When to Harvest Watermelon: The Signs I Check Before I Ever Cut One Free
My first year growing watermelon, I cut one open three weeks too early because I got impatient watching it sit there looking huge and perfect. The...
200 Skills You Need to Become 100% Independent
I’ve been homesteading for a while, and I've learned one big lesson I want to share: There’s always something else you can buy for a homestead....
How to Make Fermented Hot Sauce: My Step-by-Step Homestead Method
Every year my pepper plants outproduce every plan I ever made for them. I can only eat so many salsas and stir-fries before the crisper drawer...
An Old Homesteader Told Me to STOP Doing These Things…
A few years after Mark and I started our homestead, we signed up for WWOOF, a program that connects people with farms and homesteads where they can...
Cattle Prods: What They’re For and Why You’ll Rarely Need One
I bought an electric cattle prod my first year running cattle because every old-timer's advice seemed to assume I already had one. I used it maybe a...
Canning Spaghetti Sauce the Safe Way: A Complete Guide
Every August my counter disappears under a mountain of tomatoes, and every August I make the same batch of spaghetti sauce to can for winter. It...
9 Crops Homesteaders Grow That Are Cheaper to Buy at the Store
You've probably heard it a hundred times: grow your own food and you'll save a fortune. And sure, a good garden can absolutely save you money. I'm...
How to Start a Permaculture Garden That Basically Runs Itself
My first vegetable garden was a straight line of raised beds, tilled every spring, weeded every week, and thirsty every single day of a hot July. It...
Ranking the Best (and Worst) Firewood in the U.S.A
Buying firewood can be frustrating when you’re not sure what you’re getting. A load might look like a good deal, but after an evening of feeding the...
The Fresh Egg Test – A Homesteader’s Guide to Checking Egg Age
I collect eggs from my own hens almost every day, and I still test a batch before I bake with it. Not because I think my girls are laying bad eggs,...
Why “Weird” Crops Make Your Garden Better
Walk through the produce section at almost any grocery store and you’ll see the same familiar lineup year after year. Tomatoes, green beans, iceberg...
How Long to Cook Corned Beef in a Slow Cooker
Corned beef shows up on my table every spring, usually alongside potatoes and carrots I pulled out of the root cellar over winter. It's a tough,...
Why Your Chickens Might Be Poisoning Their Own Eggs
You walk out to the coop in the morning, open the nest box, and there they are. Warm eggs from your own hens. You know what those birds eat, where...
Compost for Raised Bed Garden: Everything I’ve Learned Building Healthy Soil
When I built my first raised bed years ago, I made the rookie mistake of shoveling in dirt from the yard and calling it a day. My tomatoes sat there...
Reviving an Old Sourdough Starter
You open the fridge looking for something, and there it is. That poor jar of sourdough starter you pushed to the back months ago and completely...
Succulent Soil: How to Mix Your Own and Actually Get It Right
I killed my first three succulents before I figured out that the problem was never the plants, it was the soil I was using. Regular potting soil,...
How to Tell If Ground Beef Is Bad: A Homesteader’s Guide
Why Ground Beef Spoils Faster Than a Steak I learned this the hard way years ago, keeping ground beef in the fridge the same length of time I kept a...
How To Turn 2 Clay Pots Into a Fridge
The first time I heard that you could keep food cool with two clay pots, some sand, and a little water, I figured it was probably one of those...
Mylar Bags for Food Storage – Everything I’ve Learned Doing This Myself
Why I Went All In on Mylar I stored food in plain plastic bags and buckets for years before I ever touched a mylar bag, and honestly, I thought the...
25 Ways to Save the Garden Glut Before It Rots
You know the drill… One week you're waiting for the garden to finally do something, and the next you've got more zucchini, tomatoes, beans, and...
How Long Do Fresh Eggs Last?
Every spring when my hens hit their laying stride, I end up with more eggs than my egg cups know what to do with. The question I get asked most by...
How Many Jars Should a Family Really Can in a Year to Save $2,000?
Let's Run a Little Experiment! Saving $2,000 a year just by filling jars in your own kitchen sounds almost too good to be true. For a family of...
7 Trees You Don’t Want Growing on Your Property
When you buy a piece of land, you usually inherit whatever the people before you decided to plant. Then, over the years, you add a few trees of your...
Oil Canning – What It Is, Why It Happens, and How to Prevent It
The first time I noticed waviness rippling across my barn roof in the afternoon sun, I was convinced something had gone seriously wrong with the...
The Truth About Composting Toilets
For years, I had one hard rule on my homestead. Animal manure could go in the garden. Cow, horse, chicken, rabbit, all of it, once it had aged. But...
How Does a Butter Bell Work? The Complete Guide
I resisted buying a butter bell for years, mostly because the whole idea sounded like a gimmick. Butter sitting in a little ceramic cup, upside...
Better Than a Greenhouse
Every year around this time, I see the same thing happen. Someone wants to stretch their growing season, so they start looking at greenhouses. At...
How to Build a More Self-Sufficient Household Water System
Water is one of those resources that feels unlimited right up until something interrupts it. A power outage can stop a well pump. A broken main can...
Food Storage Bags – The Complete Guide for Every Job on the Homestead
I have a drawer in my kitchen that used to be a junk drawer, and now it is entirely dedicated to bags. Freezer bags, vacuum bags, paper bags, mesh...
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...
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...
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...
