Creating a New Garden Bed with Milpa
Grow Food, Not Lawns. To create new garden beds from grass, I use a broadfork to turn over the sod, add compost, and then sow Milpa.
SkillsOverStuff
How to Pick your Homestead Property: the Property Walk
Prepping for the Property Walk A new member to my local community group and his wife asked me to come over to their property and do a property walk – give an assessment and a plan for adding a food forest and regenerative practices to their unused pastures. In typical fashion, we turned it into … Read more
Why You Need Multiple Sources of Backup Power
How to Thrive (as much as possible) in a power outage I have a friend who repairs equipment at electrical power plants. One regional plant currently has 12 turbines down. At another he was called out to do some repairs but the necessary parts are not available for 6+ months. So his team did their … Read more
How I Built a Greenhouse from Recycled Windows
Extend your growing season with a greenhouse and start new seedlings earlier in the spring The first frost in NE Kansas averages around Oct-20. The last frost around Apr-20. That is 6 months of no growing season. I had setup grow lights in my basement to start plants earlier, but it was starting to take … Read more
How to Grow Chestnut Trees From Seed
Step by Step – From Seed to Garden Bed You want to grow chestnuts from seed, but don’t know where to start? You have come to the right place. This will give you a step by step guide to grow chestnuts from seed – from foraging the seed, to sprouting, to transplanting. Cross posted from … Read more
How to Save, Store, and Stratify Persimmon Seeds
How to grow your own persimmon trees The wild American persimmon is a puzzling fruit. If you pick it when it looks ripe, it will taste like alum – weirdly bitter and chalky. Your mouth puckers up, but not like from a lemon. Yet if you wait until your senses are telling you that they … Read more
Foraging and Pottage – Moving Foraging from a Skill to a Mindset
How to Use Foraged Veggies to Extend Your Oatmeal – Without the Blood Sugar Spike This year I have been more mobile than usual. I am very close to location-independent. I am extremely thankful to friends and family that have let me stay with or house-sit for them while I work through this time of … Read more
Homestead Aquaponics, Step by Step – The World’s Greatest Ebb and Flow Bed
Step by Step Aquaponics By Shudra Way My first introduction to aquaponics was during my suburbia days, through a neighbour who had a 5000 litre aquaponics tub containing hundreds of rainbow trout being grown for eventual sale. Water was pumped out of the tub and through a series of aquaponics grow beds containing various salad … Read more
I Was Wrong About Chicken Feather Sexing Technique
Determining the sex of a chick by the feathers doesn’t always work in the 2nd and 3rd generation. It is Year 2 of trying to determine the sex of my newly hatched chicks by their feather shape. Year 1 was a success, as you can read here. Now it is Year 2 (with 2 generations … Read more
Don’t Let Inspiration Keep You from Getting Stuff Done
The Myths of Creativity “Sing in me, O Muse, and through me tell the story of that man skilled in all ways of contending, the wanderer, harried for years on end” – Homer’s “Odyssey”. People want to be inspired. We have an entire myth around creativity that anything artistic in our lives is the “creative spark”, … Read more
