The Farmers’ Handbook – Volumes One to Five by Chris Evans and Jakob Jespersen

The Farmers’ Handbook – Volumes One to Five by Chris Evans and Jakob Jespersen

Available for FREE: here and here at Permaculture News

I give this book 10 out of 10 acorns.

These books are fantastic. These books really are handbooks. They supply the reader with an amazing amount of practical ideas on how to grow food more efficiently, healthfully, sustainably, and easily.

These books were written for farmers in the Himalayans. As such, not all the planting ideas will pertain to your given area, but there are still very many useful ideas. And by useful, I mean useful. These are ideas for people who need to grow food to survive, not just to augment their lives. They’re ideas for people who don’t have much/any money to buy fertilizers, amendments, tools, etc…. The ideas are also explained very well, with pictures, descriptions and explanations. These are books that are excellent for someone who wants a practical foundation in permaculture, and will likely have some great ideas for those more experienced.

Each volume correlates with permaculture zones. I will give a short summary of the handbook, and mention some of the ideas I found interesting and useful in the handbooks, by volume:


Volume One: Inside the House (Zone Zero). It covers basic nutrition, sanitation, building and using an improved stove, and creating a haybox. The instructions for the improved stove and haybox are very straight-forward and easy to understand—and able to be created on site with just clay, straw, stones and a bowl used to make a mold.



Volume Two: Near the House, Part One (Zones One and Two). Covers everything from digging a pit latrine (to later plant a fruit tree in) to double digging, liquid manure, beekeeping and waste water usage. One very interesting idea they had was to put all sweepings (from inside and the patio) into something akin to a compost pile, called a sweeping pit, which one can use to create compost or grow potatoes in. I’ve always just dumped my dirt and dust from the floor into the garbage, but it makes perfect sense to put that amount of debris that adds up over time into a specific place. This volume also gives great instructions for using mulch—what to use, how deep to apply it, how to plant seeds in it, etc. Very useful for someone like me that always hears about how great mulch is…only to wonder how, exactly, I’m supposed to do it!


Volume Three: Near the Home, Part Two (Zones One and Two). This book covers a ton of very useful practices, from air nurseries to hot beds, to leaf pots, to grafting and budding. It also covers some more climate specific growing ideas, such as off-season onion growing. I found the manure section fascinating—especially their utilization of ash mixed with cow manure, as well as how to make and use green manures. One interesting thing that stood out to me is how you can apply these manures with a simple broom—dipping it in and shaking it over the plants. Free and effective, and it had never occurred to me. The chapters on air nurseries and leaf pots are also great, with excellent descriptions and explainations.


Volume Four: The Fields (Zones Three and Four). This book covers no-till farming, green manures, agroforestry, living fences, growing bamboo from cuttings and top grafting. I loved the chapter on Air Layering. As someone who is scared of messing up a grafting, air layering is described as an easy and quick way to grow a new tree—just shave off an inch of bark all the way around a branch, wrap it in moss and cover securely in plastic. In 2-3 months, you have a rooted tree…for the cost of some plastic! I’ll be trying this on my mom’s fruit trees come late winter!


Volume 5: Forest, Soil, & Other Topics (All Zones). This covers a lot of community organization techniques, as well as the importance of soil preservation and the use of mulch and terracing, as well as how to build an A-frame and the basics of permaculture.


Volumes two-four are definitely my favorites. I have learned a lot from them, and they contain a lot of information I can use. Volumes one and five are also very useful, but far more site specific. So, even while not all of these books’ content was useful to me, I find the handbooks to be very well organized, easy to understand, and full of useful information for their intended audience—and for those of us who are NOT their intended audience!

If there was one thing I would improve in these books, it would be instructions on how to make all those nifty bamboo fences, cages and structures. This is probably common knowledge for the handbooks’ intended audience, but I would really love to learn how to build these things from my own resources!

I would love to see a review/critique from someone with more permaculture knowledge and experience, but as a relative newbee who might not know any better, these books are gold… as in 10 golden acorns!

Thank you, these look terrific! As a side note, it's well worth checking out the rest of their online store - they offer many other free ebooks.

Many useful chapters. The non-cement spring box was an eye-opener as was building and managing a pit latrine so that when it's full you can immediately plant a fruit tree in it.

These look like great resources.  I've already downloaded them and can't wait to dive in.  Thanks for posting them!

Thanks for the info Nicole!  I have downloaded these and look forward to reading.

These look very interesting. Have downloaded !!

Thanks for supplying the links to get the downloads going!  :-)
FREE is always appreciated and I will go through the chapters diligently, however, very slowly as it is Gardening Season -- and I'm just getting started on that.

Again, THANKS!!

Thank you so much for posting this, what a wealth of information. I have already dived well into book 1.

It is only a week from winter here in Australia so I am making some time to bundle up warmly with lots of hot cuppas and read my way through the lot!

I give this book 9 out of 10 acorns.

Visually, this e-book is very appealing and ocularly interesting. It isn't just text jammed on a page, but more so in an organization style with some elements that are reminiscing of comic books. The book starts with outlining the structure (method) of how they go about explaining elements of the book which is appreciated. I really like how the chapters are framed from a very personal view of an individual and their immediate needs in their living space and then start echoing out into other areas that are important to an individual but are more interconnected to more and more of the outside world.

The book is in a way blunt showing or explaining the importance of certain subjects but it is a refreshing take instead of a common approach of glossing over tough subjects. I also appreciate the not so common tidbits of information such as talking about using/making haybox cookers. It provides just enough information to make sense and understand the operation without any chaffy additional words.

At the price of free, I really can not complain. This is an excellent resource that I have enjoyed reading and plan on re-reading into the future. While this might not have all information applicable for where I live, it has plenty of information to make it a useful document.