Even if you’re good at growing your own food, bad weather or thieves could steal your harvest: everything you planned for winter provisions. Fruit thieves struck the homestead this summer. This year, our most productive apple tree had set a…
It’s oft repeated in prepper circles that a big EMP would send America back to the 1800s. It if did, what would life be like? Some historical sources from 1810 provides some useful lessons for what being back in the…
Baby chicks the natural way! Incubators work fine but chicks hatched by a mamma hen is ideal for off-grid sustainability. This post is a compilation of four separate posts chronicling the adventure of the homestead’s first Boody Hen. Some chicken…
Preppers build their survival kits based on what they anticipate needing if SHTF. So, when a friend gave me a set of USAF Survival Modules, I was intrigued to see what the Air Force thought their air crew would need,…
I promise I won’t write about chickens every week. But, it is fascinating how much chicks develop in just their first week of life. They progress from helpless fluffy lumps to miniature chickens with much of their adult behavior. By…
Excitement here at the homestead: the eggs hatched in the incubator. A renewable food source is a valuable prep. Raising new chicks each year is part of the renewability. Okay, the eggs have hatched into wet, little chicks. Now what?…
If you’ve ever thought about some incubating chicken eggs and starting a flock of your own, here’s a quick primer on incubating chicken eggs. As of this writing, this year’s batch just passed the two-week mark. How are they so…
Producing your own food is an important goal. Gardens grow veggies and grains. Hunting (or husbandry) provide meat. Sweetener is another matter. Making your own maple syrup is useful and rewarding. Winter: everything is frozen and buried under snow. It’s…
New Hampshire has gotten a long spell of subzero temperatures lately. We’ve had -10 at the house overnight. Daytime “highs” were in single digits. While we put on a thicker sweater and sit closer to the wood stove, what about…
EMPs or CMEs are statistical possibilities but hackers are a lot more plentiful and therefore a lot more likely to be the cause of the grid going down. There was a recent (9/06/17) story in the online WIRED magazine (link…