep four hens, a hive and a goat, and save seed that comes back How to can tomatoes, beans, meat and jam by the USDA and National Center for Home Food Preservation tables, with the altitude adjustment worked out, plus drying, fermenting, curing and a root cellar How to fix a running toilet, thaw a frozen pipe, seal the drafts, size a small solar kit, run a generator safely and keep food cold without the grid How to stop severe bleeding, splint an arm, treat a burn, find north with a stick, tie the seven knots that do the work, sharpen every edge you own, rehang an ax, darn a sock and mend a boot How to run the household side: the ledger, the binder, the neighborhood skills map, the radio that works when the phone does not Twenty-six engraving-style plates, drawn in plain black ink, sit exactly where a picture teaches more than a paragraph: the layers in a gravity filter, the three fire lays, the headspace in a jar, the angle of a knife on a stone, the cutaway of a pressure canner.

Every chapter opens with a Town Version for lots, rentals and balconies, and closes with Practice This Week and a checklist. Every skill ends with an Old Hand's Note, the thing a competent neighbor would tell you across the fence. The back of the book holds a glossary, a month-by-month calendar, a source list and a practice card, and the Brannock Bonus Vault gives you eight printable companions: the water and power calculators, the canning quick cards, every checklist, the binder tabs and the neighborhood map.