From soil and seeds to livestock, preservation, and off-grid power.
By the Homestead Team A dark asphalt roof on a summer afternoon reaches about 170 degrees Fahrenheit. A white membrane on the same building on the same day sits near 105. That is a 65 degree difference produced by nothing but color, and it is not controversial: you can calculate it from first principles, and … Read more
By the Homestead Team We built one in a barn on a permaculture homestead in Colorado, the kind of barn that holds tools and equipment rather than animals, and the thing nobody warns you about is what it does to the room. We expected a heater. What we got was the place everyone ends up. … Read more
By the Homestead Team This is the technical companion to our piece on how rocket mass heaters work and whether you should build one. That article covers the decision, the code and insurance problem, and the safety case. This one assumes you have made the decision and want the numbers. Nearly every failed rocket mass … Read more
By the Pantry Team Start with the honest version, because most of what you will read about beef this month is written to frighten you. There is no beef shortage at the American grocery store. The cases are full. What has happened is that the price of what is in them has climbed past the … Read more
By the Homestead Team There is a number in the USDA’s avian influenza data that most flock owners have never seen, and it reframes the entire subject. Since the current outbreak began in 2022, roughly 1,431 poultry flocks in the United States have had confirmed cases. Of those, about 652 were commercial operations and about … Read more
By the Homestead Team Most water-harvesting advice starts on the roof: gutters, a downspout, a tank. That is worth doing, but it solves only part of the problem, and it depends on a roof, a pump or gravity feed, and a tank that can crack, freeze, or run dry. There is an older, quieter way … Read more
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 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 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
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