With their clawed feet, bizarre-looking caruncles, mohawk-like crest, and lack of quack, Muscovy ducks don’t quite fit the “bill” (if you pardon the pun) for what you might consider a “normal” duck. But on our homestead, these are the only ducks we want to keep because they have won our hearts with both their utility […]
How To Make the Most of Garden Failure
“Oh, fiddlesticks! Another dratted hornworm has eaten a plant. How exceedingly grumpy I am.” You’d correctly guess these were not my exact words as I plucked the corpulent caterpillar from the stick formerly known as a lush jalepeño pepper, but they’re close enough for this article. I felt an understandable wave of schadenfreude as I […]
Foraging for Wild Spinach
“Eat more healthy! Eat organic leafy greens!” The bleached-smile exhortations of the nutritional elite ring out from websites and health shows. So we trundle over to the grocery store and are greeted by the sight of an $8 bundle of organic spinach that would barely feed a rabbit — much less a whole family. Then […]
10 Considerations For Your Backyard Duck Coop
When it comes to barnyard livestock, ducks are probably the easiest-going of the bunch. When there is a slight drizzle, the goats complain and run into the barn. When the north wind blows ice crystals across the fields, your chickens are floofed-up and hiding in the coop. Meanwhile, the ducks are blithely waddling across slush […]
Ground Rules for Foraging Safely
Foraging is more than a hobby. It’s a means of sustenance, and for some of us, it really is a way of life. Pretty much everyone has an idea that some wild plants are edible whether they work in a city high-rise or hoe weeds on the farm. Even in this strange modern age, many […]
Healthy Homemade Homestead Snacks
Sometimes, you just get a hankering for something salty and crunchy. Usually, that itch is scratched with a snack from a shiny, throwaway bag that has more multisyllabic chemical ingredients than there should be. But on a homestead seeking both a healthier lifestyle and a less wasteful existence, those Bag O’Salt crunchies really shouldn’t have […]
Foraging for Pokeweed
Elvis sang about it. Gardeners loathe it. Old-timers grew up on it. Suburban moms are afraid of it and pull it out with gloves … and foragers? They’re inconsistent about it. It’s a miracle cure, a deadly poison, a nutritious food, a pest, a gift. It’s pokeweed! Watch the Video: This hotly contested, rich-historied, delicious […]
Useful Knots for the Homestead
Once upon a time, there were things that needed to be held in place, tied down, hoisted up, and cinched shut. The humble rope — and the knots it could tie — was the answer to all of these problems and more. Ropes stretched throughout our ancestors’ histories, securing the rigging on a ship, crisscrossing […]
Eating Acorns: From Foraging To Cooking & Recipes
The first summer my family and I moved to our homestead, we were not able to get a garden into the rocky, wild ground, but somehow we had a fantastic fall harvest and started accumulating jars of dry goods from the plenty. How was this possible? One surprising word… acorns.
Foraging for Wild Strawberries
One of my earliest foraging memories is crouching in my childhood backyard. I nudged the leaves of a low-growing plant aside with a tiny, slightly grubby finger — and the white flowers that were there a week ago had changed into dimpled green spheres. I asked my mom, and she said they were strawberries. But […]
Foraging for Field Garlic
Winter is long. Even if you have a well-stocked root cellar brimming with canned goods and root vegetables, by the time January and February roll around, most anything that was green is long, long gone. And if you’re like me, your eyes and palate might start yearning for that verdant, lively color to return. Watch […]
In a Plastic World, Recycling Ain’t What It Used to Be
“They’re saying I haven’t delivered, but it’s not my fault!” I heard Recycling’s sobbing wail, and pulled out a porch chair to sit. “Sheesh, Recycling, what’s this all about?” Recycling sniffled loudly. “I’m not what they think I am. I can only do so much.” PVC pellets started to rain from Recycling’s triangular eyes, scattering […]
Make Your Own Delicious Sourdough English Muffins
There are many things in this strange world with names that don’t suit them. Jerusalem artichokes are actually a sunflower. The peacock mantis shrimp is neither peacock, mantis, nor shrimp. The blindworm is a legless lizard that can see just fine. And don’t even get me started with the lesser broomrape. I don’t know what […]
How to Pay Off Debt by Thinking Like a Homesteader: 20 Practical Ideas to Try
When you have the burden of debt hanging over your life, you don’t feel free. Living paycheck-to-paycheck, coasting by on minimum payments, and playing hot potato with your credit cards is not the way anyone wants to live. It can feel like you’re stuck in a dead end rut, working hard at a job for […]
How to Make Olive Oil
Olive oil has been an important food source, lamp fuel, religious material, cosmetic, and medicine for thousands of years. More than just a salad topping, olives join wheat and grapes as the core foods of the Mediterranean. In the modern age, it has enjoyed waves of popularity as a health food and DIY ingredient. This […]
Free Land: Where and How to Find It
Land, free for the taking, just waiting for someone to work hard enough to claim it as their own. Does a sentence like that send shivers of longing and hope down your spine? “But those days are gone” you may concede with a sigh. Gone along with the covered wagon, the real cowboy, and herds […]
Goat Shelter Basics: What You Need to Know to Keep Your Herd Safe
Goats are remarkably hardy animals. They can survive on forage and browse that would make a cow or sheep’s stomach rumble in discontent, and their clever feet can scamper among rocks, cliffs, and scree that are impassable to even the most surefooted human. For all their apparent toughness to inhospitable environments, however, there is one […]
How to Protect Plants From Frost: 12 Clever Methods That Work
As winter wanes and patches of bare ground open up in the fields, my green thumb gets crazy-itchy. I am eager to get back in the garden and get my eyes full of living, growing things again. With the season’s change, however, comes the age-old game of chicken that gardeners play with the weather — […]
Seed Saving: 5 Things I Never Knew
Before I moved to my homestead, I was gifted a huge jar of heirloom seeds by a friend who understood what we were trying to do and had experience in seed saving. I remember dreamily sorting through the tiny baggies of beans, kale, and beets; my inexperience and ignorance of gardening temporarily gilded with happy […]
How to Turn a Single Chicken Into 5 Delicious Homegrown Meals
For many a homesteader, putting meat on the dinner table is not a simple, thoughtless endeavor. Meat is precious. The chicken we roast for an evening meal isn’t just a random chunk of flesh from the supermarket, but a bird that we carefully raised and protected until the dinner bell tolled. As such, making sure […]
How to Make Soil Acidic: 3 Natural Methods That Work
When you think of the word “acidic”, what images first spring to mind? Perhaps visions of lemons, vinegar, and upset stomachs — but I will hazard a guess that a pile of soil didn’t join their number. If you’re hoping to grow a bumper crop of blueberries or potatoes, soil acidity and learning how to […]
Soil pH: What It Is And Why It’s Important
I know, I know, as you’re browsing all the excellent articles on Insteading, you see that this one is about soil pH and you probably want to just gloss on past it. When there are tomatoes to pluck, chickens to chase, and compost to turn, rehashing 9th-grade chemistry terms might seem a bit dry. BUT […]
A Helpful Homesteader’s Guide to Harvesting Sunflower Seeds
The humongous, cheery blooms of sunflowers, nodding head and shoulders over the garden gate, is a welcome addition to any food plot or house corner. But these sun-following flowers aren’t just for show — they provide protein-rich, delicious seeds for both humans and animals. Here’s our guide for harvesting sunflower seeds as well as cooking […]
Long Beans: How To Grow, Harvest, and Cook This Delicious Legume
Our first year on the homestead, before we got all our gardens started, we bought the bulk of our fresh produce at the local farmers market. I remember one sunny, late-summer morning when I spied a glossy, purply-green bunch of unbelievably long beans at a vendor’s stall. Generous handfuls of beans were tied in neat […]
Harvesting Basil: Helpful Tips For How to Harvest and Preserve Basil From Your Garden
Where would we be, culinarily, without the mint family? This gregarious and generous tribe of plants gives us such kitchen stars as thyme, lemon balm, oregano, and of course, the many piquant mints. Vying for prestige as best of the family, however, is probably the large-leaved and aromatic basil. Sweet, spicy, attractive, a pollinator-magnet, a […]
How To Add Nitrogen To Soil & 5 Natural Methods To Try in Your Garden
When you just start gardening, your knowledge of how to do it may be deceptively simple. Take a seed, put it in some soil, add water, and voila! Couldn’t be easier, right? And while this approach is a wonderful way to start, the beginner may notice that some sprouts do better than others. Surely there’s […]
Harvesting Lettuce: How to Harvest and Store Lettuce For Fresh & Delicious Garden Salads
Go to any cheap restaurant, and you’ll see a sorry showing of lettuce. It usually is represented in two forms: either a single leaf of romaine, apologetically separating your burger from the bun, or the translucent, colorless chunks of a sodden iceberg that makes up the bulk of the salad you regretfully got instead of […]
8 Winter Vegetables You Should Plant In Your Garden
August rolls around, and lots of us start looking at the garden with a sad sigh. The cucumbers are petering out. The tomatoes are still going strong, but the first frost (is it really looming already?) will wipe them (and the okra) from the plot until next year. The summer squash is gangly and tired, and […]
Harvesting Garlic: How To Gather, Store, And Enjoy Your Garlic Harvest
There are few garden plants I know that require as little upkeep as garlic, yet require as much time as garlic. If you’ve grown this wonderfully spicy, flavorful bulb in your garden, you are well acquainted with the near-year wait time till you’re finally at the point of harvesting garlic. You also know that the […]
How To Make Easy Blackberry Wine
Midsummer comes over the horizon, and with it comes humidity, mosquitoes, firefly nights, and hard work in the garden. But one of my favorite summer arrivals is wild in nature, both delicious and hazardous. It’s blackberries! The ravines and forest edges that were full of white-spangled spring brambles are now absolutely loaded with free fruit […]
Stop Spraying Your Dandelions: 3 Simple Methods For Making Dandelion Tea
I find it a weird mix of sad and amusing that our current culture spends so much time killing dandelions. These nonnative lettuce relatives were brought to the United States from Europe for their very useful purposes as food and medicine. In a great stroke of what now seems irony, the grass was torn out […]
6 Reasons to Overcome Your Fear Of Spiders On The Homestead
I flipped open the new issue of my local conservation department’s magazine. Filled with gorgeous photography and information about nature in my state, I often learned things I had never known about the forests and fields around my homestead. But as I glanced at the letters to the editor, I put down my tea mug […]
8 Meat Chickens To Consider Raising For Your Table
Many of us, unsatisfied and even disgusted with the treatment and quality of animals in the food processing industry, have begun homesteading as a way to reclaim food responsibility. On that journey, we discover the joy of raising meat chickens as a small-scale declaration of independence. Chickens are an ideal animal to start with when […]
A Beginner’s Guide To Restoring Cast Iron
Let’s say you’re walking down the aisle of an antique store, mildly browsing the booths, hunting for treasure. All of a sudden, there! You see it. A cast iron skillet. Sure, there are rust spots, and it looks like it hasn’t seen service for a few decades, but you’re smart enough to know this thing […]
Grow Healthy, Flavorful Fruit With The Best Fertilizer For Tomatoes
“You get your tomatoes in yet?” My neighbor smiled with his usual good-natured grin, but there was no denying the competitive edge to his voice. This was no mere neighborly exchange. It was the opening to a summer-long challenge where plants were pawns and bragging rights, the prize. As a newcomer to the Ozarks, I […]
20 Ways To Use The 5-Gallon Bucket: The Most Useful Tool On The Homestead
We homesteaders love our tools. We hang them from our belts, carry them until the handles show the impression of our hands, and use them to accomplish amazing things. As we keep our acres and animals in good working order, certain items start to become near extensions of our arms and take on their own […]
8 Of The Best Egg Laying Chickens For Daily Farm Fresh Goodness
Fresh eggs, warm from the coop, laid by a contented flock of beautiful birds. It’s the stuff of self-sufficient dreams, isn’t it? A flock of laying hens is integral to the fabric of the homestead, giving you a wonderful source of nutrition for a small amount of infrastructure and work. But for those who are […]
Rooster Spurs: What They Are And What To Do With Them
If I were to ask people on the street what makes a rooster a rooster, what do you think they might say? I guarantee most would mention their crow, the large wattles and comb, or the impressive and beautiful feathering. And of course, all those answers are correct, but there is one more important feature […]
9 Beautiful Water Plants For Your Aquatic Garden Or Pond
Spring has come. For the winter-weary gardener, the chance to finally get back out into the wonderful world of soil and sprouts is exhilarating. Within a few short weeks, garden beds are awake and planted, pots are filled and placed back on the porch, and flower beds are tenderly mulched. And then … all that […]
Free Firewood: 8 Places to Find It Near You
When summer rolls around our part of the Ozarks, the rivers and parks teem with weekend adventurers. And like the Echinacea plants that dot the roadsides, signs start to spring up selling firewood for campers — at prices that make my head spin. When you only need a picturesque campfire to roast some hot dogs […]
Growing Swiss Chard
If a garden was a high school movie drama, tomatoes would be the prom queen cheerleader, corn would be the basketball star jock, fennel would be the weird kid who dislocates his fingers and thinks it’s entertaining, and Swiss chard would be the really nice, helpful girl who just isn’t popular. And I think that’s […]
The Best Chicken Waterers For Your Flock
It’s early morning, and I’m out around the homestead, quietly doing my normal chores. If you listen closely through the birdsong, you’ll hear the sound of a metal bucket clunking against my boots, transporting something precious. I filled it slowly from the rain barrel, listening to my small flock of chickens clamoring in their coop. […]
10 Types Of Moss For Your Garden
There’s something mysterious and intriguing about moss. Maybe it’s because of the way it drapes over trees and rocks in places like the Hoh Rain Forest of Washington state. It looks like a land outside time. Or maybe it’s a bit of residual childlike wonder from the days we were small enough to crouch on […]
Raising Tennessee Fainting Goats
My first interaction with fainting goats was unintentional. I was jogging along a park trail, watching the trees go by while enjoying the quiet rhythm of my pounding feet. That reverie was jostled into confusion, however, by the sound of something screaming. It wasn’t human, and as I looked for the source, a goat blundered […]
Raising Boer Goats
My husband and I like to look through our local farm listings to find tools or animals for the homestead. It gives us the chance to make friends, learn information about our area, and acquire stock that is more acclimated to our Ozark home. The last time we were scrolling through the pages of tractors, […]
Powdery Mildew: What It Is, How To Identify It, And Treatment Methods
You walk into the garden, wiping sweat from your forehead in the summer’s boggy heat. The peppers are dangling like hidden jewels beneath their glossy leaves. The okra is dazzling with its tropical, hollyhock-like blooms. And the tomatoes are looking fine — even though you flicked a hornworm to your chickens as a treat. But […]
How To Make Yogurt (And Why You Should)
Yogurt is an ancient food that in recent years, has seemed to become an entity unto itself. Walking down the yogurt aisle at any grocery store (yes, it has its own aisle) is an adventure in persuasive marketing. Every plastic tub begs for your attention because it is more protein-rich, probiotic, or healthier than the […]
Marek’s Disease: What It Is & How To Prevent It
If you are new to keeping chickens, you will eventually have to do some reading on the diseases that can befall your flock. In the lists of common ailments, you’ll encounter plenty of problems to keep in the back of your mind as you observe your birds. Some are serious but easily understood. Problems like […]
How To Make Flour
One of my favorite college coffeehouses was across the street from a milling company. I spent many hours sketching and sipping their various brews, the mood-lit ambiance of the cafe constantly underscored by the low hum of unseen machines turning grain into flour. Anyone who parked more than an hour on the that street would […]
Soil Temperature: What It Is And Why It Matters
On any given day, normal people are concerned with the temperature of the air. If you have to walk a few blocks to the subway, or you want to plan a barbecue, the ambient air temperature can affect whether you go out in a t-shirt or hunker down inside. But us gardening folk are a […]
