Fermented food is one of those things that we all eat but most of us know little about.  Bread, Cheese, Wine, Beer, Cider, Coffee, Tea, Pickles, Sauerkraut, Salami, Miso, Tempeh, Soy Sauce, Vinegar, Yogurt, Kefir, Kombucha can all be fermented foods that you can make yourself if you like.  Why …

Efficiency is a big deal in everything we do.  Heating a home with oil or a fireplace is not terribly efficient though.  Definitely not efficient enough for living off the grid on our homestead.  So what should we do instead? Build a rocket mass heater of course! What is a …

We are at the very early stages of our future homestead.  Actually, we haven’t even started the homestead yet because we don’t have any land.  Our major project this year is to finally buy some land after spending three years looking. Last year, we thought we had found the perfect …

This is a very exciting time of year for me. All of the seed catalogues are coming in the mail. I could sit for hours looking through them all, trying to decide what is best for my garden. So much fun! When I am choosing seeds for my garden, there …

Now that I have explained why you might want perennial vegetables, many of you are wondering, “What vegetables come back every year other than asparagus?” Some people are aware of artichokes, sunchokes and rhubarb. But that is the extent of most peoples, including my own, knowledge of perennial vegetables. So …

Happy Winter Solstice everyone!!  Today is the shortest day of the year and the longest night.  From here on out the days are getting longer and the nights shorter.  That is something to celebrate no matter what your chosen holiday of the season is.  It rained all day today, so …

In our journey to becoming self sufficient, there are numerous skills we need to learn along the way.  We currently live in a house in a little neighborhood with every store imaginable within ten minutes.  We don’t need to have many skills.  When we decided that we were leaving this …

If you are going to start a permaculture garden you need to have something more permanent than annual vegetables. Permaculture is not planting vegetables every single year. It is setting up a bed one year and harvesting every year. This means that you need perennial vegetables. Vegetables that come back …

Now that your lasagna garden is all set up you have all these leaves leftover because you went overboard collecting them. This is a perfect time to start a a compost pile. Don’t get too lazy and just throw the leaves in a pile somewhere though, it could make extra …

Setting up your own lasagna garden is easy and can be done completely for free. The entire job took me about a day all together. There was a little bit of collecting also involved, but the piles of stuff didn’t even sit for very long. So here’s how to do …