RESOURCES I RECOMMEND

These are the people and places I regularly go to for education and inspiration!

Okay, HJF offers a WEALTH, folks! She has made loads and loads of both pay-what-you-can and free information readily available, and it can be easy to get overwhelmed. I would recommend starting with her Permaculture for Beginners course. It may be more abstract than you expect, but it's a seriously accessible and well-organized primer on what "permaculture" even means. Generally, these are the places you can learn more:

Food Not Lawns & Free Permaculture - These are both hubs where you can get a free copy of Heather Jo's book Food Not Lawns, as well as many different online courses, informative blog posts, a coloring book, and more.
Eco Design Hive - This is a burgeoning online space for folks to gather and talk about SO much more than just growing food. The Food Not Lawns FB group has been such a wonderful resource and community, and some of us have already switched over to EcoDesignHive. Break up with big tech wherever you can! I hope you'll join us there!
Permaculture Women - Same awesome info, but by women, for women. Lord knows women need safe spaces in this world, and lord knows sisterhood is potent.

PERMACULTURE & GARDENING

GARDEN

The Art of Doing Stuff:

I've been following TAODS since my 2010, and it's provided me so much information, education, and delight over the years. Karen has great, sometimes pretty random and hilarious how-tos, and an especially great wealth of gardening and home maintenance tips. While the blog is decidedly not about veganism/sustainability/permaculture/etc, it IS full of detailed how-tos from seed-sprouting to harvesting to using cold frames in the winter, plus keeping chickens, efficiently growing food in your yard, and how she beautifully and efficiently uses the space in her local community garden.

The Last Farm:

These folks don't have a huge online presence, but share a veritable trove of fascinating ideas, goals, etc as they work on their new home site and permaculture design. I highly recommend checking them out for all sorts of information about off-grid power generation and storage, "forgotten" farming methods, and general thoughts/resources on the environment, sustainability, and eco-socialism. There's a newly started Substack newsletter available here.

Home-Grown and Hand-Gathered:

This couple's documentation of their journey to sustainable living is inspiring, informative, and fun. They aren't vegan, which I obviously wouldn't recommend, but in my opinion they are engaging in meat-eating in the only way I think folks should - they hunt and fish for wild animals, and they eat a much smaller, much more proportional amount of meat to the average animal eater. Here's their website.

Soul Fire Farm:

Oh man, this is such a great organization. The farm itself is regenerative, Afro-Indigenous centered, community-driven, and actively fighting against food apartheid in this country. In addition to that, co-founder Leah Penniman just put out a book, and they regularly hold workshops and events that have so much great information and opportunity for us to care for and feed each other, ourselves, and the environment (because, y'know, those things are all inextricable from one another!) Here are their resources and programs.

The Forest Garden Podcast:

This podcast is a real trove of information, whether Mike and Ben are chatting about progress within their own permaculture designs, or if they're chatting with one of their myriad interesting guests. This podcast covers a nice range of topics without losing focus, and it's really listenable. They're also over on the 'gram.

Future Ecologies

This podcast is an exceptionally beautiful one. Rich and compelling storytelling weaves together with thoughtful and immersive audioscapes to present a seriously cool array of knowledge about the environment and anthropology to the listener. They don't put out a huge number of episodes, but each one is a gem.

Low Tech Magazine:

Okay, this website is, in a word, cool. A wide-ranging resource for all sorts of ways we can live our lives in a less extractive, less (or perhaps, differently) tech-reliant way. Whether you want to fix broken gadgets, retrofit them to make them less online/more sustainable, learn about technologies from the pre-fossil fuel era, green up your life in a myriad of ways, or simply nerd out on some factoids, Low Tech Magazine is absolutely worth checking out.

Backwoods Home:

Backwoods Home Magazine has been a standby for homesteaders, gardeners, and the like for decades, and for good reason. While they don't promote either a vegan or permaculture lifestyle, one of their missions is to get homesteaders away from a stock-up-on-plastic-wrapped-Walmart-goods way of "homesteading" and into a grow/hunt/trade/make-your-own-goods way of living. Each quarterly covers a wide range, with recipes, how-tos, anecdotes, and tips, and I find something extremely useful in every copy.

A note here: Self-reliance is the name of the game at Backwoods Home, but I haven't found that they fall into the trap of individualism that many "preparedness" publications and organizations lean into, which is a one-way ticket to exclusion and anti-community. However, this feels like a good time to point out that, in general, when romping around the world of homesteading, self-reliance, and related areas like homeschooling and subsistence gardening, you will unfortunately need to be on the lookout for nationalism, white supremacism, Christofascism, gun/violence worship, and other forms of hateful ideology. A lot of people are brought into these arenas by fear rather than love, hope, or sheer interest in the subject. It's important to remember that self-reliance should be a vehicle toward helping yourself help others. We can't be a closed-loop system unto ourselves, we need to make community and outreach a part of our everyday lives. This is a problem that plagues the US, and the permaculture community is no exception, so I try to support those doing the work of grappling with the white-centered, male-centered bent of too many organizations in the movement. One of the central ideas of permaculture is an appreciation for the fruitfulness of boundaries -- where different things meet there is usually immense potential for growth, and this is true whether we're talking about where a forest meets a clearing or where different individuals and communities bleed and blend into each other. Thus it follows that there is no place in permaculture (or, in my opinion, a loving heart) for racism, sexism, bigotry, or exclusion in general.

KITCHEN

COOKING & BAKING

Below I'll list the websites and cookbooks I frequent, but I want to drive home that a significant amount of the time I make sh*t up! While baking is essentially edible chemistry and variations are significantly less flexible, cooking is incredibly adaptable and almost endless changes can be made to suit diets, tastes, time, and availability of ingredients. So for the seasoned cook, I highly recommend playing around, veganizing non-vegan recipes, and simply experimenting. Turns out we can play with our food!

For the fledgling cooks: to be honest, after 10+ years of veganism and 20+ years of regularly cooking and baking for myself and others, I may have gotten a little out of touch with what resources are best for a beginner cook or newbie vegan/flexitarian. But I 1000% encourage questions! If you're looking for ways to start eating more plants and fewer animals, or if you're simply new to cooking for yourself or for a household and you find I'm not providing the on-ramps and introductory information you need, please reach out! I love talking food and I would be glad to pass along recipes, help you veganize a dish, or menu plan, or whatever you're struggling with. Also, I tend toward fairly simple recipes that don't involve complicated methods or inaccessible ingredients, so the resources below should still be in your wheelhouse.

The Joy of Cooking

Old school and inimitable, The Joy of Cooking is a must-have resource for all cooks, if you ask me. Chock-a-block full of recipes ranging from the fundamental basics to somewhat high falutin dishes, it covers a ton of ground and also includes general methodology and vocabulary. Pretty much as close as you can get to a culinary textbook without actually buying a culinary textbook. These recipes are almost never vegan, but I've veganized a ton of them with great success.

The Flavor Thesaurus

I love this book. A fabulous jumping-off point for experimentation, a great way to figure out what leftovers and rando ingredients sitting in the back of your cupboard would turn out to be really delicious together, and even a solid coffee table book to open and read at random. What flavors make good and bad bedfellows is an expensive thing to trial-and-error, and The Flavor Thesaurus can both help you avoid headaches and spice up routine recipes.

The Minimalist Baker

I have yet to try a Minimalist Baker recipe that hasn't turned out. Not only baked goods, this is a resource I use regularly, and I've both adapted and used as written a ton of their recipes. Also a great website for folks who are gluten-free!

Other Books & Sites:

Vegan Richa is a real standout, absolutely full of interesting and flavorful dishes
Alicia Silverstone's The Kind Diet was one of my first books about veganism, and I really enjoyed it. I still consider it a great resource for healthful vegan recipes, and it provides great information and advice for an organic, whole-food, unprocessed diet. She also includes information about keeping a macrobiotic diet, and that's a fun bonus!
Each and every one of Tomi's recipes at The Vegan Nigerian are mouthwatering, and the ones I've tried have turned out really well. Once in a while she'll use an ingredient that's a little hard to find in the US, but often you can just sub in a local food pretty easily.
Nora Cooks is another really solid option for finding recipes
Vintage cookbooks are a fun way to try old recipes that may be new to you. Often you'll have to veganize them, but not always! In fact, a lot of older cookbooks are less reliant on putting a huge proportion of animals products in each dish than modern recipes.

HOME

This is a bit of a vague category, but here I'll list the resources I use for home improvement and repairs, DIYs, housekeeping, and the like. This was a much more robust online world when before monetization and social media blew up the blogging world, but there are still some holdouts.

The Art of Doing Stuff

As I wrote above, Karen from TAODS is an incredible DIYer, and has a huge number of helpful methods to do home repairs, build and craft items yourself, and has tips for just about everything, from building a pizza oven to the best way to get rid of fruit flies to whether or not you can actually open a corked wine bottle without an opener.

This Old House

A classic, and for good reason. The articles are informative, usually include pretty good step-by-step photos, and cover a pretty wide range of topics.

Apartment Therapy

I debated whether or not to include AT on this list, because they've become outrageously hit or miss in recent years. As with most other websites, paid content, usually for Bezos' website, has become a really problem. BUT -- there are still older archived DIYs that are pretty handy, and occasionally you get some good inspiration or how-to, or at least directed to the site of a DIYer or designer who has helpful stuff. Their Small Spaces series is also usually still pretty good, and reminiscent of the older, pre-spon-con days when the website was actually about apartment living. Also, it's usually worth checking out the comments, where it's common to see professionals and designers and DIYers sounding off about the quality of the advice and offering up some good nuggets themselves.

Design Files

This website mostly features home builds and renovations of an extremely specific niche of modern design. Generally it's not to my personal taste, stylewise, but very often they feature sustainable builds and retrofits, since Australia is so much more into fairly genuinely green building than the US, and it's a great representation of how "primitive" concepts like passive solar can blend seamlessly into even the most modern, trendy home. They also increasingly feature garden spaces, so it's good inspiration for both in and outside of the home, as well as frequently running profiles of various artists and their work, which is always a treat.

Other Sites:

These are sites I used to frequent, and for various reasons have become less helpful or relevant to me in recent years. But some of their older archived posts are still useful and fun:

A Beautiful Mess: This started out as a blog written by two apartment-dwelling sisters, and, frankly, I enjoyed their scrappier earlier days more than the very polished brand they've become, with many more contributors and several houses apiece. That being said, they still have the occasional recipe, homekeeping tip, or DIY that I file away.
Paper & Stitch: Similarly, this is a site that was more useful when it was less about Amaz*n Prime Day sales and more about hand-crafting a home, but there are still some solid DIYs on there.
Home Made by Carmona: I would go right to the DIY section, where there's a good trove of how-tos.
Ctrl + Curate: Only sporadically updated but with an archive of DIYs and printables, this is a nice resource reminiscent of the good ol' days of blogging.

I know, I know, this one is kind of polarizing. While Pinterest is suffering the same "new internet" ills as all the other sites -- every sixth pin is an ad, every fifth is a useless TikTok video -- it in many ways is a better search engine than Google these days. I still stand by it as a very useful way to organize recipes, how-tos, and inspiration, and I go back to it regularly. It takes some time to get a feed that is really useful to you, but it's especially handy if you go in with specific topics or ideas in mind to search and you just want more information and different methods various folks have used.