People that are new to homesteading often get a bit of a shock when they buy a house with some land because they think that it will be all ready to go once they move in. If you’re lucky, the land may be ready for growing but a lot of the time, it isn’t. If your land isn't ready for gardening quite yet, here's some information for how to start a vegetable garden from ...
HOME & HOMESTEAD
How to Harvest and Store Romaine Lettuce Seeds
While purchasing seeds won't necessarily set you back a whole lot of money, as a homesteader, you are likely interested in frugality to some degree. When seed quality and frugality can intersect, all the better! This year is a great time to learn how to harvest and store your very own romaine lettuce seeds. Rather than yanking the bolted lettuce plants out of the ground ...
How to Protect a Garden from Animals in 15 Minutes
Garden pests! Such small critters can wreak so much havoc on the garden you work so hard to tend and coax to produce. How disheartening to find that bugs or cute little mammals treated themselves to our hard-won vegetables and plants. They come together within about 15 minutes and the hardest part, really, is cutting the hardware cloth because it's so ...
Easy Root Vegetable Storage Ideas That Need No Root Cellar
As a gardeners, one of the goals of growing your own food is to achieve good nutrition to put on the dinner table. Most crops are preserved by some sort of food preservation method like canning. However, if you have a root vegetable storage plan, you can cut out a lot of extra work for yourself! Root Vegetable Storage Made Easy The benefits for storing root vegetables ...
How to Make Fruit Leather from Any Fruit
If you have your own fruit trees or partake in loss leader deals at the store, you may find yourself with lots of extra fruit on hand during the summer. Rather than letting your overripe fruit go into the compost pile, why not take advantage of the sweetness of fruit at this stage and learn how to make fruit leather? It's nature's candy! So you've made your strawberry jam, ...
How to Make a Delicious Peach BBQ Sauce {+ Canning Instructions}
Whether you are purchasing peaches from the store or using your peach harvest, you may not have thought of making something savory with them. After you've made your jam, fruit leather, and wine, make sure to save a few lbs to make peach bbq sauce! Barbecue is some of the best food on earth, thank God it's so easy to do! Todd and I ran across this recipe when we were trying ...
How to Make Fig Wine at Home {Step-by-Step Instructions}
Summer is the season when many delicious fruits are harvested. Sometimes the windfall more than provides more than enough jam, frozen fruit, fruit leather, and other fruit products until next harvest. A great way to use up all of your extra figs is to learn how to make fig wine at home. A few years ago, we were invited to a friend's farm to harvest figs from her huge tree. ...
How to Make Strawberry Wine Step-By-Step
There's little more satisfying than filling your plate or glass with something you made with your own hands. Even better if it's something you have grown on your homestead! Making fruit wine is one of those satisfying activities, and this one yields the best flavor. This post will teach you how to make strawberry wine with store bought, or home-grown berries. If you ...
How to Use Diatomaceous Earth in the Garden
These days with all of the concern over food quality, widely used chemical pesticides are viewed askance by those wanting to live more naturally. If you are among this group, you will want to find ways to grow your own food without harmful pesticides. Learning how to use diatomaceous earth in the garden can help eliminate some of the chemicals you'd prefer not to have on your ...
How To Make Your Own Herbal Materia Medica Journal
As an aspiring herbalist, you are likely already making your herbal materia medica journal, where you can keep records of which herbs are most accessible to you, how to use them, and how effective they are with each member of your family. Your husband has a cold, how can you help him get well? Your child has a stomach ache, which herb will help with that? You are ...
How to Easily Correct GI Stasis in Rabbits
If you’ve ever gone out to your rabbit hutch only to find your sweet bunny’s food dish full and hutch tray empty? It's a good chance that your are seeing what GI stasis in rabbits looks like. Time is of the essence. Keeping our rabbits GI system in tip-top shape is dependent on us feeding proper food, in the right amounts. In addition to the pellets you add to her feeder, ...
How to Make Chicken Feed for Layers {17.5%}
There are plenty of choices for layer feed that we can purchase from our local farm supply store that your flock will thrive on. However, not all of them can boast a lack of genetically-modified ingredients, and the ones that do are pretty pricey. There's only so many foods we can give our chickens from our kitchens and without the right foods protein levels won't be met, which ...