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
- 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
- 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
- In praise of the lowly corn cob
- Build a high protein dispenser and feed your chickens for free!
- 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
- 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
- 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
- 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
- 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
- What’s a geep?
- Milking sheep offer a new small farm alternative
- California Variegated Mutant sheep
- 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