If you’re anything like me then you find books to be a great source of education and inspiration. That’s why I keep my shelves full of great books.
Here is a list of 21 great permaculture books that will help you take your permaculture homestead to a whole new level.
A house without books is like a room without windows.
Horace Mann
1. Practical Permaculture
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2. The Resilient Farm and Homestead
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“Inaction quickly consumes a lifetime. Be curious, be bold, pay close attention to the world in front of you. And start trying stuff.”
― Author Ben Falk
“And relatively self-reliant households are the basic building block of any culture that is viable over the long term without requiring war (stealing of resources) to sustain itself. No democratic civilization can last long if it is built upon a citizenry that consume more than they produce; that’s debt and debt is inherently unsustainable and undemocratic. If our goal is a peaceful, just society, self-reliance at the home and community levels must be a central focus of our lives”
― Author Ben Falk
3. Plant Partners
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“It was once thought that the odor of certain companion plants deterred pests from feeding. For example, commonly recommended companion plants, such as marigold, peppermint, sage, and thyme, were often chosen for their strong fragrance. But over many years, multiple studies have shown that the scents of these plants don’t necessarily repel pests. Instead, further data are suggesting that these odors mask the volatile chemicals emitted from host plants. This points to the fact that the mechanisms of how certain companion plants deter pests (or don’t, as the case may be) are still being researched and debated among scientists. However, plenty of pest-deterring strategies are backed by solid scientific research, and those are the ones we will consider here.”
― Author Jessica Walliser
4. The Grafter’s Handbook
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5. Permaculture: Principles and Pathways Beyond Sustainability
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“If you understand it from an ecological or sustainability perspective, agriculture is the primary way we meet most of our needs, and it’s the greatest form of human intervention on our environment. It has intimately shaped our culture as powerfully as industrial modernity, but for ten thousand years rather than two hundred.”
— AuthorDavid Holmgren
6. The Permaculture Handbook
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“The emergence of garden farms is at hand. Under the pressure of necessity as unemployment rippled through the economy, millions of North Americans turned to gardening or expanded their gardens in 2009 as evidenced by a 40% increase in vegetable seed sales. Urban homesteading is spawning its own literature as energy descent forces more and more households to adapt in place. With income constrained and energy and materials shortages looming, the only resources capable of filling the gap in livelihood are imagination, information, and knowledge, in particular, a deeper understanding of the material cycles and energy flows of nature. For that understanding, we look to permaculture, a language derived from the patterns of the world around us.”
—Author Peter Bane
7. Permaculture: A Designers’ Manual
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“The greatest change we need to make is from consumption to production, even if on a small scale, in our own gardens. If only 10% of us do this, there is enough for everyone. Hence the futility of revolutionaries who have no gardens, who depend on the very system they attack, and who produce words and bullets, not food and shelter.”
― Author Bill Mollison
8. Introduction to Permaculture
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“Sitting at our back doorsteps, all we need to live a good life lies about us. Sun, wind, people, buildings, stones, sea, birds and plants surround us. Cooperation with all these things brings harmony, opposition to them brings disaster and chaos.”
― Author Bill Mollison
9. Gaia’s Garden: A Guide to Home-Scale Permaculture
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“The average yard is both an ecological and agricultural desert. The prime offender is short-mown grass, which offers no habitat and nothing for people except a place to sit, yet sucks down far more water and chemicals than a comparable amount of farmland.”
― Author Toby Hemenway
10. Sepp Holzer’s Permaculture
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“Nature’s book always contains the truth; we must only learn to read it.”
— Author Sepp Holzer
11. The One-Straw Revolution
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“When it is understood that one loses joy and happiness in the attempt to possess them, the essence of natural farming will be realized. The ultimate goal of farming is not the growing of crops, but the cultivation and perfection of human beings.”
― Author Masanobu Fukuoka
12. Edible Forest Gardens (2 volume set)
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“The first stage of the design phase is the formation of the design concept. The design concept is the ‘big idea’ or organizing notion of the whole design for our site. Our goals statement tells us our mission, and our base map and site analysis and assessment tell us the context within which we will achieve that mission. The design concept defines our vision for achieving that mission in that specific context in its most essential or fundamental aspect. Ideally, all the design details flow from this vision and harmonize with it, support it, and manifest it”
— Author Dave Jacke
13. Restoration Agriculture
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“What is needed are ecosystems that are designed to produce our food, fuel, animal feed, medicine and fibers, and ecosystems that can do so without the use of fossil fuel technology, those that can tolerate extremes of weather and potentially changing climates, and that can thrive without supplemental irrigation from vulnerable and increasingly expensive public utilities.”
― Author Mark Shepard
14. The Permaculture City
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“Local power is also the realm of the small nonprofit, church, and civic association. A handful of people, properly organized, can drive enormous changes in a city’s dynamics.”
― Author Toby Hemenway
15. Rainwater Harvesting for Drylands and Beyond, Volume 1
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16. Rainwater Harvesting for Drylands and Beyond, Volume 2
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17. Create an Oasis with Greywater
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“Like much of the country, we are in a record drought with record heat that is drying us out even more; stressing many shade plants, and threatening our cooling soil-carbon sponges—so we should be doing all we can to capture and hold on to cooling, life-enhancing moisture.”
— Author Brad Lancaster
18. Paradise Lot
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19. Edible Landscaping with a Permaculture Twist
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20. Teaming with Microbes
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“One of the most amazing things about mycorrhizal fungi is their ability to associate with more than one host plant at the same time—in other words, their networks can be shared among plants, even plants of different species. As a result of this feat, mycorrhizae can benefit entire forests, as the larger trees literally feed and protect the smaller trees through an interconnected mycelial network. And when one plant dies, many of its nutrients are returned to the network and flow toward other plants.”
― Jeff Lowenfels
21. Mycelium Running
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“I see the mycelium as the Earth’s natural Internet, a consciousness with which we might be able to communicate. Through cross-species interfacing, we may one day exchange information with these sentient cellular networks. Because these externalized neurological nets sense any impression upon them, from footsteps to falling tree branches, they could relay enormous amounts of data regarding the movements of all organisms through the landscape.”
― Paul Stamets
