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We feel strongly about living a healthy lifestyle, one that is both self-reliant and supportive of businesses that promote sustainable foods.

This infographic lists some of the best natural food brands that contain non-GMO ingredients, so you know you’re getting the healthiest, most whole ingredients for your family.

A lot of “natural” food brands just package themselves as healthy but really use GMO ingredients and donate to pro-genetic modification lobbies and companies, so it can be hard to make informed decisions on the fly at the grocery store.

So we put together this list of a few companies you can be sure are totally safe and committed to healthy, natural, organic, and non-GMO ingredients. Enjoy!

You will never run out of uses for buckets on the homestead. You can use them to carry water, feed, dirt, rocks, even your harvest from the garden or eggs from the hen house (if you have enough!).

5-Gallon buckets are one of the essentials of homestead or garden life, and you may have experienced this already. Trouble is, it seems like the more uses you find for them, the less you seem to have! While 5-gallon buckets are sturdy, it is possible to break them as well (quick tip: it’s important to keep them out of the sun and rain if possible to maintain the integrity of the plastic).

Whatever 5-gallon buckets you already have, you probably purchased new from Home Depot or Lowe’s, and it’s definitely great to have a few new, good-quality 5-gallon buckets, especially if you’re just getting started. But if you find yourself with more and more needs for buckets and could use a few free ones, here are some tips on where to find them:

Sandwhich shops

Sandwich shops are great places to ask for free buckets, since pickles often come in large, 5-gallon food grade buckets. Just ask if they have any to spare or will sell you some for a marked-down price.

Bakeries

Icing also comes in 5-gallon buckets, so bakeries or grocery stores with bakeries are often willing to give their icing buckets that they’d otherwise just toss away.

Fast Food Restaurants

Fast Food joints also often receive things like ketchup or other bulk sauces in 5-gallon buckets, so you might be able to snag a few from them before they throw them out as well.

Cleaning tips:

When you find discarded food buckets for free, you might find the cost is a little elbow grease you’ll have to put into cleaning out the buckets.

If you make a solution of warm water, vinegar, and a few dashes of Dawn soap, scrub the inside of the bucket down, a let sit for a few hours, then rinse with hot water and repeat as necessary, that should eliminate the smell in no time.

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Does your to-do list start off on the fridge on Monday and end up buried in mail and seed catalogs on the kitchen table by Friday? You have the best intentions to manage your work and goals, but at some point, they just snowball and when Sunday night comes to an end, you’ve met only a few, if any, of that week’s goals. Or maybe you have a system for getting livestock fed and crops watered but are looking for a way to do it more efficiently and make more time for other things. If any of these sound like you, you need the secret weapon in every productive homesteader’s cache: a day planner.

Rather than hiring an extra hand around the homestead, using a day planner helps you to budget your time and spread out your workload. For some, the planner serves as an “external brain” because plotting out your day on paper and sticking to it makes for a more efficient system than just winging it. Here are a few simple tips to help you use your planner:

• Time is money, so budget it! Estimate how long each chore and task takes you to complete and fit it into your day accordingly.

• Prioritize! When prioritizing all your responsibilities, organize them by urgency and importance. Tasks that are both urgent and important get done first.

• Reflect! Your planner can also serve as a kind of journal. As you check off completed tasks, you can look back over the weeks and see where you met your goals and where you need improvement. You don’t get that from a to-do list!

There are many styles of planners out there; a quick evaluation of your needs and goals for your self-sufficient lifestyle will help you determine which has the features you want.

Once you have a good planner in your toolkit, stick with it! Your planner is an asset. Just like you wouldn’t neglect your equipment or your animals, don’t neglect your planner. Getting the most out of your planner helps you to get the most out of your homestead.

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Kale is an awesome source of vitamins and iron, but if you like to buy in season and locally, you can’t always find it fresh. If you shop at the farmer’s market or grow kale yourself, you might find yourself faced with the task of having to preserve a large amount of kale. It’s popular to dehydrate kale, but a lot of people don’t have a dehydrator.

Fortunately, it’s very easy and convenient to freeze kale in large batches for use in soups, smoothies, and even stir-frys. Here’s what you do:

How to freeze kale: 

1. Take your bunches of kale and spread out, to make sure there are no clumps of dirt in between the leaves in the bunches.

2. Prepare your kale wash: mix a few tablespoons of vinegar in a big bowl of water or a full sink.

3. Wash all your kale leaves thoroughly by plunging into the wash and agitating around. This will remove both dirt and microbes.

4. Rinse thoroughly under cold water, inspecting each leaf for dirt.

5. Now, rib the kale, and, if you want, keep the ribs to add to stock or broth and freeze on their own.

6. Chop the kale leaves up roughly and pack into zip lock bags. Or, if you want, you can make individual smoothie packs by adding fresh fruit and a handful of chopped kale leaves to a sandwich bag. Doing this will make your morning green smoothie super simple to make!

7. If you’re freezing the kale by itself, just fill up a bag with just enough to still lay it flat, squeeze out the air, and lay in your freezer. You can stack the bags on top of each other so that they’ll freeze flat, which will make them easier to organize in the freezer.

That’s it! You’ll enjoy having kale to add to dishes or smoothies throughout the winter or whenever you don’t have fresh greens in the house.

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If you’re an avid gardening, you’re probably counting down the days until you can get started gardening again. And, if you’ve started your seeds indoors, you’ll need to make sure your soil is warm and thawed out by the time your seedlings are ready to be transplanted, as you will have a small window of time in which you’ll need to get them in the ground fast.

Obviously, you can’t control the weather, and you may find yourself in a position where you’ve started seeds indoors, counting on the weather to warm up enough to thaw the ground out in time for you to plant, but low and behold, once your seedlings are outgrowing their pots, the ground is still frozen and not ready for planting.

Fortunately, there is a quick and easy way to thaw out the ground in time for planting. You’ll still need a little bit of foresight for this to work for you, as it will take about 3-5 days, so try to think ahead.

What you need

All you need for this is some black (this is important, it will need to absorb the heat of the sun) plastic sheeting, some bricks or cinder blocks, both available at your local hardware or garden supply store, and again, a little bit of foresight. About a week before you definitely need to plant, you’ll want to get your thawing operation started.

What to do

1. Take your plastic sheeting and spread it out over your beds.

2. Weigh down at each end and in the middle if needed with the bricks or cinder blocks. You’re going to need the plastic sheeting to stay firmly in place for up to five days. This is why a heavy, thick black plastic is ideal.

3. Now you wait. The idea is that the sun will beat down on the black plastic and it will absorb the heat and thaw out the ground. Check daily to see how it’s progressing. When you can dig down easily into the dirt and don’t find any more frozen ground, you’re good to go!

Happy planting!

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If you are planning to start raising chickens, you might be faced with the decision of what breeds to buy, especially if you are ordering your chicks from a catalog or online. There are a lot of different breeds out there, that have all been selectively bred for different purposes and to suit different needs.

Some chickens are excellent producers, some lay more in winter, some lay big eggs, some are more self-sufficient when free range, etc. This infographic from Commonsensehome.com is a great cheat-sheet for comparing the top 10 best chicken breeds, their class, size, size of egg, winter hardiness, etc.

Getting an idea for what kinds of breeds are available and which ones might best suit your needs is a great place to start when considering starting chickens. Hope this helps you navigate the wide world of poultry farming! Enjoy.

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Ok, this is really cool. I had no idea it was so easy to make your own lamp oil, but as it’s basically comprised of rubbing, or isopropyl, alcohol, and distilled water, apparently it’s quite simple to mix up your own batch that’s guaranteed to be a lot cheaper than the kind you’ll buy pre-made at Walmart for tiki torches or old-fashioned oil lamps.

Lamp for oils is a really important item to keep on a homestead. If you live off-grid or with limited electricity, it can easily light up a room in the evening and save on electricity. I used a simple oil lamp at night for years and loved it. You can hang them to disperse the light and cook, clean up, even read, depending on how close you are to the lamp or how many you have. They’re great! So this is why I was so thrilled to discover how stupid simple it is to make your own fuel for them.

Since the base is rubbing alcohol, you can easily just stock up on this and make it when you need it. Rubbing alcohol is already a great item to have in your stockpile for first aid.

So, here’s what you need: 

• 16 oz bottle of isopropyl alcohol
• Distilled water
• Mixing container
• Storage container (plastic bottles with caps will do for both of these)
• Essential oil (optional)

Instructions: 

1. Put your alcohol in the container you intend to mix in.
2. Measure 1 tsp of distilled water and 1/2 tsp essential oils if you intend to use them, and add to the bottle.
3. Shake your mixture vigorously.
4. Pour into the container you intend to use, then close the lid tightly and label. This is an important step so you don’t get it mixed up with regular rubbing alcohol or other solutions.

That’s it! So simple and easy, right?

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For most gardeners, space is a major limiting factor, these means that you have to make the most out of every square foot you have, whether it’s ideal or not.  One less than ideal situation you might have is a slope, which many would leave unplanted and unproductive.  While slopes do pose some real difficulties, there are steps that can be taken to mitigate the natural difficulties and take advantage of potential benefits from growing on a slope.

• If the slope is orientated so that it faces the sun you are in luck, your slope will maximize the amount of light available to your crops. If your slope produces shade you will need to grow crops that reach heights that allow them to access the light, trellising may work, or you may want to grow trees.
• Always use heavy mulch on slopes and never leave soil exposed, exposed soil on a slope will be easily eroded by rain or irrigation.
• Grow the crops that can tolerate drying out or that require the most sun at the top of the slope and crops that are heavier feeders at the bottom.
• Planting perrineals will reduce the amount of work you need to do on the slope which can be physically difficult if the slope is steep, and will be a risk of erosion.
• Using construction stakes and planks of wood, or natural onsite material, you can make terraces that will both decrease the rate of erosion and make it more comfortable to work. Simply drive the stakes in, screw the planks to the stakes, and fill in the empty space with dirt from above.  Then place another set of stakes and planks against the exposed area where you removed the dirt from to support the slope above it.

Don’t let the terrain available to you limit your garden.  With some innovation you can take advantage of nearly any ground do grow food and in some cases even benefit from what others would see as a disadvantage.

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