Stuff You Can Use to Thrive

Raised beds that I am building to test Perennial Kitchen Garden layouts:

Vego Garden Modular Metal Raised Bed (which I will make 5′ x 3.5′, 17″ tall).

I use this for a perennial kitchen garden – growing herbs to use daily in the kitchen. Just come along and pick what you need for tonight’s dinner.

Vego Garden Modular Metal Raised Bed – 5′ x 3.5′ x 17″

Meadow Creature Broadfork is my favorite tool for starting new garden beds. I turn over the sod, add a layer of compost, then Milpa, and cover with woodchips.

Meadow Creature Broadfork – My favorite tool

Permies digital marketplace is YOUR source for all things permaculture for your homestead, side hustle, and designing your intentional life:
from video courses, to blueprints, to books.


Joseph Lofthouse is the author of Landrace Gardening: Food Security through Biodiversity and Promiscuous Pollination.

landrace gardening book
Get Joseph’s Landrace Gardening book

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Check out the 2024 Homesteading Bundle from Permies, which has 35 e-books, courses, videos.

What I really liked:

  • The Backyard Forest Garden e-book
  • Agroforestry
  • Restoration Agriculture: Designing Your Perennial Farm presentation from Permaculture Voices by Mark Shepard
  • Permaculture Thorns, A Book About Trying to Build Permaculture Community, by Paul Wheaton.
  • Plus 2 books by Nicole Sauce.
homesteading-and-permaculture-bundle
Homesteading and permaculture bundle

Check out the Solar Food Dehydrator from Permies. Watch the movie, get the plans, all for reasonable cost.

solar food dehydrator

If you don’t want the whole homesteading 2024 bundle, check out Paul Wheaton’s book – Building a Better World in your Backyard- Instead of Being Angry at Bad Guys


Check out Paul Wheaton’s book – Permaculture Thorns, which has interesting and amusing stories of people trying to form intentional community. People think that they have the same vision and goals – until they live together and decisions on money and conflict arise. They quickly find out that absolute consensus (and even democracy) don’t work in an intentional community. If you are thinking of forming an intentional community (including that libertarian utopia) then you need to read this book. Just $15.


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Recommendations and Resources:

All of these things we have used and recommend.

(Note that these links may be affiliate links).

Holistic Homesteading by Roxanne Ahern:

holistic homesteading


Live Not By Lies – by Rod Dreher.

This book rocked my world in 2020 and 2021, especially Section 2 where the Eastern European Christians who did not go along with the Bolsheviks were pushed to9 the margins of society, and Section 3 about how Christians survived the gulag.

Live Not by Lies

Farm Innovators 4250 Incubator. This is the incubator that I use.

Farm Innovators incubator

Surviving the Future by David Fleming and Shaun Chamberlin.

The title of this book inspired Thriving the Future Podcast.

Surviving the Future is a more digestible version of Lean Logic: A Dictionary for the Future and How to Survive It, a thick book which deep dives culture, community, debt, growth, de-growth, and assumes our problems can be handled in a Lean manner, all local. Highly recommended, if you are into localism, community, and remarkable Hope, despite an uncertain future.


Cotton Crochet Market Bags – Washable Crochet Grocery Bags – Reusable Crochet Produce Shopping Bags

I use these for storing veggies in the basement, hanging from nails on the rafters.


Wildcrafting Soda and Brews:

The Wildcrafting Brewer: Creating Unique Drinks and Boozy Concoctions from Nature’s Ingredients:


How to Make Vinegar:

Homebrewed Vinegar: How to Ferment 60 Delicious Varieties, Including Carrot-Ginger, Beet, Brown Banana, Pineapple, Corncob, Honey, and Apple Cider Vinegar by Kirsten K. Shockey:

vinegar shockey

American Nations: A History of the Eleven Rival Regional Cultures of North America. This explains why we have so much divide in this country. It’s been that way since the beginning and these seven cultures took their values West with them.


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