How to Build a DIY Rainwater Collector
One of the utility bills that keeps going up (like everything else) is the water bill. People on municipal water sometimes have to wonder when the price hikes will stop. And even if you don’t have municipal water, relying instead on a well pump or other water...
7 Everyday Things That Attract Flies (Get Rid of Them ASAP)
Flies are by far one of the most annoying thing about summer. No matter where you are, inside the house or outside in the garden, flies are a constant thing. They buzz around your face, they land on food, and they always appear when you think they’re gone. But...
Why Some Hens Lay Blue Eggs
The first time you reach into a nesting box and pull out a blue egg, you stop and stare. I did. It was sitting right there next to the usual brown ones, and the blue color was so clear and so unexpected that I was almost sure something had gone wrong with my hen. It...
9 Fruits You Can Grow from Cuttings
Maybe you’ve decided you want to grow fruits; after all, they are an amazing investment for self-sufficiency since you can make jams, can them, dry them, freeze them, or make delicious drinks and syrups. They’re the whole package. The problem is that you walk into...
10 Things You Should Never (Ever!) Store in Plastic Containers
You probably have a cabinet full of plastic containers. I sure do and some of these plastic containers are stained orange from spaghetti sauce, a couple are missing their lids, and at least one smells faintly of last week's leftovers no matter how many times I wash...
12 Signs Your Canned Food Has Gone Bad
Has this ever happened to you before? You go into your pantry ready to grab a jar of whatever you canned last season you look at it... and something is… not right? The jar does not look the same way it used to when you put it in the pantry and this is kind of...
DIY Natural Noise-Cancelling Walls
Has this ever happened to you? Staying in your backyard on a nice summer morning, thinking about what to do with this beautiful day and then BRRRRRR!!! You start hearing this unbearable sound and all you want to do is just go somewhere quiet. Most of the time, it’s...
Top 7 Best States to Be Self-Sufficient
Every once in a while, somebody emails me asking the same thing. They want to know where in the country they should move if they are serious about starting a homestead. They want land, fair weather, decent taxes, and neighbors who will not call the county on them for...
If You See This Weed, Your Garden Is in Trouble…
Nobody plants weeds. They just show up. You pull them, you toss them, you move on, and I've done it a thousand times. But weeds aren't random. Each weed grows where the soil suits it, so a weed taking over a bed is a sign of what's happening in the dirt below. And...
Aged Chicken Manure – What It Is, How to Make It, and How to Use It Safely
If you keep even a handful of hens, you already have a steady supply of what old-timers used to call brown gold. Chicken manure is genuinely one of the best natural fertilizers available, richer in nitrogen, phosphorus, and potassium than almost any other common...
10-10-10 Fertilizer – The Complete Guide
10-10-10 is probably the most recognizable bag on the fertilizer shelf, and also one of the most misunderstood. It gets reached for as a default, all-purpose choice for everything from tomatoes to lawns, when in reality it's the right answer far less often than its...
How to Grow Spinach – The Complete Guide
Spinach is one of the first things I plant every spring, and one of the first things I lose to bolting if I'm not paying attention. It's a fast, nutrient-dense crop that rewards a little planning, and punishes procrastination by turning bitter and running to seed the...
2,4-D Weed Killer – What It Is, How It Works, and Whether It’s Safe to Use
If you have ever bought a bag of "weed and feed" for your lawn, there is a good chance you already own 2,4-D without realizing it. It is one of the oldest and most widely used herbicides in the world, and it works differently than the glyphosate products most...
Why You Should Bury Your Cotton Underwear in the Garden
You take a look at your garden and it looks A-M-A-Z-I-N-G! The tomatoes are heavy and bright red all the way up the vine. The beans have run to the top of their poles and started reaching for each other. So you stand there a minute feeling pretty good about the whole...
Never Plant These Vegetables in a Container or Bucket
Maybe your garden is small. Maybe the only decent soil on your place sits in the wrong spot, or you're renting, or your back isn't up for digging another bed this year. So you start eyeing the stack of buckets by the shed and the old totes behind the barn, and you...
Foods That Grow Under Snow – A Homesteader’s Guide to Winter Harvests
The first winter I left carrots in the ground past the first snowfall, I figured I had just lost the crop. I was wrong. When I finally dug through eight inches of snow in January, out came carrots that were sweeter than anything I had pulled in October. That discovery...
Plastic Water Tanks – The Complete Guide
Once you commit to storing your own water, whether for drinking, irrigation, livestock, or just backup security, you'll run into the same question almost immediately: what tank should I actually buy? Plastic dominates this market for good reason, but not every plastic...
5 Surprising Ways to Reuse Graywater Around the Homestead
You already know graywater is worth saving. And you've seen the same short list a hundred times. Water the flower beds. Run the washer out to the lawn. You've probably poured a dishpan on the flowers yourself. That's all fine, and I do some of it too. But you didn't...
Easy DIY Candle Making at Home: A Complete Beginner’s Guide
Candle making is one of those homestead skills that pays for itself fast. A pound of wax and a few basic supplies turn into candles that would cost three or four times as much at the store, and once you've got the basic technique down, you can adapt it into...
How to Get TV Reception When You’re Miles From a Tower
This is one of the most annoying homesteading problems. Your TV has no signal. You’re not able to watch anything without interruptions. And this keeps repeating day after day. Why can't you hold a channel out here when a house in town pulls in twenty of them with a...
DIY White Oil for Your Homestead
You probably love tomatoes, but they can be some of the most difficult vegetables to grow. Why? Because pests love them as much as you do. Maybe this happened to you. Going into the garden to see what your tomatoes are doing and you find their leaves full of little...
Homemade Dish Soap – Recipes, Ingredients, and Everything You Need to Know
Every homesteader reaches a point where buying another plastic bottle of dish soap off the grocery shelf starts to feel wrong. It is one small purchase, sure, but multiply it across a year and you have a pile of single-use plastic, a list of ingredients you cannot...
How to Make Bricks at Home, Step by Step (4 Methods That Actually Work)
Paying store prices each time you want to edge a garden bed, line a fire pit, or shore up a wall makes no sense and I have some good news for you. There’s no need to lose cash for this. You can make your own bricks at home with materials you can find under your feet...
Parchment Paper Substitute – 10 Real Alternatives That Work in the Kitchen
You are halfway through mixing a batch of cookies when you reach into the drawer and find an empty roll. No parchment paper. This happens more often than it should, and the good news is that a reliable parchment paper substitute is almost certainly already in your...
Canning Carrots – The Complete Guide
Carrots store well in a root cellar for months on their own, so why can them at all? Because canned carrots are ready to dump straight into a soup or side dish with zero prep, and a well-stocked shelf of them means one less thing standing between you and dinner on a...
Deer Jerky Recipe – The Safe Way to Turn Venison Into Trail-Ready Jerky
A good deer season leaves you with more venison than your freezer really wants to hold, and jerky is one of the best ways to turn that surplus into something you will actually reach for all winter. It is lightweight, shelf-stable, and turns a pound of meat into a...
Homemade Kefir – A Complete Beginner’s Guide
The first jar of kefir grains I ever got came in a small ziplock bag from a woman at my local farmers market, handed over like she was passing along a secret. She was not wrong to treat it that way. A few dollars worth of rubbery little culture turned into more...
Homemade Almond Milk Recipe – How to Make It From Scratch
I switched to making my own almond milk years ago, after doing the math on how much a carton of the store bought stuff was costing me every week for a product that's mostly water anyway. Once I saw how simple the process actually is, there was no going back to paying...
Working Dogs – The Complete Guide to Herding, Guarding, Hunting, and Vermin Control Roles
Ask ten homesteaders what a good working dog looks like and you will get ten different answers, because the term covers jobs that have almost nothing in common with each other. A dog built to gather sheep from a hillside and a dog built to sleep in a barn full of...
Fur Hen – The Complete Guide to Fluffy, Fur-Feathered Chickens
If you have ever seen a photo of a chicken that looks more like a small, walking pom-pom than a bird, you have met a fur hen. It is not an official breed name, it is a descriptive nickname that has caught on for chickens whose feathers grow soft, loose, and fur-like...
Mini Pigs – Everything You Need to Know Before Bringing One Home
A neighbor of mine bought what she was told was a "teacup pig" from an online breeder, a piglet small enough to fit in a purse in the photos. Two years later, that same pig weighs close to 150 pounds and lives in a custom-built stall in her barn, nowhere near the lap...
Why Did My Hens Stop Laying Eggs?
You wake up and it’s a beautiful morning. As usual, you grab your basket or bucket and go to the chicken coop to gather the eggs. You lift the nest box lid, and there is nothing in there. The same thing keeps happening days in a row and you can’t understand what’s...
Birch Tree Syrup – The Complete Guide
We've mentioned birch briefly in our roundup of backyard trees worth tapping, but it deserves its own deep dive, because birch syrup is genuinely not just maple syrup's lesser cousin. It's a different product with a different flavor, a completely different production...
The Real Cost of Starting a Homestead (And How to Cut It)
When Mark and I bought our piece of land, I thought the price on the listing was the number I needed to save for. I had it in my head like a finish line. Save that much, buy the land, done. Then the land showed up with a second bill. And a third. And a fourth. The...
Why You Should Drop A Cactus Pad in Your Water Bucket
Think about how much muddy water shows up around your place in just one month. The rain barrel goes brown because the roof was coated in dust and pollen before the storm hit. The stock tank churns up its own bottom and turns cloudy. Or if you’re among the lucky ones,...
When Essential Home Equipment Fails – A Resilience-First Triage Plan
Self-sufficiency does not mean repairing every machine without help. It means understanding which household systems are essential, noticing failures early, protecting people and property, and keeping a workable backup while the real cause is diagnosed. That...
How to Start a No-Dig Garden From Scratch
If your garden gets a little smaller every year because your back can't take what it used to, keep reading. You till in spring. You fight weeds all summer. And by August you're moving like someone ten years older than you were in May. So, what if you never had to turn...
How to Make Cheese Powder at Home (Safely)
I go through a lot of cheese on this homestead, and like most of you, I've had blocks go dry at the edges or shred sitting in the fridge longer than I meant it to. Turning that cheese into powder is one of the best ways I've found to stretch it, and it's a lot simpler...
12 Ways To Mouse-Proof Your Homestead
Maybe this already happened to you. You walk into your pantry and you notice that there’s a bag with a hole in a corner. It looks chewed and the first thing that crosses your mind is mice. You’re right. Mice are the main culprits in this case. The easy answer here...
What August Says About Your Homestead
By August, you can already see the rewards the summer season had for you. The garden is full of tomatoes, the mornings start to feel a little cooler, and honestly, the most telltale sign is that you feel like you want to just take a break. And I get it, but August is...
