This post will be updated as more folders with files become available.
All hosting at this time is through Google Drive.
While I have privacy concerns with Google, it is still a good free hosting service for files at this time. If that changes, I will move the files.
Food Preservation
Canning Safety and Basics: The main folder was crowded and clumsy to find individual topics. I now have it organized into individual folders. This update added 14 March 2025
Salsas: All recipes in this folder have an English and a Spanish version.
Other Food Preservation Techniques: General contents include a large document on preservation of home grown produce, including storage of the whole fruits and vegetables prior to or without preserving techniques, a document on general food storage, and a document on food safety and preservation during natural disasters.
As a side note, I am particularly pleased with the curing and smoking section. Two of those documents had already lost hosting and were dead links. I used my knowledge of how webpages work to recover the files which were still up but floating (no link to the content).
I will be adding to this document as I get more files hosted. In the meantime, restack this post to share on your own feed. It should be easier to find than random notes.
Growing Your Own Food and Community Gardening
Agriculture and Gardening: This folder houses files on specific fruits, vegetables, grains and other food plants, as well as files about farm management including maintaining field health. I am debating whether to include orchards in this section or put them in their own section. If you have an opinion on this, please share in comments.
Vegetable Crops: Detailed documents on multiple crops as well as alternative tilling and mulching practices to assure soil preservation in vegetable growing.
Non Orchard Fruit Crops: Strawberries, bog grown fruits like cranberries, cane (raspberry, blackberry), and bush fruits. Tree fruits, such as apples and pears, will be in another folder.
Pest and Disease Management: This was the most sobering moment of this project so far. I don’t expect it will be the last. It is nearly impossible to even browse the files in this folder without calling to mind specific patterns of mold, blight, or rot seen on the produce on the shelves of your local grocery. I personally call this folder, “Welcome to the Nightmare.”
Wild Animal Management : As anyone who has ever had even a small farm or even a home garden knows, the first ones to notice are the local wildlife. I was particularly impressed with these documents because most of them take a “coexistence first, control second” approach. There is also an entire file on building houses and feeders for birds and small mammals.
Animal Husbandry: Animal husbandry is the catch all term for raising animals in a farm environment. If you are raising chickens for eggs or keeping a few goats for their milk, you are participating in animal husbandry.
Poultry: Resources including tips on keeping chickens in urban environments, instructions on how to build and maintain “chicken tractors,” and keeping waterfowl for meat or eggs.
Manure Management: Modern life has sanitized our view of farming, both literally and figuratively. If you are keeping any kind of animals, you will end up with far more poop than you ever imagined possible. Keeping up with it and knowing how to manage it before it becomes a problem is a vital part of farming.
Horses: This folder is a little sparse for now but hopefully will be added to later. Societally, we have come to think of keeping horses as a luxury for the wealthy. If we were to return to a more agrarian way of thinking, horses become a vital part of managing a farm. Fossil fuels conditioned us to believe anything an animal could do, a machine can do better, but fossil fuels are not an endless resource.
General: This folder contains overview documents on a variety of topics. Individual topic folders contain more detailed information, but for “Just the Basics” this folder has information on cattle, sheep, chickens, as well as information that was difficult to otherwise categorize like managing silos and alternative bedding for animals.
Farm Management - Pasture: It’s just a big empty field, how difficult can it be? There are a lot of misconceptions about farming. One of the biggest is that it isn’t really that hard. If you are raising animals for food, your life is literally depending on your success. The ability to recognize a plant that could poison your livestock or cultivate your fields for best nutrition so that the meat and milk produced are sustaining can be vital.
Cow - Meat: Information specific to raising cattle for meat.
Cow - Dairy: Information specific to keeping cattle for dairy.
Update Log:
Update: 27 February 2025
New folders have been added to the Google Drive. I am in talks for additional space because I expect this project will soon fill the space I have available.
Update: 04 March 2025
Links to folders I already had live have been added to the document. New folders include Vegetable Crops, Non Orchard Fruit Crops, and Pest and Disease Management.
Update: 14 March 2025
The realization I’ve been time traveling for the update log. Not really. Not a Time Lord and no TARDIS, but apparently my mind was still stuck in 2024. Can’t imagine why. Not like anything traumatic has happened this year. (Heavy sarcasm if that isn’t obvious.)
This week saw a LOT of changes to the organization of the File Preservation Project, making individual topics quicker and easier to find. For example, instead of the Canning Basics folder being just a long list of files, there are now individual folders by topic.
The Animal Husbandry folder now has links to content specific folders. A folder of resources in Spanish has been added. Unlike with other resources, the folder is not subdivided. There are several reasons for this. One, I am not literate in Spanish and could not accurately categorize the files. Two, there simply aren’t as many resources in Spanish as there are in English and if I subdivided, I would have a bunch of folders with only one or two files in each. While I don’t have the means to hire someone to assist me at this time, I hope that in the future I will be able to add more resources in other languages.
The one upside to being sick in bed is that there isn’t a lot else to do but type on a computer that I have energy for. (Even that was a bit much a few days this week, but I still got a lot of progress made.)
Updates coming soon: In addition to more modern approaches, I have been working on finding resources on plant based medicine and Indigenous practices. I have already found several resources and one of my subscribers has been helping me to find more. Thank you
! I will be adding a full folder and summaries of resources.
Thank you for this work. It's going to be needed.
Thank you for having the foresight for us all ❤️ I cannot express my gratitude enough, bless you 🙏