Tag: homesteading
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How to Read Antique Cookbooks
Antique cookbooks are a wonderful relic of the past, and yet, if you’ve ever tried to make any of the recipes contained within, you might find yourself scratching your head. Just as lifestyles have changed drastically in the last half, even quarter century, so have the way we cook, talk about, and interact with food,…
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Living Simply in a Tiny Off-Grid Cabin (Video)
Would you be happy living with less? This family certainly is. Living in a tiny cabin on a piece of land in New Zealand, instead of paying rent, they do work-trade for the opportunity to live off the land. You’d be amazed at the simplicity of their dwelling, and yet, they’re clearly very fulfilled. I…
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Why You Need to Rest if You’re a Homesteader
Homesteading is a lot of work. It’s definitely work that’s quite worth it, and if you are a homesteader, it’s probably what you signed up for. You are probably the kind of person who was willing to sacrifice the ease and convenience of modern life to roll up your sleeves, pull on your work boots,…
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Goat Crossfit (Video)
Regular Crossfit is all the rage, but now…there’s goat Crossfit! When this urban homesteader’s friends all started going to Crossfit down the street from her house, she knew she didn’t need to go, because she already had goats. This very cute and funny video shows the brilliant invention of goat Crossfit! It has yet to…
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Survivalist or Homesteader? (Video)
This is a great video from a popular homesteading and survivalism vlogger I really enjoy. He poses the questions: which will survive longer, a homesteader or a survivalist? Are they the same thing? Does one come before the other? I think this is a really great topic since, while homesteading and survivalism are not necessarily…
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When the Garden Doesn’t Grow: How to Increase Food Supply
As a homesteader, you will typically put a lot of faith in your garden when it comes to having enough food to last your family. You will learn how to plant and keep the plants healthy and strong, how and when to harvest, and canning techniques, most likely. When everything is going well with the…
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Make Money on Your Homestead
You love the idea of living simply and living on a homestead. However, you probably also love the idea of having some extra money coming into the household. Fortunately, you can combine these two loves and find some interesting ways to make money from your homestead, and it is easier than you might imagine. Here…
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The Reality of Homesteading: What No One Tells You
Homesteading is a noble pursuit, and we obviously strongly encourage everyone to try their hand at it! Growing your own food, raising livestock, and living off-grid are a wonderful way to enrich your life, get healthier, and truly embrace self-reliant living. But it’s not all puppies and sunshine! There are some harsh realities of homesteading…
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Building a Tiny Home
We recently posted an article on the tiny house movement, and I wanted to elaborate a bit more on what it takes to actually build yourself a tiny house. This is one of the biggest appeals of tiny houses, of course, that the initial building materials can be cheap, the construction easy. Many people are…
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Are You Ready for Livestock?
Raising livestock is one of the great appeals of homesteading. If you’ve just bought your own land or have plans to, or have considered raising goats or chickens in your backyard, you should be careful not to get too far ahead of yourself. The prospect of raising livestock is so appealing, the decision to dive…
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18 Ways to Become Food Independent
The ultimate goal of homesteading for many is to be completely self-sufficient, and entirely food independent. There’s nothing as empowering as growing and making your own. While getting 100% of your food from your own land might be setting one’s sights pretty high, there’s nothing wrong with aiming for it! The thing is, while most people…
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Simple, Effective, and Affordable Insect Trap
One of the most important elements of living as a homesteader is learning to live a simpler life. For many, the thought of “living simply” is very alluring, but making the leap to homesteading, and being successful and happy with the lifestyle, is not as easy as many wish it would be. They do not…
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How to Make Kombucha Tea (Video)
We’ve covered a lot about culturing in the past, and kombucha tea absolutely needs to be mentioned. It is one of the easiest home cultures to make and a great place to start if you’d like to get started with culturing. Kombucha is created using a fermentation process, it contains a large number of healthy bacteria known as probiotics. …
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5 Warnings for the New Homesteader
It might seem contradictory, but starting on the path to a “simpler” life can actually come with a lot of complications. In pursuit of all our hopes and visions for our homestead, we can become overwhelmed pretty quickly, or simply fail to anticipate common problems. Let me share with you a few key lessons I’ve…
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Growing Strawberries In Gutters (Video)
Spring is here, and I’ve definitely got gardening on my mind! I’m starting to see fresh, delicious, American-grown strawberries in the grocery store again, but as with anything else, I’d love to grow my own. Strawberries can be tricky, depending on where you live, but these clever off-grid gardeners figured out a pretty cool hack:…
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Simple Steps to Greater Self-Sufficiency
The goal of everyone who is interested in homesteading is to become more independent and less reliant on the “machine” that seems to run the lives of most people. Many today have no real idea of where their food comes from or what would happen if they no longer had easy access to electricity. They…
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Homemade Rosewater Recipe
Rosewater is exactly what it sounds like: water infused with roses. It’s simple, but it’s incredibly effective to tone, moisturize, and give a wonderful scent to skin and hair. You can use it in many different ways, as a toner for your skin, a quick moisturizing spray, to add to homemade lotions or remedies or…
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Amish Barn Raising (Video)
The Amish are famous for their incredibly speedy “barn raising”. This is when the whole community comes together and builds a barn in a day, sometimes even a matter of hours. I’ve always wanted to see one done, so I was thrilled to find this time-lapse video on YouTube recently that speeds a barn raising…
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Ways to Profit Off Your Land
When you invest in a homestead property, it probably won’t be cheap. You won’t want to buy cheap, useless land to get started, after all, since it won’t be much use to you. So how can you offset the cost of settling on the perfect slice of property? Well, there are a lot of possibilities.…
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Off-Grid Cabin Security (Video)
When you live out in the country, it might seem safer than an urban environment, and in many ways, it definitely is. Those low crime rates aren’t misleading; way less people means way less crime. That being said, there’s still a risk of your property being vandalized or stolen if you aren’t at home, especially…
