By the Homestead Team Most homesteads get planned one project at a time. The garden goes wherever there was open, sunny ground. The orchard goes wherever a nursery delivery truck could reach. The woodpile ends up wherever it was convenient to stack it that first winter, and stays there for the next ten. None of … Read more
By the Homestead Team Almost every vegetable garden runs on the same yearly cycle: till the bed, start or buy seedlings, plant, tend, harvest, then pull the spent plants and start the whole process over again next spring. Perennial vegetables break that cycle. Plant them once, give them a year or two to settle in, … Read more
By the Homestead Team Plant a single fruit tree in a patch of mowed lawn and you have signed up for a job: feeding it, spraying it, weeding around its trunk, and mowing right up to the base every week of the growing season. Plant the same tree surrounded by the right ring of companion … Read more
By the Homestead Team A natural forest does not grow in rows. It grows in layers, stacked from the tallest trees down to the roots underground, each layer using light, water, and space the layers above and below it are not using. A food forest borrows that structure and fills it with edible plants instead … Read more
By the Preparedness Team Most disaster planning fixates on food, water, and shelter, and rightly so. But look at the actual death tolls after major disasters, and a quieter cause keeps showing up: disease from bad sanitation, not the storm or the earthquake itself. When water stops flowing, toilets stop flushing, taps stop running, and … Read more
By the Gear Team Open most people’s gear drawer and you will find a graveyard of batteries: a couple of odd 18650s from an old flashlight, three dead AAs, a headlamp cell that fits nothing else in the house, and a charger that only works with one of them. None of that is useful in … Read more
By the Precious Metals Team Few corners of the preparedness world attract more heat and less light than precious metals. To some, gold and silver are the ultimate insurance against collapse. To others, they are a shiny distraction that pays no interest and does nothing but sit in a safe. The sensible truth sits between … Read more
By the Gear Team A phone at ten percent is not just an inconvenience during an outage, it is your weather alerts, your family group chat, and your flashlight all going dark at once. A good power bank is the cheapest, smallest piece of insurance you can buy against that, and unlike a whole-home generator … Read more
By the Gear Desk Ask a homesteader what they regret planting and roses come up more than you would expect. Not because roses are a bad idea, but because most people plant the fussy, hybrid tea kind their grandmother grew: the ones that need spraying every two weeks, careful pruning, and a prayer against black … Read more
By the Gear Desk Not every planting on a homestead needs to end up on a plate. Shade, privacy, and windbreak cost real money to buy any other way, whether that is a shade sail, a wooden privacy fence, or a heating bill that climbs every winter because cold wind hits the house head on. … Read more