Homesteader Depot

Tag: homesteading skills

  • Become a Better Homesteader Using These 4 Tips

    Become a Better Homesteader Using These 4 Tips

    When it comes to homesteading, there is no such thing as knowing too much or working too hard. Yet, many people want to get into this lifestyle without truly understanding what it means or by looking for shortcuts. Instead of trying to find the “easy” way to be a homesteader, you need to find ways that you can become a better homesteader. The life is not always easy, but it can be extremely rewarding. The following are a few tips that will help you to get into the right mindset and to make sure homesteading for the long haul is right for you.

    Learn to Live With Less

    This does not mean you need to give up all the things that you enjoy. It simply means that you need to learn to live within your means, which is something that so many people today have a problem doing. You do not need to have the latest phone and all the latest gadgets.

    You do not need to spend on all the fancy, shiny new equipment, and gear that you think you need for the homestead either. If you need a tractor, you do not have to buy one that is brand new. Buy a used one and learn how to do the repairs yourself. This leads us into the next thing you will want to do to become a better homesteader.

    Learn a New Skill Each Day

    You are never done learning when it comes to homesteading. There is always something new that you can learn, and you should make it a point to try to learn something each day. It might be something simple, such as how to cook a new meal or how to clean a fish. It might be something more complex, such as making repairs to that tractor we mentioned earlier. Strive to learn something new and find people who are willing to teach you things. You can also share the knowledge you have with them.

    Learn this simple step by step process to recondition old batteries and NEVER buy batteries again>>>

    Focus on the Task at Hand and Work Hard at It

    When it comes to homesteading, you can’t put things off until later in most cases. If you do, you will have too much work piling up and it will be overwhelming. You need to have a plan of action for each day and you need to focus on each of the tasks you need to get done. If there are others in the family, spread out the tasks and chores among everyone and work together to get things done.

    Consider New Ways to Boost Your Income

    Another way to improve as a homesteader is to find some ways to make some extra income that you can invest into the homestead or put into your savings. If you are doing woodworking or making soap or candles, for example, you could sell those goods online and at craft shows. There are plenty of ways that you can make money doing what you love.  Take a look at the following links to learn some super simple crafts:

     >> 5 Step DIY Soap

    >> 16,000 Woodworking Plans

    These are just some of the ways that you can become a better homesteader. Start implementing these tips now, and keep on learning.

     

     

  • How to Make Mud Bricks (Video)

    How to Make Mud Bricks (Video)

    You probably know by now I’m a fan of all kinds of pre-industrial skills, and making mud bricks from mud and straw is one of the coolest skills for a homesteader to know. It might not be the most practical way to obtain bricks in our modern life, as they’re pretty labor-intensive, but it is a pretty foundational thing to know. You never know when you might be able to benefit from the basics of brick-making.

    After all, when you buy them from the hardware store, they have been made from hand somewhere, and there are still low-wage workers in third-world countries making them by hand either for themselves or for import. So when the grid goes down or the global economy reaches crisis, being able to say, build your own grill or outdoor oven could be game-changing.

    Watch this handy artisan make super basic, classic bricks that anyone can make. Enjoy!

     

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  • Sewing, Knitting, and Crocheting – Three Skills You Need

    Sewing, Knitting, and Crocheting – Three Skills You Need

    As a homesteader, you are a collector of skills. With every skill that you acquire, it leads you one step closer to true self-sufficiency. The following are three related skills that you will certainly want to add to your repertoire – sewing, knitting, and crocheting. Let’s learn how these skills can benefit you.

    Sewing

    If you can sew, and if you practice your techniques, you can mend your clothing and tailor it as needed. This means your clothes can last for far longer than they would have. Not only that, but you may even get to the point where you decide you can make some of your clothing. You want to learn how to sew with a sewing machine, of course, but that’s not all. You should also learn how to sew by hand since a machine might not always be available.

    Knitting and Crocheting

    While these two skills are very similar, the methodology behind them is different. You may choose to focus on just one of the fields, or you might want to learn how to do both. When you can knit and crochet, you can make hats, mittens, scarves, blankets, and more. These are fun skills to learn, and you can put them to use. Having extra blankets around is always nice. In addition, you can give gifts that you’ve made, which is part of the homesteader’s DIY spirit.

    You might be wondering how long each of these skills takes to learn. Well, it depends on the person. Some people are fast learners and can pick up the basics quickly. It might take others a little longer to get the skills down. Once you get the basics though, you are well on your way. Of course, it can take quite some time to become a true master of these skills.

     

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  • 3 Things to Consider When Felling a Tree

    3 Things to Consider When Felling a Tree

    Cutting a tree down can be dangerous, even deadly.  But it is something that, if you are homesteading, you will probably be faced with sooner or later, if not regularly.  Felling a tree is not something that should be rushed into or taken lightly, especially if the tree is particularly large, or close to a structure.  Before felling any tree, give it some thought, and be careful.

     

    Limb pattern

    Trees are not 100% symmetrical.  If a tree has anything obstructing its access to light on one side, it will grow more limbs in the other direction.  Limbs can also die and fall off, and when they do it is unlikely that they will do so symmetrically.  These factors will affect the direction the tree falls in.  This can be controlled by selectively removing limbs on the side that you do not want the tree to fall it.  This will make the tree unevenly weighted and help control its direction of fall.

    Trunk shape

    The shape of the tree’s truck will also affect the direction it is likely to fall in.  If the tree has an oblong truck, it is highly unlikely to fall in the direction the truck is wider in.  It will take quite a lot to change the direction of fall from the thin side to the wide side.

    Making your cuts

    Once you have determined the direction the tree will fall in is safe, you will have to start making the cuts that will bring the tree down.  This should be done with three cuts.  The first should be placed on the side that you want the tree to fall to, it should be nearly parallel to the ground but slightly higher as you get deeper, and should be about 50% the depth of the trunk.  The second cut should be placed on the same side, and should be at an angle, between 30 to 40 degrees, and it should connect to the first cut so that a wedge of wood can be removed.  The third cut should be placed on the side of the tree opposite from the direction that you want to tree to fall in.  It should be just higher than the first cut made, lower than the angled cut, and also nearly parallel to the ground but slightly lower as the cut gets deeper.  Try to make the third cut exactly opposite the first cut, for instance, if the first cut is from 2 o’clock to 5 o’clock on the trunk, then the third should be made at 11 o’clock to 7 o’clock.

     

    Felling a tree is not something to take lightly.  Plan it out and be safe.

     

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  • Developing Skills Prior to Homesteading

    Given the drastic lifestyle changes inherent in making the transition from typical modern life to homesteading, preparation is a must.  Along with gathering tools and resources, one should not overlook practicing the skills that are soon to be a regular part of your life, but which are typically unfamiliar to those living in suburban or urban settings.  While not everything can be simulated, even a little experience can provide you with the skills and attitude that can transfer to many other aspects of your new homesteading life.

    Gardening

    Starring at a plot of fallow ground without having any experience gardening can be intimidating and can lead to less than desirable results.  Starting big for your first time can have you waste time and energy.  Nearly everyone, despite their space and living arrangements, can grow some food.  This will help you learn about plant care, pest control, sustainable harvest, and crop selection.  Even if you live in an apartment without ground access you can grow in containers if you have a balcony.  Fruiting plants like tomatoes, peppers, and eggplant can be successfully and effectively grown in containers.  Greens like kale, chard, and Okinawan spinach do well in containers.  Culinary and medicinal herbs such as basil, mint, feverfew can thrive in containers.

    Animal Husbandry

    Like gardening, raising small domestic animals can still teach you the basics about how to properly care for and how to deal with possible and inevitable difficulties that go along with animal husbandry.  For those who can raise a few chickens or ducks in their backyard, this would be a great place to start.  First-hand observation will teach you more about your animals than any amount of reading or watching YouTube videos ever could.  You will learn first-hand through trial and error things like proper containment, effective methods of keeping predators away from your animals, and parasite and other health management.  Perhaps the most difficult to thing to learn without actual experience is slaughtering.  It is one thing to read about the methods of slaughtering an animal that you have put months if not years of care into raising, and it is another to actually do it yourself.  But it is a reality that one will have to understand if one is going to raise animals for food.

    Food Storage

    Resource conservation of all sorts is going to be an everyday part of life for those that are homesteading.  One way to prepare yourself for this now is to practice food preservation and storage such as canning and dehydrating.  Buying vegetables such as tomatoes and green beans while they are on sale and canning them for when they are out of season and more expensive is great practice for resource conservation.  Likewise growing your own herbs and dehydrating them for the winter months will be good experience for food preservation and resource conservation.

     

    Preparing now for the new changes and challenges that one will have to face when beginning homesteading can make the difference between a stressful failure and an exciting new way of life.  Good luck.

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  • Simple Steps Towards Self-Reliance

    Simple Steps Towards Self-Reliance

    If you’re homesteading, you’re probably already pretty self-reliant. But if you’re not and you wish you were, there are still many ways you can become more self-reliant, no matter where you’re living. Every little thing you can do counts, and also will help you assess just how much you rely on “the system” and what you can do to change that.

    Here are a few simple ideas to reduce your dependence on, say, multi-national corporations or globalized trade, and more on yourself and the resources that are available in your community. It might be called “self” reliance, but really, relying on our communities, local farmers, artisans, and small-scale production, is a huge leap towards resource independence.

    Buy Food Local and Seasonal

    It might some adjustments to your diet, but find out what grows in your area and shop according to what you can purchase locally and seasonally. Find local farmers markets, community gardens and local food production like bakeries or butchers that specialize in local meat.

    Learn to Cook

    Learning to cook as much as you can from scratch will give you a better idea of what the food you like to eat requires. It also will help you be more independent from large-scale food production and narrow the food you eat down to more local, fresh, organic ingredients.

    Make Something With Your Hands

    Whether it is knitting, weaving, carpentry, soap or candle making, learning to make something yourself, instead of buying it from the store, is not only fun, it will make you feel just a bit more able to survive on your own, without the support of lots of large-scale industries.

    Buy Something Handmade

    Obviously you probably don’t have the time or resources to make everything you use on a day-to-day basis for yourself, so shopping for handmade, local, artisan items yourself is a great way to supplement what you can’t do. Soap, food products, clothing, fabrics, furniture, purses, belts and wallets, even art or metal work are usually made by people who work hard to create unique, beautiful and high-quality items. If you can’t find much locally, Etsy is another great way to support small artists and keep money between individuals, not big companies.

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  • From Fleece to Yarn (Video Series)

    From Fleece to Yarn (Video Series)

    Some homesteading projects are so much better explained visually, when you can see the whole process, start-to-finish. Shearing sheep, processing the wool and spinning it into yarn is such a classic self-sufficiency skill that, even if you don’t have sheep, you’ll love learning how to do. Just seeing how a brilliantly versatile natural fiber is made using traditional methods will take you back to bygone days. Is there anything more idyllic than spinning wool on a homestead?

    I loved watching this series from the YouTube channel, Keeper of the Homestead, on how to shear, clean, process and spin wool. It’s part of a bigger series on homesteading, check out all their videos, there’s lots of great homesteading knowledge and tutorials.

    This first video covers shearing the sheep and how to store the wool.

    This second video covers washing the wool-a very important part of the process as sheep fleece can be quite dirty!

    This video covers “carding” the wool, which is basically combing out the wool to make it smoother and more manageable:

    This next video shows “roving” the wool, which is the next step towards spinning:

    And finally, this video covers the fun part-spinning!

    I just think it is so cool to learn these traditional methods for taking resources from our homestead and turning them into tools and material to use. Because after all, isn’t that the point of homesteading?

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  • Skills to Build While You Wish You Could Homestead

    Skills to Build While You Wish You Could Homestead

    Whether you’re stuck in a cramped apartment in the city or living in a suburban starter home while you save up to buy land, there’s no reason you can’t start building your homesteader skills now, as you dream of more self-reliant times ahead. You can check out our guide to how to homestead in a city if you can’t wait to free yourself from the grid, and also start developing the following skills to be ready when the time comes to fully escape the plugged in life:

     

    1. Bake your own bread: We tend to take our packaged, fluffy white supermarket loaves for granted, but there is nothing as delicious or satisfying as freshly baked homemade bread. It’s not too difficult to master, and doesn’t require anything more than what you can buy from said supermarket. And in addition to delicious bread, it will provide you with more of a sense of control over what goes into your food and a whole lot of respect for homesteaders of yore-who grew, milled and baked to get their daily bread.

     

    1. Pickling and Canning: There’s no reason you need to be growing your own crops to start preserving food. It’s always good to have a nice supply of foods that don’t need to be refrigerated, and really rewarding to make them yourself. Pickling is great because pickled and fermented foods are actually an amazing source of probiotics, and canning your own food is a great way to take advantage of marked-down produce at the supermarket as well as a healthy alternative to most GMO, BPA, toxin-ridden store-bought canned products.
      Check out: 7 Steps for Easy Canning

     

    1. Render tallow and lard: Mostly a forgotten homesteading art, rendering tallow and lard can be both greatly rewarding and cost-effective. Using often-times free scraps from butcher shops, or, if you’re lucky enough to know a hunter or farmer, the remains of a deer or cow after butchering, tallow and lard can be used in place of conventional oil or store-bought butter and tend to be far more delicious and nutritious.

     

    1. Make your own soap: The cost-effectiveness of making one’s own soap is probably the best reason to try it-homemade-soapbut, like making your own bread or canned products, also gives you a sense of control over what is going in your soap and knowing it’s safe. If you can get over the fear of working with lye, soap-making can be a blast, and odds are you won’t go back after you’ve tried it. Just make sure to follow basic safety precautions and you’ll be making all your family members homemade vanilla-lavender-coconut suds in no time!
      Check out: 5 Step DIY Soap

     

    1. Butcher a chicken: OK, so odds are, if you live in the city or suburbs, you probably don’t have access to a live chicken, but that doesn’t mean you can’t start practicing butchering now. Most supermarkets and butchers sell whole chicken, and they’re always much cheaper than chicken cuts. It’s a great way to whet your pallet for butchering, and you can use the giblets for gravy and bones for tallow-learning how to use the whole animal will give you a great taste for proper homesteading!

     

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