Countryside Library

After chores

  • The greater gift
  • The flying squirrel

All around the homestead

  • Equipping the “ideal” homestead in the 21st century
  • How we use time determines what our lives are, what we are
  • It takes time to acquire tools and experience
  • Time saving devices
  • How many ways can you save time?
  • Are you depriving your kids?
  • Cold-stirred, no-cook lye soap
  • Make a smoker from a cardboard box
  • Flat-free tires
  • Learning is saving
  • They don’t make them like they used to
  • My homesteading blunders
  • Why are you interested in homesteading?
  • How things were done in the 1800′s

Your homestead business

  • Selecting and starting your ideal home business
  • Thinking about a homestead enterprise?
  • Do you really want to go into business for yourself?
  • Marketing your crafts
  • Spousal support in the home craft business
  • It takes time to establish a home business
  • Your time is worth something: Pricing your products in a home craft business
  • Wholesale vs. retail, Part I: Retail
  • Time for a crafty harvest
  • A farm store can work for you
  • New model for supermarket beef on a Georgia Serengeti

Alternative energy

  • Practical solar power
  • Forecast for alternative energy: Sunny, and exciting!
  • Solar, wind and steam: A cost comparison
  • Heating with wood
  • Heat with peat moss
  • A silent killer: Carbon monoxide
  • Renewable system payback
  • Free hot water
  • There s a renewable energy system for you
  • Site specific system designs
  • 25 years off-grid, a retrospective
  • Getting started with solar power
  • Living off the grid: A wife’s perspective
  • Piecing together a spanking new $600 solar-electric system
  • Purchasing and using a masonry stove
  • Selling the sun: Solar and wind options for grid-tied homes
  • Series and parallel wiring
  • Home heating from the good Earth
  • Unfolding the complexity of wind towers
  • Choosing the right off-grid inverter
  • Stand-alone solar water pumping
  • Calculating your daily solar energy harvest
  • Midwest couple doubles their diesel dollars
  • Battery options for your off-grid home
  • Is homegrown wind power right for you?
  • SIPping the good life – Structural Insulated Panels prove a good match for off-grid living
  • Solar hot water, anyone? System options for every climate
  • Using wind energy for direct water heating
  • Cashing in on sunlight’s changeable nature. Efficient windows and thermal mass
  • Electricity from wood? An old technology with a new twist
  • Sizing a solar-electric system for worry-free off-grid living
  • Install solar and wind electricity for a secure and sustainable future
  • Portable generators: When the power goes out, you don’t have to worry
  • Calling for backup: Standby generators
  • Calling for backup: Part II: Battery-based backup power systems
  • Going solar in a small way: Pint-sized inverters
  • A Colorado family’s 18-year off-grid odyssey
  • Real life in the off-grid dream
  • Free hot water from your wood cookstove
  • The real cost of going off-grid
  • Cutting amps by ramping volts
  • Timely tax breaks for energy efficiency
  • Big results from a little off-grid welding shop
  • Two solar hot-water systems you can (probably) build yourself
  • Venturing out of the backwoods: Can your off-grid home survive without you?
  • Brewing up some wind power: Axial-flux and other DIY wind turbines
  • Our favorite bun warmer
  • Living off the grid: Can you hack it?

Homestead housing

  • A place to heal
  • Living in the round: Life in a yurt
  • Squatter nation

Homestead Construction

  • Energy efficient homes
  • Frequently asked questions about cordwood masonry
  • Building for free with “alternative” natural material
  • Construct a straw bale greenhouse
  • Designing your ideal homestead
  • A backyard lean-to
  • Build a wood-burning cookstove from a steel barrel
  • Build your own solar shower for pennies
  • Build it with stone…build it for free!
  • Build a homestead root cellar and smoker
  • Hoard’s bike cart

The Homestead kitchen

  • Learning to cook on a woodstove
  • The Fab Four: How to survive on wheat, dry milk, honey and salt
  • Cheese: A natural way to preserve your milk
  • Solar food drying
  • How To Make Vinegar
  • Doc Salsbury makes sourdough
  • Alternate heat sources for food dehydration
  • No-frills oven-drying of fruits and vegetables
  • Slow food A Celebration of Life
  • Baked beans and stews
  • The versatile meat grinder
  • Fall butchering advice & reminders
  • The best butcherin’ recipes
  • There’s yeast in them there hills
  • Mead: Gift of the gods
  • Delightful eggplant dishes from Eastern lands
  • It s easy to make your own yogurt
  • Sourdough bread variations
  • Africa’s delicious gift to the world
  • Cast iron in the country kitchen
  • Why eat whole foods?
  • Here’s a tasty, healthful, inexpensive snack
  • Make goat milk mozzarella & Make your own rennet
  • Try some goat milk ice cream
  • Stocking your emergency food pantry
  • Read the instructions that came with your pressure cooker, or beware the ominous Red Rain!
  • Taking care of your game meat
  • Grow your own stir-fry
  • Cider making: A pressing concern
  • The whole wheat experience
  • Cabbage: One of the most nutritious vegetables
  • Cranberries: A healthy and versatile fruit
  • Fill your pantry with help from Mother Nature
  • Breakfast & beyond: Reinventing the egg
  • Dry it. You’ll like it!
  • A chicken in every pot
  • Spinach: The prince of vegetables
  • Cooking common fish
  • Money saving tips from More Money Than Month
  • Bread baking basics
  • Warm up with horseradish this winter
  • Make fois gras at home humanely and inexpensively
  • Snow food is snow terrific
  • Bringing Thanksgiving back to the farm
  • All or nothing = nothing
  • In a class of its own: Food and the Codex
  • Can it already
  • Menu planning & a clean kitchen
  • Real “whole” whole wheat bread
  • Muffin basics
  • Whole wheat bread recipe: A variation
  • Bake fresh-ground whole meal potato bread
  • Gluten, dairy, soy, & sugar-free recipes
  • Yogurt: An easy, inexpensive (and yummy) way to preserve your excess milk
  • Living off milk abundance
  • Debbie’s bread recipe

Country neighbors

  • “Grow as you go”
  • Homesteading in Malawi, the warm heart of Africa

Homestead crafts

  • Design your own insulating window quilts
  • A second life for bluejeans
  • Rags to rugs

Crops & soils

  • The soul of soil
  • How to make compost
  • Composting at home
  • No-till, permanent bed farming
  • Evaluating hay quality
  • Weather and plant maturity affect hay quality
  • Out to pasture: Nutrition more important than rotation
  • Soil health

Fences

  • On guard: Protecting the homestead herd with electric fencing
  • Fences for livestock
  • User-friendly gates: Tips for quick fixes
  • The real meaning of stick-building
  • Five Fencing mistakes you don t want to make

Homestead finances

  • Do your research before buying your homestead
  • How to thrive on half your income
  • How we went from $42,000 to $6,500 and lived to tell about it!
  • Coping with today’s economy
  • Economics for homesteaders

Homestead firearms

  • Is it time you started reloading your own ammo?

The garden

  • How to buy a good garden tool
  • How to grow mushrooms on a log
  • Grow herbs in winter
  • Can your garden provide homestead income?
  • The beauty and bounty of basil
  • Scarecrows that actually work
  • Our greenhouse refuge
  • Germination and transplant tips for vigorous plants
  • The charm of chives
  • Animal gardening
  • The beauty of scythes
  • Okra: Useful and attractive
  • Feed your trees
  • Strawberry delight
  • This is not your Daddy’s okra! Big okra with big taste
  • Kale in the fall garden
  • Make a cold frame from your scrap pile
  • Botanical Latin for the plebeian reader
  • Preserving your harvest with turn-of-the-century methods
  • The gardening game. Do you know where your seeds come from?
  • Growing organic strawberries
  • What is intensive planting? How does it work?
  • An abundance of squash
  • Earth’s most user-friendly composter: Used tires
  • The secrets to growing delectable sweet corn
  • The joys and challenges of growing herbs
  • Try kohlrabi for a unique treat
  • Extend your growing season with a cold frame
  • Row covers extend the garden season
  • Let’s get planting: Tips for starting your seeds off right
  • Fruit trees: History’s movers & shakers
  • It’s high time to revive the working family garden
  • Autumn frost protection for your garden
  • Mulch ado about nothing
  • The $2 garden
  • Get an early start in your garden
  • K.I.S.S. your compost
  • Growing fruit without sprays
  • Gardening on a dime
  • Spring gardening in the greenhouse
  • Strawberry boxes
  • Onions for food, flavor & fun
  • Gardening is easier with “tables & tanks”
  • Bridge over troubling teethmarks
  • Growing apples in cold regions
  • Ground squirrel eliminator
  • Saving seeds
  • The Victory Hoe

The Greenhorn’s Guide to Homesteading

  • This land is your land; this land is our land
  • Planning your homestead
  • Location, location, location!

Homestead health

  • Avian flu de-mystified

Homestead household hints

  • Clean your home with homemade products

Homestead landscape

  • Finding something deer won’t eat
  • Soil-borne pathogens
  • Herbicide use and its unintended consequences

Homestead livestock
  • Take a tip from Nature: Farm wild
  • Livestock on the homestead
  • Donkeys on the homestead
  • On the loose at the 15th Annual Wisconsin Grazing Conference
  • The importance of biodiversity in livestock production
  • 15th Annual Wisconsin Grazing Conference, Part III
  • Eye inflammation in livestock can be caused by burrs
  • Managing mastitis
  • Off-the-grid alpaca farm
  • Q Fever: A disease we definitely don’t need
The apiary
  • Getting started with bees
  • Housing and feeding your new packaged bees
  • Keep your bees healthy
  • Your first year with bees: Now is the time to plan for next year
  • Fun with mason bees
The cow barn
  • Pasture and cattle: Some tips for beginners
  • Love my Dutch Belted!
  • Selecting cattle for your small farm
  • Malpresentations & manipulations
  • Watering your herd in winter
  • Hardware in cattle
  • Prevent coccidiosis in calves
  • Tips on using an esophageal feeder or nasogastric tube
  • The lady wants a cow
  • Milking your own cow
  • Trouble with twins
  • Marketing grass-fed beef
  • Preparing your homestead herd for winter
  • Essential remedies for the dairy barn
  • There’s nothing magical about cow warts
  • What is a crossbreed or a composite
Feeds & feeding
  • In praise of the lowly corn cob
  • Build a high protein dispenser and feed your chickens for free!
The goat barn
  • Why Oberhasli Swiss
  • Start your own meat goat herd
  • True success comes with planning
  • Small-scale milking machines
  • Contain your kids with this handy disbudding box
  • Goats are affected by nasal bot larvae
  • All goats need some basic care
  • Selecting a dairy goat
  • Raising organically certified dairy goats
  • Concrete hoof trimming
The horse barn
  • Attending the newborn foal
  • Horses I have known – There’s a breed out there for everyone
  • Draft horses as useful today as ever
  • West Nile Virus in horses
  • Miniature horses: Caring for the ideal hobby horse
  • The ten most commonly asked farrier questions
The pig pen
  • Raise a pig in your backyard
  • Cold weather planning for pigs
  • Living high on half the hog
  • Water your hogs without using electricity
  • Raising your own backyard pig
  • Harvesting the homestead hog
  • The (long) weekend pig project
  • Gloucestershire Old Spots
Homestead poultry
  • Guineas for tick control
  • Build your own small-scale chicken plucker
  • Rearrange your chicken yard for fresh grazing
  • Raising ducks and geese on pasture
  • Use care when feeding ducks chicken feed
  • Homestead poultry butchering
  • Chicken feed and pig slop options
  • Breeding meat chickens
The rabbitry
  • Fundamental principles of rabbit feeding
  • Rabbit raising from a Pakistani view
  • The art of palpation
  • Hooked on Dutch: Give this delightful old breed a try
  • Reflections of a rabbit raiser
  • Overcoming the “cute factor”
  • Raise rabbits for meat: They’re quieter than chickens
The sheep shed
  • What’s a geep?
  • Milking sheep offer a new small farm alternative
  • California Variegated Mutant sheep
More Resources
  • Backyard Poultry Magazine
  • Dairy Goat Journal
  • Magazine

In the wild

  • The brown recluse spider
  • Milkweed: A truly remarkable wild vegetable
  • Sumac: The wild lemonade berry
  • Cooking over the campfire
  • Living on the wild side
  • Drink nature-ally
  • Wild onions punchy, pungent, perfect
  • The pronghorn: Back from the edge of oblivion
  • Identifying and harvesting wild plants
  • Basswood: The ultimate wild salad plant
  • Defending “ugly” fish
  • Wild parsnip: It’s like raiding a garden, but better
  • Wild things

Looking back

  • The “antique” value of prudence and the psychology of economics
  • Where the money went
  • Discovering our roots: How the 1920s and ’30s shaped modern homesteading
  • Food and the fast track

Notes from the Northwoods

  • Our flexible, movable kitchen
  • Eating out of your garden
  • Homestead wine
  • Build a homestead one-log hauler
  • Rhubarb: A special plant
  • Rise to a new height the workshop mini-bench
  • Grapes in the north
  • Horseradish: It s great with almost everything!
  • The Manytracks solar oven
  • Building and using a midwest solar food dryer
  • From cucumber to pickle
  • Start spring in the fall

Homestead politics

  • Welcome to Anathoth
  • Food security is a real issue
  • The “National Animal Identification System”: A new threat to rural freedom?
  • National Livestock Identification System (updates)
  • The real impacts of the National Identification System
  • Maverick: An interview with Bud Kerr
  • The scene of the crime: Could raw milk get you in hot water?
  • Chicken crimes
  • American panopticon

Self-reliance/Survival

  • The Great Ice Storm of ’98
  • In Michigan s northwoods, they re always prepared
  • How to purify water in an emergency
  • Lost in the wilderness! Tips to help you emerge safely
  • A simple hand-warming heater you can make yourself
  • Water: The most important preparedness item

Homestead simplicity

  • Living deliberately: How to approach simplification
  • Homestead security equals free-range chickens, a good dog, and Jerusalem artichokes

Homestead skills

  • Make a rope
  • Welding for anyone

The smithy

  • Make an e-z log poker
  • E-z blacksmithing coal forge

Voices

  • Whatever happened to the Food Safety Modernization Act?

Homestead water

  • How to get water from a drilled well when the power is off
  • Conservation tips for everyone
  • Winterkill prevention on ponds and lakes
  • Hydraulic ram pump how-to
  • A 12-volt “walking” water system
  • Homestead water procurement
  • But the levee was dry: The truth about the Clean Water Restoration Act of 2007
  • Build a small pond in your backyard
  • Once a pond a time
  • Build a homestead pond
  • Using grey water in the garden
  • “Water rings” make watering a snap

The woodlot

  • Build a firewood holder
  • Aid to dependent woodland owners

The homestead workshop

  • Build a redwood hot tub for under $300
  • Make a homemade boot scraper