These 10 Watering Mistakes Waste 50% of Your Water
There’s a high chance you water the garden, walk away, and maybe think the job's done. But a lot of the water you use never gets near a root because of some basic but incredibly common mistakes even the most experienced homesteaders make! In many cases, the water runs...
11 Scam Items Homesteaders Fall For
If you've been homesteading for a while, you already know how tempting it is to buy things you don't actually need. And if you're just getting started, all that marketing out there is aimed right at you. Cute little coops, miracle seeds, gadgets that promise to solve...
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...
How to Plant a Banana Tree: What I Learned Growing My Own
I planted my first banana tree with far more enthusiasm than knowledge. I dug a hole about the size of the pot it came in, dropped it in, and figured a tropical plant would just handle the rest itself. It survived, barely, and it took me another season of actually...
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 inside was pale pink, watery, and barely sweet. I threw it on the compost pile and learned a lesson that every watermelon...
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 produced food, but it also produced a lot of my time and a lot of my frustration. Permaculture is the reason my garden...
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 lettuce, zucchini, a few kinds of squash. It can make you feel like those are simply the vegetables people are supposed...
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 sulking all summer, and it took me a full season to figure out why. The soil had compacted into something close to...
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, the kind that works beautifully for tomatoes and herbs, holds onto moisture for far too long around succulent roots, and...
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...
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...
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...
DIY Food-Generator in a Box
What if you could grow a whole season of food out of one big pot just by watering maybe twice a week? What if you never had to feed your plants and weeds wouldn’t be a problem anymore? Sounds too good? If you don’t believe it’s possible, I get it. Most of the time,...
DIY Closet Farming Guide
It may seem unusual, but a closet is an excellent location for an interior garden. Many people who try to create garden spaces indoors, especially during the winter, often have to sacrifice space appearances and put up with the mess of dirt on the floor and the...
How to Prevent Garden Runoff from Reaching Your House Foundation
This is one of those mistakes that you notice when it's already too late. Maybe you spent years building a beautiful garden and then you discover that same garden is threatening the integrity of your house. I'll give you a short checklist that can save you a small...
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, but because "fresh" is a sliding scale, not a yes-or-no answer, and knowing exactly where an egg sits on that scale...
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, cheap cut that turns into something genuinely tender if you're patient with it, and the slow cooker is the easiest tool on...
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 roast, and ending up with a package that smelled off a full day before I expected it to. Ground beef spoils faster than...
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 fuss over them was overblown. Then I opened a bucket of wheat I had packed in a heavy freezer bag two years earlier and...
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 cucumbers than you know what to do with. At first, it's great. You eat what you can, give some away, and feel pretty good...
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 people new to keeping a flock, or by anyone who just bought a dozen from a farm stand, is simple: how long do fresh eggs...
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 bags, a couple of mylar bags left over from last fall's wheat. It took me a few seasons of ruined harvests to figure out...
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...
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...
Cashmere Goats – A Homesteader’s Complete Guide
The first time I ran a metal comb through a goat's winter coat and pulled out a handful of fiber softer than anything I owned in my closet, I understood exactly why cashmere carries the price tag it does. It felt almost unfair that something this luxurious comes off...
Holstein Cow – What Every Homesteader Should Know Before Getting One
If you ask most people to picture a dairy cow, they picture a Holstein. That black-and-white spotted animal is the face of the dairy industry, and for good reason: no other breed on earth produces more milk. But the same traits that make Holsteins the obvious choice...
How Many Eggs Does a Chicken Lay a Day?
The honest answer is that a healthy hen can lay at most one egg a day, and most don't even do that. It physically takes a hen 24 to 26 hours to build a single egg from the inside out, so the math never quite lines up with a clean 24-hour cycle. That small gap is the...
Chicken Dewormer – The Complete Guide to Treating and Preventing Worms in Your Flock
Every flock I've ever kept has carried some level of worms, and honestly, that's normal. Chickens live outside, they peck at the ground, they eat bugs and slugs and each other's droppings without a second thought, and worms are just part of that deal. The real...
Do Cows Have to Be Pregnant to Produce Milk? The Straight Answer
This is one of the questions I get asked most often by people visiting my homestead, usually while they're watching me milk a cow that very clearly isn't pregnant at that moment. It's a fair question, and the honest answer has a little more nuance to it than a simple...
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 stay, help out, and learn how things are done. I wanted to see how other people were actually running their places. Not...
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 stove, the house still feels cold. It’s enough to make you wonder whether you bought the wrong wood or got scammed. ...
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 forgot about. You open the lid and dark liquid sits on top. The starter underneath looks flat and lifeless. You try to give...
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 four, that's a serious chunk of the grocery budget. But before you start thinking about how you'll arrange all the mason...
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 install. A neighbor who'd put up three times as much metal roofing as I ever will just shrugged and called it oil canning,...
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,...
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...
How to Wash Fresh Eggs the Right Way
The first time I collected eggs with a smear of coop bedding stuck to the shell, I did what most new chicken keepers do. I ran straight to the sink and rinsed it off under the tap without a second thought. It took me embarrassingly long to learn that this simple habit...
How to Keep Your House Cool Using Plants
Every summer, you pay good money to fight the heat. The AC is on all afternoon, the electric bill keeps rising, and the house still feels hot by the evening. Meanwhile, the cheapest cooling system you can install doesn't plug into anything. Instead, it grows and you...
How to Get Smoke Smell Out of Wood Furniture
I've brought home more than one "great deal" piece of furniture that turned out to be a smoke bomb in disguise. Estate sales, thrift stores, and hand-me-downs from a smoking household all carry the same risk: gorgeous solid wood at a fraction of retail price, wrapped...
The Only Way to Save Your Garden and Produce Water When It Doesn’t Rain
A while back, I kept running into the same problem every summer. I felt like I didn’t have a reliable water source in case of an emergency. My rain barrels would run dry by the middle of July, the creek would get low, and the only thing left coming out of the hose was...
What July Says About Your Homestead
You might think the big work is done by July. You’ve planted your vegetables, the animals are settled, and all you have to do now is just water and wait, right? That’s exactly the way of thinking that helps you have a half-empty pantry when fall comes. This is a...
What Is a Homestead? The Complete Guide to Starting and Living the Homesteading Life
Somewhere between a backyard garden and a full working farm, the homestead occupies a unique space in modern life. It is a place built around self-reliance: a property where you grow food, raise animals, preserve harvests, and take direct responsibility for as many of...
How to Use Cornstarch Around Your Homestead
You probably have a box of cornstarch sitting in your pantry right now, and you probably think it is only good for thickening gravy and pie filling. But I promise you that by the time you finish this article, you are going to look at that little box differently. ...
