Practical Self Sufficiency

Practical Self Sufficiency

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Dick Strawbridge is a proper national treasure – ex army Lieutenant Colonel and team leader on the superb Scrapheap Challenge from the 90s. He is also an accomplished self-sufficiency expert who made a fascinating BBC2 series “It’s not easy being green”. He also sports an enormous moustache, allegedly the biggest in showbusiness!
The Practical Self Suffiency book is in essence a book of the series published by Dorling Kindersley and a great read it is too.
It covers a lot of aspects of trying to be more self-sufficient for the urban dweller like me right up to the full on DIY farming types. As you’d expect from Dorling Kindersley it is well designed with lots and lots of photos and printed on lovely glossy (but probably not very green paper)

The book is very good on vegetable growing, storing and preserving and has fascinating sections on making biodiesel yourself (as I write this a lot of panic fuel buying is happening!), making a solar dryer to preserve food, a smoker, generating electricity, nettle beer even a compost loo!
I would heartily recommend this book as a great intro to being more self-sufficient. It’s main function though is not to give you all the information you need on a topic but whet your appetite and get you hungry for more information and off researching further. As an example the make your own pizza oven section neglects to mention the benefit of an insulation layer and the ratio of sand to clay but having a clay base is something I will add to mine -so I did learn something new after all!
All in all, Great Stuff!

Disclaimer: Dorling Kindersley sent me a free copy for which I thank them and the button below will earn me a small commission from Amazon. So if you want to buy it without me benefiting – just google “Practical Self Sufficiency by DIck and James Strawbridge”!

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