Alongside being tasty, beer has a number of surprisingly helpful properties that make it a potentially key ingredient in the garden: from making better fertilizer to actively fighting garden pests, I feel safe in the knowledge that there is a justifiable, practical reason to buy 2 crates of beer this weekend – it’s for the garden!

What Is Beer Made Of ?

Before going into how beer is so useful in the garden, it can be helpful to properly understand what beer is actually made from.

I actually brew my own beer (my recent brew is an English bitter that I made with way too much chocolate malt) so I always have about 20 lbs of extra brewing ingredients lying around.

Beer is basically a simple mixture of water, grains, and yeast.

Taken as their base ingredients, these three ingredients are already useful in the context of gardening: grains could grow new plants, water can… water your plants, and yeast is a helpful nutrient. However, it is the interplay between these ingredients, and the chemical reactions that occur after fermentation, that makes these ingredients even more useful and practical for your garden.

How Beer Can Affect Your Compost

Firstly, the most obvious way that beer is helpful in a garden is as a compost ingredient. Beer is basically nothing more than liquid infused with sugars and proteins from grains, and these sugars and proteins are incredibly useful for the development of healthy compost.

You can simply pour beer directly into your compost to help give a fledgling compost pile a bit more life.

However, if you are a home brewer like I am, you can go one step further; use your waste ingredients as the principal ingredient of compost!

As part of making beer, grains are steeped in hot water to help leech out their sugars into the water. After enough time has passed, the grains have given up most of their sugars and are now nothing more than leftover starch, fiber, and some trace proteins.

Most people usually toss this or feed it to their chickens, but you can instead pour it directly over your compost pile and work it in. The grains will act like brown matter, in that they will add plenty of carbohydrates to the mixture, while also decomposing and providing the whole thing with a ton of nutrients.

So while you can certainly just pour some leftover beer onto your compost, being able to use all of your grains is even better.

One thing to note if you are brewing your own beer is that you definitely shouldn’t add any hops to your compost pile. Hops are actually super poisonous to all kinds of animals, especially cats, and dogs, so definitely don’t put any hops onto your pile.

Related: How To Make A Barrel Of Beer At Home

How To Use Beer As a Pesticide For Wasps

A much less frequently utilized benefit of beer is its potential as a surprisingly good pesticide.

Now, most people on hearing the word “pesticide” would immediately jump to the anti-pesticide, natural-only arguments, and for the most part, they would probably be right. However, when I talk about using beer as a pesticide, it is not about pouring beer all over your plants to somehow avoid bugs that might eat your cabbages, but instead about killing that one pest that we all hate: wasps.

While wasps are vitally important if you are planning on growing something like figs, and they do also eat a few species of caterpillar that might prey on your garden, for the most part, wasps are nothing more than a pest.

This is especially true if you happen to keep bees, as desperate, hungry wasps can totally overwhelm an otherwise thriving beehive if you let the wasps get out of hand. However, just like us, wasps love beer! They don’t mind the alcohol, and they actively enjoy the combination of protein and sugars.

To use beer as a pesticide for wasps, simply cut off the top 15% or so of one of those big plastic bottles. Invert the cut-off top and place it into the lower part of the bottle, and then pour a bit of leftover beer into the plastic bottle.

While the wasps will know precisely how to get into the bottle, they won’t be able to figure out how to get out through the smaller hole you have left. This will result in a buildup of wasps in the bottle, and you can just throw them away at the end of the day, or even put them on top of your compost!

How To Use Beer As a Pesticide For Mosquitoes

In much the same way that you can use beer as a pesticide against wasps, you can also do the same for mosquitoes.

Mosquitoes are useful only in that they are a food source for birds – other than that, they are just a nuisance. The bloodsucking critters are primarily drawn to the release of carbon dioxide, which is how they evolved to seek out their prey to suck their blood.

Beer, of course, is constantly releasing carbon dioxide, making it a great way to make an effective trap!

Simply the same trap used for catching wasps can be used to catch and remove mosquitoes. Keep in mind, though, that eventually, the CO2 will run out, so to keep your trap running in the long term, add a little bit of yeast and a good spoonful of sugar to your beer trap. This will gradually release more and more CO2, thanks to the yeast eating the sugar and processing it into CO2.

So, while it might seem a little bit gross to need to throw away a big cola bottle filled with mosquitoes and wasps, it can really help to clear out your garden.

As I’m a home brewer, I always have a bit of leftover beer and yeast, making me enemy No.1 for every wasp and mosquito within 5 miles of my garden, so long as I remember to put traps out.

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With the bitter winds and maybe even snow, the garden becomes something belonging to a different time – why bother ever thinking about it when the sun has seemingly disappeared forever?

However, while being a bit lazy over winter is to be expected, there is actually a ton of preparation you can be doing during the wintertime to not only prepare your garden for the new year but also for yourself.

Trimming Trees & Perennials

For those of us lucky to have trees in our garden, whether they be fruit trees, ornamentals, or just those giant sycamores that provide wonderful shade in the summertime, the winter is the perfect time to give them some love.

Even though it is tempting to ignore your trees when they aren’t providing anything for you, they do actually require a bit of maintenance throughout the year.

The best time to do this maintenance is during the wintertime; trees generally go into dormancy over winter, meaning that their limbs are easier to manipulate without damaging the tree. Plus, unless your tree is an evergreen, its leaves will have fallen, making it way easier to be able to actually see what you are doing and work on your tree without the leaves getting in your way.

So instead of just forgetting about your trees over winter, take the time to trim brands, cut off dead limbs and just generally perform a bit of maintenance.

Though it might be difficult to manhandle and saw away at your trees, it will promote better health and even new growth in the spring, leading to a happier and healthier tree in the long run.

Related: The 10 Best Trees For Homesteaders

Varnish & Treat Wooden Fences

Wooden fences and wooden garden furniture are another easily forgettable part of the garden, something that many people wouldn’t even consider when planning their winter maintenance.

Though they seem like they should last forever, wood does need careful, regular maintenance to be able to stand the test of time. Left without tender love and care, even the best quality fence posts will decay and rot in the rain and winds.

This is why it is so important to take the time to care for anything made of wood in your garden.

A single coat of wood varnish will likely be enough if you make sure to do it every winter, year after year, but if you have neglected your fences in recent winters, you might need to give them a more thorough seeing to. This means some light sanding, followed by two coats of varnish to really help protect the wood.

This isn’t just for good looks, mind you – without regular treatment, your wooden fences will crumble and rot, ruining your borders and any useful garden furniture you might have.

Raking, Collecting Leaves & Tree Debris

Leaves are sometimes seen as the ultimate gardener’s bane – every year, like clockwork, they fall all over your garden, clogging up pathways and ruining garden beds.

You know you are supposed to rake them and get rid of them, but you just can’t bring yourself to drag out the rake every year.

Well, if you were a bit lazy in the fall season, now is the perfect time to get out there and collect any remaining fallen leaves, as well as any tree debris like loose branches. In fact, if you left them for several months on the ground, you might actually find that the leaves have already decomposed, adding to the nutrients of your soil and making your garden more productive!

Even if they are only partially decomposed, the looser structure of the leaves makes it super easy to pick up with a rake and deposit into your garden beds or your compost pile, allowing you to grow even larger and more nutritious crops in the spring.

Turning Your Compost For Spring

A compost pile is something every ardent gardener should cultivate, as not only is it the perfect way to add nutrients to your garden without paying extortionate amounts to garden centers, but it also serves as a way to recycle your kitchen waste.

During wintertime, most compost piles will enter a mild dormancy period, with not a lot of activity going on underneath the top layers. However, as winter reaches its zenith and the warmer weather starts to look closer and closer, it is probably a good idea to start resuming your compost maintenance.

This means regularly turning your compost, ideally with a pitchfork or another tool that can really get into and underneath the top layers, as well as adding a good mix of brown and green matter to keep growing your compost pile.

If you don’t turn it and care for it, you might find your healthy compost pile turns into nothing more than a rotting pile of dirt and potato peels.

Related: 10 Common Composting Mistakes. Are You Making One Of Them?

Plant Seeds

A pretty critical part of cultivating anything in your garden is actually planting something to start with.

While it seems to make the most sense to do your planting in the spring when the growing season starts, you might find yourself running out of good weather before your plants actually produce anything of value.

This is especially true of warm weather-loving plants like tomatoes and peppers – if you don’t have a particularly warm climate, your plants simply might not be developed enough to take advantage of the warmer weather during the summer peak. To help combat this, consider planting your seeds really early in the year, ideally before the middle point of February if you’re in the northern hemisphere.

This gives your fledgling plants plenty of time to develop and grow in the springtime, leading to a healthy, fully grown plant just in time for the fruiting season, leading to plenty of delicious fruits and vegetables just as the weather gets properly warmer.

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Whether because of logical delays, or complete societal collapse, keeping at least a few days’ worth of food for you and your family can be one of the best ways to keep safe in a serious emergency.

Not all foods are created equal when it comes to storing them for emergencies. While some food is obviously designed for long-term storage, too many people try and store the completely wrong types of foods for emergencies.

Here are 10 foods that you should really stop storing for emergencies.

Snacks

Twinkies, and other cheap and calorie-dense snack foods, have long been seen as these eternally safe, shelf-stable food products, in part because of their advertising.

However, despite what popular lore will tell you, Twinkies do actually have a sell-by date on them, and they can actually start to go rancid within only about a year. Even leaving aside the fact that storing cheap, processed, sugar-dense food isn’t a good idea for an emergency, Twinkies will likely expire long before you need them in an emergency.

Plus, empty, sugary calories are not what you need for long-term survival.

Related: 10 Fruits And Veggies To Dehydrate For Long-Time Storage

Coffee

A huge amount of people require at least one cup of coffee in the mornings to remain functional, so it would make sense to store some for emergencies, right? After all, how are you going to survive if you are too tired to function?

Well, coffee is probably not the best thing to store for emergencies, sadly.

Not only is it pretty bad at long-term storage, as it goes stale pretty quickly, and will start to taste rancid and off after only a few months, but you need to consider how you would even use it.

In a serious emergency, how are you going to make hot water to brew your coffee?

If you really want to keep some caffeine on hand, store some caffeine tablets instead, or one of those containers of instant espresso powder instead – at least they will mix well into cold water.

‘Just Add Water’ Pots

If you’re storing food for emergencies, it seems like it would make sense to store those shelf-stable pots of noodles that every supermarket seems to have, right?

Well, just like the coffee problem, storing these kinds of things just isn’t a very good idea.

Not only are they reliant on needing hot water, something likely to be difficult to obtain, but they are also super low in calories, as well as lacking satiety, making them one of the worst things you could try and store for an emergency.

Cheese

Cheeses have long been seen as the ultimate storage food, as they should ostensibly get better the longer they sit, right?

Well, this one is technically half-true: certain cheeses, like especially hard cheeses still in their wheel and covered in a hard rind, can last several months or even years.

Those carefully wrapped, supermarket packets of cheese, however, really won’t keep very long at all.

You should especially avoid storing any kind of soft cheeses as well. Not only are they likely to go off, but they also won’t really be the most calorically dense, and thus not the best option for food storage.

Related: How To Wax Cheese For Long Term Storage

Sugary Cereal

Sugary sweet cereal seems like an obvious thing to store for emergencies, but it really isn’t a good option in terms of keeping healthy food.

Not only is it just empty calories, but it will go stale and gross pretty quickly after opening.

If you really want to store cereal for an emergency, instead store some high-fiber cereal instead, as at least that’s a bit better for you.

Chips

Avoid storing these salty, empty calories for any kind of emergency.

Not only are they not good for you, they actually expire way faster than you would think!

Anything Frozen

Storing food in the freezer seems like a no-brainer, as frozen food lasts months upon months.

However, in a real emergency, the power will go out, giving you only a few days to eat the contents of the freezer.

Instead, stick to canned foods or root vegetables stored in a cool dark place, rather than relying on your freezer.

Related: This Is How You Can Live Without Refrigeration

Flour

Flour seems like it should be an obvious thing to keep for an emergency; calorie-dense and it lasts for years and is easy to store.

However, the problem with using flour in an emergency is that it can be really hard to make use of it when disaster strikes. How are you going to cook it? Where are you going to get the necessary items to make bread?

While you could mix up some flatbread, getting a reliable heat source to safely cook flour can be an impossible task.

Plus, flour always carries the risk of mites or weevils, something you really don’t want to contend with in an emergency.

Biscuits

Biscuits or any other kind of sweet snack like them are not only high in sugar and low in nutrition, but they also expire way too quickly to be useful in an emergency.

The only reason to keep some on hand is as a morale booster for a large group during an emergency. But honestly, something like a bar of dark chocolate would work just as well and last way longer as well.

Energy Drinks

Energy drinks are often kept in an emergency, solely for the purpose of giving some quick energy, caffeine, and sugar in a disaster.

However, not only do they go off too quickly, they aren’t a good thing to rely on for energy or caffeine.

There are much better ways to store caffeine and far better ways to maintain hydration. Stick to caffeine pills and a reliable source of water instead.

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While there are other ways to create an EMP, the most commonly known, and most likely, is as an aftereffect from the detonation of a thermonuclear weapon.

Previously unknown before the first nuclear bomb tests, EMPs have the potential to fry every kind of electrical device, especially ones with intricate circuitry, and can bring down the supply network within moments.

Since it never hurts to be careful and aware, here are 10 things that a wise prepper should have ready before an EMP blast threatens all of their electronics.

Gasoline

Gasoline isn’t just useful to power vehicles and allows you to get from point A to point B – it can also be used to power generators, light a fire, or even used as currency.

Gasoline is obviously not going to be affected by any kind of EMP, and it can be used in all sorts of ways in a survival situation. Even if you don’t have a working vehicle, gasoline can start an emergency fire to keep warm and is always useful to keep around.

Related: Best Fuels For Off-Grid Survival

Cell Phone

A cell phone isn’t just a means of communication – it is also a tool to access information and coordination, it is a flashlight, and if you pre-loaded it with useful apps, it is a tome of useful knowledge and applications that could help your survival.

While most people might assume an EMP would render your cell phone useless, you actually might be surprised to find that it turns back on after the EMP has faded.

An EMP fries electronics that are actively on and drawing power, so if your cell phone is turned off when the EMP blast hits your house, your phone has a good chance of staying alive. Even if it was drawing power, give it an hour after the EMP and try to turn it on, as well as try a reset.

Failing all of that, keeping a spare cell phone powered down in your drawer is always a good thing to have on hand, and it might just be your saving grace in the event of an EMP.

Food To Last A Few Days

While making sure you have water is of paramount importance, ensuring you have a decent food supply is absolutely vital as well.

If the EMP is merely one step in a general societal collapse, a small supply of food can help you last a while until you can work on establishing a more stable source of calories.

However, if the EMP only knocks out electricity for a few days, having enough dry and persevered food on hand to wait out those few days can be a huge lifesaver. Not only does it allow you to stay indoors to wait out the worst, but it gives you redundancy in case you can’t find any other source of food or if the supply network completely collapses in the wake of whatever it was that caused the EMP.

Flashlights

This one might seem obvious, but you should always keep a backup flashlight around, just in case.

In the event of an EMP, the flashlight should remain working, so long as it wasn’t on when the EMP hit. After all the electricity goes out, you will need a way to see where you’re going and how to find the things around you, and thus a flashlight is absolutely essential to your survival.

Batteries

You aren’t going to get very far with your flashlight if you don’t have the batteries necessary to power them.

Make sure to keep a whole variety of batteries for all sorts of devices – even if you can’t use them, they might be useful for trade in the event the worst happens.

Portable Chargers

In the same vein as batteries, having a plethora of portable chargers with multiple connecting ports will be incredibly useful after an EMP.

So long as they are already charged up and filled with electricity, they shouldn’t be impacted by the EMP and should allow you to easily charge your phone and other devices in the wake of an EMP blast.

Water Supply

Everyone is used to water quite literally flowing from their taps on demand, but what not a lot of people realize is that after an EMP, your water will likely shut off pretty quickly.

For a little while, your taps will still give water pressure thanks to gravity, but without electricity to power pumps to keep the system maintained, you could quickly wind up in a situation where you don’t have any water.

That’s why keeping a stored supply of water, ideally in bottles or even large multi-gallon containers, is a great idea. While they do need replacing every few years because of the plastic leaching into the water, it is always a good idea to have backups when it comes to water.

Related: H2O Dynamo – This Awesome Device Turns Air Into Fresh Water

Radio

Radios are another important tool to keep on hand in a survival situation. Like other devices, if it was powered down during the EMP, then it should work just fine after the fact.

Use it to coordinate relief efforts, speak to authorities, or just communicate with other people out there.

Backup Laptop

A laptop is just like a cell phone in emergencies, except for the fact that it could also be used to connect to any internet that is still usable after an EMP.

Keep a spare laptop powered off, safe and secure so as to make sure that nothing can happen to it, and you might be able to use it to help improve your odds of survival after any kind of serious calamity.

Solar Systems

This one might seem the most extravagant, but having some solar panels can be a huge help in the event of an EMP.

While EMPs will certainly fry any circuitry actively working, if you have forewarning of the EMP, you could disable the solar panels before it hits, allowing you to reconnect them and give yourself free power.

While any solar batteries you might will probably struggle to work, you can at least harness the natural energy from the sun to power your home, at least until more permanent solutions present themselves for fixing the energy supply chain in the wake of an EMP.

Even having a few solar panels lying around could be beneficial, as many come with connectors to allow you to hook them up to a conventional plug socket, giving you at least some power in a catastrophe.

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To regular people living their 9-5 life in the suburbs, the two types of self sufficient peoples are basically one and the same.

However, while it is true that there are a lot of similarities between the two, the actual lifestyle of homesteaders and preppers can be pretty fundamentally different, mainly because of what they are preparing for.

What Is A Homesteader?

Homesteading has definitely become a pretty popular idea in recent years, with a lot of people deciding to change their lives and adopt a more self sufficient lifestyle.

While homesteading used to represent the frontier lifestyle of making it on your own in the distant wilderness, homesteading is now about finding peace and serenity with yourself and your family.

Simply put, homesteading is all about being as self sufficient as possible and not having to rely on the rest of society. This means adopting more self sufficient habits, like growing your own food or learning the skills necessary to survive.

Related: Does Government Still Have Power Over You If You’re Off The Grid?

What Is A Prepper?

A prepper is a lot like a homesteader in many ways, primarily because they are both concerned with self sufficiency.

However, while a homesteader simply wants to enjoy their life in relative peace and learn to be as independent as possible, a prepper has a specific goal for their self sufficiency – they are preparing for a catastrophic event.

Preppers are typically concerned with the end of modern society, whether through a specific event or the gradual breakdown of regular societal conventions.

This means that they are concerned primarily with stocking up and preparing for the eventual collapse of modern society. So preppers might be more focused on hoarding and preparing stockpiles of food, fuel, and other supplies, with a bit less focus on preparing regular day-to-day self sufficiency.

So how does living life as a homesteader or a prepper change how you look at certain aspects of self sufficiency?

Gardening

For most people, gardening is nothing more than a simple hobby to pass the time, but when looking for self sufficiency, it is actually the primary way to get established with becoming self sufficient.

The only thing is, it definitely looks a bit better depending on how you approach self sufficiency.

• Gardening As A Homesteader

Gardening as a homesteader is very similar to the concept of gardening as a hobby; only you are looking to eventually lead it towards being able to subsist entirely off of your gardening.

When you are a homesteader, you are trying to grow as much food as possible, ideally meeting the majority of your caloric needs just from your garden.

• Gardening As A Prepper

As a prepper, gardening is a little bit different.

When prepping, you not only are hoping to be self sufficient, but you also want to be prepared for any eventuality. This not only means food but also includes things like medicinal products as well.

Healing herbs, poultices, and even possibly growing your own fiber producing plants like cotton as well. Instead of just looking to make your food, you might want to consider making everything.

Home Defense

Defending one’s own property should be seen as a regular thing, but there are always going to be a few differences when it comes to being a homesteader or a prepper.

• Home Defense As A Homesteader

When you are a homesteader, home defense is as much about protecting your livestock and crops as it is about protecting yourself. Most homesteaders will live pretty remotely, so dangerous people that they might need to defend themselves against are likely few and far between.

Instead, home defense is a lot more about good, strong fences and maybe even a herding animal like a sheepdog.

• Home Defence As A Prepper

Home defense as a prepper is less about protecting your property from nature and more about protecting your possessions and your prepared stockpiles against invaders.

Preppers, generally speaking, believe that society will break down, which will necessarily lead to an increase in lawlessness.

This means that the main threat is from other people out to steal your stockpiles, necessitating things like firearms and a more rigorous home defense plan.

Related: How To Secure Your Homestead Against Intruders

Water Gathering

Gathering water is generally considered to be an incredibly vital step in preparing for self sufficiency, but for many people, it is usually one of the last to be considered, as water is such a dependable resource in life.

The two types of self sufficient living consider them quite differently, however.

• Water Gathering As A Homesteader

As a homesteader, water gathering is usually a bit of an afterthought.

As long as you live at least somewhat within the bounds of regular society, most homesteaders will probably have access to mains water.

This means that setting up rain catchment systems or other methods of gathering water is more about being as self sufficient as possible, with an aim to have as minimal an environmental impact as is physically possible.

• Water Gathering As A Prepper

As a prepper, water catchment, or any kind of water gathering systems at all, are of paramount importance, because the water supply can’t be considered to be sustainable once the worst comes to pass.

If society breaks down, so will the water supply, necessitating homemade sources of gathering water. Whether this means taking water from a nearby flowing water source or instead setting up an efficient rainwater catchment system, water gathering is usually one of the first things that preppers consider when it comes to beginning preparing for the end of days.

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While it might seem like it would be nothing more than idyllic, agrarian bliss, it is actually a huge amount of hard work. It requires a ton of knowledge and learning before you could really be considered “ready”.

Luckily, for those thinking about shifting their lifestyle towards a more self-sufficient one. There are a number of projects you can complete in your home right now to prepare you for an eventual life as a homesteader.

Homestead Projects That Will Turn You Into A Self-Sufficient Homesteader

Growing Your Own Food

The obvious first step in shifting to a more self-sufficient lifestyle is to try and get started with growing your own food at home.

While homesteaders generally try to aim to grow as much of their own produce as possible, with some even going far enough to grow their own animal feed, those just starting out can start with something a lot easier.

Growing your own food can be as simple as keeping herbs in your garden or growing some tomatoes in the summertime.

Any amount of growing your own food will lead towards a more self-sufficient lifestyle. This is because any food you grow yourself, is food you don’t need to buy from somewhere else. Even if it is only a little bit of food, you will pick up all kinds of skills and knowledge just from tending a few plants over the year. This can be easily extrapolated later on to growing all of your food needs yourself!

Storing Your Own Food

Growing your own food is really only the first step towards becoming self-sufficient.

To truly be able to survive while being a homesteader, you need to be able to preserve the food you’ve grown.

Getting started at home now is the best way to get ready for this. This can be as simple as learning how to pickle some vegetables, or even can some tomatoes or make jam with fresh strawberries. Every bit of canning and preservation you can learn now will super useful when your first winter as a homesteader hits.

Learning How To Hunt & Gather

This is definitely the more advanced step towards becoming a homesteader, and also not something that everyone will agree with.

However, a big part of being self-sufficient is being able to hunt, gather, and forage for yourself in your local area. Whether this is actively hunting and eating animals, or just learning to forage mushrooms, being able to source food from your surroundings is a key part of being self-sufficient.

Related: 6 Best Guns To Have Around Your Homestead

Becoming Energy Independent

Despite everyone’s dreams of an idyllic, isolated homestead life, the fact remains that modern conveniences like electricity are a bit too hard to pass up.

While it is possible to remain connected to the electrical grid in even the most remote of places, it is far better to become energy independent and get some solar panels. You don’t need to wait until you are a full-fledged homesteader, though!

You can get started right away with installing solar panels on your home right now. Also, you will save huge amounts of money in the long term, as well as learn vital skills and knowledge to prepare you for maybe setting it up yourself later!

Developing A Rain Catchment System

A lot of homesteaders remain connected to the water system, even if they are disconnected from electricity, but being able to be water independent is incredibly useful to become self-sufficient.

While there are other ways to get potable water as a homesteader, such as wells and fresh, running rivers, developing a rain catchment system is a lot more passive and effective. However, rain catchment systems can be useful even if you don’t need the water to survive.

Why not try setting up a water butt to gather rainwater from your guttering? You could use it to help water your plants and minimize your impact on your local water system.

Related: Easy DIY 165 Gallon Rain Harvester

Learning Basic Sewing

When clothes tear, most people are more used to throwing out their old clothes and buying new ones. Learning to sew can be a huge step forward when it comes to being self-sufficient.

Learning just the very basics of sewing, mending, and needlework can go a long way towards preparing you for homestead life.

There will always be something that needs repairing, something that needs mending or a quick touch-up. The careful needlework of learning clothes making and patching will be invaluable once it comes time to start a homestead of your very own.

Composting Your Food Waste

Composting is one of those things that all gardeners and want-to-be homesteaders dread learning about because it seems like such a significant undertaking.

Composting food waste isn’t just throwing all of your garbage into a pile in the corner of your garden. It requires careful tending and maintenance: pitch forking it to turn it, adding in brown and green matter in the correct quantities, and frequent watering to produce something truly useful as a compost.

However, you don’t need to do anything so drastic. Even a little pile in a small box near your back door can be enough to get started.

Start out by following the simple mantra of 2-to-1 brown matter to green. This means that for every liter of food compost you add, try to add 2 liters of brown matter, like leaves, grass clippings, or cardboard from your latest order packaging.

Though it will take a long while to turn into good quality compost, it can be enough to give you the confidence you need to start an even bigger one when it comes to starting your own homestead.

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In fact, jerky is so great that most meat-eating cultures around the world have developed their own varieties of jerky, each made in their own way. From regular American-style beef jerky to South African Biltong, there is a surprisingly wide array of ways to preserve meat for long-term storage.

One of the more interesting and least talked about is the Mexican tradition of Machaca.

Not often made outside of Mexico, Machaca can be a great way to preserve those extra cuts of meat that you have leftover after butchering. Instead of turning them into ground meat for burgers or sausages, why not try and emulate North Mexican ranchers and make your very own Machaca at home?

What Is Machaca & Why Is It Different From Regular Jerky?

Machaca is the Mexican reply to regular jerky and is the somewhat ancient method of preserving those large cuts of meat that just won’t get tender no matter what you do.

The meat, which was sometimes mixed with ground chilies and other spices, was traditionally dried and dehydrated by leaving it out under the hot sun, usually on drying racks. From there, the meat was pounded using rocks to break it apart and tenderize it, eventually shredding it into fine pieces. It was then stored away from the air and kept in this almost powdered form.

To use it, the Machaca is rehydrated with some water and then cooked until it swells back into a sort of ground beef consistency and then used in all kinds of different recipes.

So how do you make it at home? Just how easy is it to make some Machaca using meat from your own homestead?

What You’ll Need

To make Machaca, you will first need a cut of meat to dry. Meat destined to be made into Machaca tended to be those large cuts filled with loads of connective tissue and usually pretty unappetizing without long, slow cook times.

Pork shoulder, beef top sirloin, and any other cut you wouldn’t particularly want to make a steak out of are all great cuts for turning into Machaca.

Other than that, plenty of salt and whatever spices you plan on using are all you need. A lot of Machaca was made using nothing other than salt to help the drying process, but adding in fresh chilies like Poblanos was also very common.

First, though, you need to cut your meat.

Related: Makin’ Bacon: How to Dry Cure Pork Belly

How To Cut Meat For Machaca

The critical part of making Machaca is cutting it properly first.

Most likely, the meat you are using will be incredibly tough and filled with connective tissue, so you want to cut it to minimize any of that chewiness in the final product. This means cutting it across the grain.

To find the grain, just pull the hunk of meat slightly apart, and the lines of the muscle fibers should make themselves clear. Then, just cut across all of the fibers rather than between them. This will create a softer, easier texture in the finished Machaca. Other than that, just make sure to slice the meat as thin as you possibly can, as this will help to speed the drying process.

After that, you want to salt your meat liberally with coarse salt, like kosher salt. The exact salt ratio is actually not entirely critical unless you plan on leaving this meat out on your counter for long-term winter storage.

There are a lot of calculators out there for working out the ideal salt ratio for preserving meat, but the joy of using something like kosher salt is that it is able to guide you into how much you need visually. Just sprinkle kosher salt so that it covers the entirety of both sides of your meat, and that should probably be enough salt to saturate it completely. Remember that you will eventually be adding water back to the meat to rehydrate it for cooking, so it will probably not taste as salty as it might look!

Drying The Machaca

This is surprisingly easy, even if you lack a dehydrator.

While a dehydrator would obviously make the whole process go a lot faster, as it is able to put out consistent heat and provide its own ventilation, you can also pretty easily do it with a home oven.

Just set your oven to the lowest possible temperature that it can steadily maintain. On most home ovens, that is around 200 Fahrenheit, though lower is better. Place all of your meat in a single layer on a rack over a baking sheet and stick it in the oven, ideally with the door cracked open just a little bit to help moisture escape.

After 30 minutes, flip the meat over, and do it again after another 30 minutes. From there, just check it every 15-30 minutes by taking a piece of meat and gently bending it.

When it is done, it should be darkened considerably and be almost in danger of cracking when you bend it completely.

Related: The 10-Dollar Jerky Maker

Blitzing It

Once thoroughly dried, you want to blitz your meat into pieces for storage totally. The traditional way to do this is with a rock on a hard surface, though a meat mallet will also do.

If you don’t want to do all of that hard work, though, you can also just throw the whole pile of dried meat pieces into a good high-powered blender and blend until it has the consistency of fine, slightly damp sand.

This is also a great time to consider seasonings – if you want to add dried cumin, dried garlic, or other spices like black pepper to the meat, putting it in the blender along with the meat is a great way to help incorporate those flavors. Some of the spices you might use could get scorched if put in the oven for as long as the Machaca takes to dehydrate.

How To Store Your Machaca

Machaca was originally designed to be kept in an airtight vessel and used as a meat replacement for the long winter months or while out on the ranches in Northern Mexico.

This recipe will produce a pretty typical Machaca that will last for a few days if kept away from the air and eaten while on the go.

To really help increase its ability to last forever, you will want to increase the salt amount considerably. If you are looking for a shelf-stable product that is able to just sit out on the counter indefinitely, you will want to salt it like traditional salt pork or salt beef. This means literally caking it in salt and storing it in even more salt in its vessel.

These days, however, salting it moderately and keeping it in the fridge makes for a much tastier product that is able to be rehydrated and mixed with some onions, tomatoes, peppers, and other seasonings to make for a delicious family meal, so long as you serve it with some tortillas as well.

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The post Making Machaca – Mexican Pemmican (Shelf Stable Meat) first appeared on Self Sufficient Projects.

Anyone looking to start up homesteading is bound to get involved in making beer themselves. After all, if you have some land and an interest in beer, it doesn’t take much imagination to begin to contemplate making your own. However, unless you already know what you are doing or have worked in a brewery, it might seem pretty challenging to get started.

So, how do you get started brewing at home?

The Easy Way

By far, the easiest way to begin home brewing your own beer is to buy one of those ready kits that are sold in all sorts of Homeware stores.

They are usually tucked away towards the back, but most stores focused around home crafts, hardware, or anything to do with the home will tend to have a little section dedicated to brewing at home.

The kits will usually be a container that holds all of the necessary ingredients, including the malt, yeast, and anything else you need, alongside a list of other pieces of equipment you might need. Things like fermenters or bottling equipment will probably be explained in the kit, or the kit itself will contain it for you.

Realistically, though, doing that isn’t really like home brewing. It is sort of like calling paint by numbers the same as really painting – there is nothing wrong with it, and it is a great way to get drinkable beer, but it isn’t really the same thing as getting started doing home brewing.

Related: Are You A DIY-er?

What Is The Home Brewing Process In A Nutshell?

The fundamental methods of making beer are pretty simple.

You take grain, typically barley, that has been slightly heated to dry it out and encourage the preservation of certain enzymes, and grind it up into a consistently small particle size.

You then “Mash” this grain mixture in water that has been heated between 145 Fahrenheit and 158 Fahrenheit. This specific range encourages the enzymes within the grain to begin working, as you are essentially replicating the process that a grain undergoes when it is planted in soil.

It takes in heat and water and then activates to start sprouting into a barley plant. Only instead of trying to encourage a plant, we just want the enzyme to start breaking down the starch in the grain into fermentable sugars, typically a sugar called Maltose.

From there, we boil the mixture, both to sterilize the wort and to help reduce the water content. We also had hops, which helped to give the beer a pleasantly bitter flavor, as well as help keep it free from bacteria.

After that, it is cooled, locked into a fermenter with an airtight seal (albeit with an airlock to allow carbon dioxide to escape), and then yeast is added. This yeast ferments the beer, eating the sugars and creating alcohol and CO2, turning it into beer!

How Do You Go About Doing All This Yourself?

What Equipment Do You Need To Get Started?

Alright, you have committed to home brewing, and maybe you even have a few recipes you want to try. Where do you go from here?

The first thing you will need is the right equipment.

There is a whole lot of debate surrounding the proper equipment needed for homebrewing, preferences of equipment styles, different ways of doing things, and even some cultural and regional standards as well.

The easiest, though a probably most expensive option, is to simply buy a home brewing machine.

There are a few brands which make a series of really great brewing machines, which are electrically powered and allow you to mix, mash and boil all within the same piece of equipment.

Related: 10 Easy Ways to Turn Profit from Your Homestead

However, if that expense is too much, then you can easily just use a very big kettle on your kitchen burners, at least 10 liters in volume, to let you do it all from the comfort of your kitchen.

From there, you will need the actual grain; you can either get it ready-made as a sort of concentrated maltose solution, or you can buy the grain yourself, grind it and mash it to get it to the same stage.

You will also need whatever hops your recipe calls for, as well as a suitable yeast – careful you don’t pick the wrong one! There is a lot of different types of beer yeast, and they all have different flavors and effects.

From there, you will need a device to ferment the beer, typically called a ‘fermenter,’ as well as some equipment to help bottle it once it is ready. Bottles, bottle caps, bottling wands, and some way to actually cap the bottles at the very minimum. Once your beer is fermented, you will want to move it into the bottles using a racking cane and then cap it, along with some carbonation drops or a calculated quantity of sugar. If you’re sure that you’ll use all of this beer in a short period of time, you can keep all of it in a barrel.

This last addition of sugar helps the remaining yeast in the beer create a little bit more CO2, just enough to carbonate the beer to your liking and give it the necessary fizziness.

All told, the process is a little bit complicated, but it truly does easier the more you get into it.

For even more help and advice, consider joining your local home brewing association branch and attend some meetings – they’re basically everywhere, and they will be glad to help you get started.

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It is just a fact of nature that, if you grow a garden and aspire to feed yourself with it, you will be creating an attractive foraging area for wildlife.

While the idea of prancing deer and grazing birds might seem bucolic and like idyllic bliss, there is always the risk of something dangerous making its way into your garden and threatening your family.

One of the most unassuming, yet still surprisingly dangerous, examples of wandering wildlife is the Wild Boar. So what should you do if you happen to discover a Wild Boar wandering around your property?

How Could a Wild Boar Be Dangerous?

The cousin species of our domesticated pigs, the Wild Boar, is a lot like our livestock pig in appearance, other than being a lot hairier and sporting some sharp tusks.

This might lead you to think that a Wild Boar is safe to be around or even that it’s cute and cuddly; however, you shouldn’t let its deceivingly cute appearance sway you. It is still a wild animal and, if it is on your homestead, it is likely already being a nuisance.

This isn’t to say that the Wild Boar is a natural-born killer, though, or even that it wants to hurt you – it isn’t a coyote or anything like that.

Wild Boars are omnivores, and they spend pretty much all of their lives foraging for food. Just like us humans, they have adapted to eat pretty much anything. While they typically mostly eat rhizomes, roots, leaves, and nuts, as well as all manner of fish and small mammals, they are more than happy to feast on your garden.

They could also become a problem for any small animals that you keep for your own benefit; they will happily kill chickens, ducks, and even baby goats if given the opportunity.

They probably aren’t a real risk to your family, but Wild Boars have been known to attack humans when they feel threatened, especially when cornered by dogs or they have been wounded. This is why it is essential to know what to do if you come across a Wild Boar on your homestead.

Related: Best Dog Breeds For Homesteaders

What Should You Do If Your Family Meets A Wild Boar?

If a Wild Boar appears on your property, whether it has been using your home as part of its roaming grounds or if you just happen to spot it wandering around, the first thing to do is to keep calm.

A Wild Boar is unlikely to hurt you, but it is always a good idea to take precautions, so you should immediately seek to back away and deescalate.

If you have any small children, make sure to get them inside immediately, as well as any loose dogs or other pets. Make sure you don’t run, though! It is never a good idea to run from wild animals if you don’t have to, as it could trigger a chase or charging instinct.

After backing away and making sure your loose animals are safe, it is a good idea to make sure any animal pens you have are secure. If you just spotted a Wild Boar once on your property, then it is possible it is just passing through, but a check-up on your animals, as well as your vegetable garden, is a good idea.

If you notice the Wild Boar sniffing around your property occasionally, you can try and shoo it away and make loud noises, and it is possible that this will sufficiently scare it away from sticking around.

However, if you discover that your crops or your animals have been attacked or damaged or otherwise learn that the Wild Boar is here to stay, then you need to try and deal with it.

This can be pretty tricky, however, and depends heavily on where in the world your home is located. You might need to contact your local government to see if they have any special control measure in place, or otherwise contact a local, licensed hunter to take care of it.

Of course, assuming it is legal, you can always deal with it yourself.

Are Wild Boars Still Dangerous If You Have Firearms?

Firearms do make certain aspects of being a homesteader a bit easier.

When it comes to dealing with a Wild Boar, if it is plaguing your homestead and affecting your livelihood, the best thing to do is to hunt it. But you still need to carefully consider your local US laws and regulations surrounding both owning the firearm, using it, and actually hunting it as well.

It differs from state to state, but you might need a specific permit to hunt a Wild Boar, so don’t accidentally run afoul of the law in your eagerness to protect your homestead.

Assuming you can do it legally, hunting the animal is likely the best solution – plus, assuming it is healthy and not too old, it can actually feed your family as well!

The meat of the Wild Boar is a bit tougher and more sinewy than our domesticated pigs, but it can still be enjoyed when well prepared, and if dealt with by a skilled butcher, could feed your family all winter long!

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