Ducks differ in their needs from backyard chickens, and it can be straightforward to create a DIY duck house with some readily available, basic materials. When starting your flock, making your own duck house instead of purchasing an overpriced product from a retail store, can save you time and money. If you want to add
Search Results for: eco-living/eco-bamboo
Hand Water Pumps: A Guide
“So let me get this straight. You want me to pull the electric pump out so you can put in a manual pump?” My husband and I nodded at the man who had come to remove our broken electric pump. He scratched the back of his head, a funny sort of half-smile creasing his cheeks. “You know,
Manual Tools for Off-Grid Land
When it comes to living and working on an off-grid homestead, there are a lot of different tasks people need to accomplish. Many of these tasks are in the area of land maintenance. Trust me, if you donโt take care of the land, it will be an overgrown mess in no time flat, and then
Hugelkultur: What It Is & Inspiration For Your Permaculture Garden
Instead of putting those small branches, leaves, and grass clippings in bags by the curbside…build a hugelkultur bed. Simply mound logs, branches, leaves, grass clippings, straw, cardboard, petroleum-free newspaper, manure, compost, or whatever other biomass and organic matter you have available, top with soil, and plant your veggies or perennial plants. What you’ll get in return
38 Eye-Catching Moon Gate Designs For Your Garden
A moon gate rises out of the earth, like the moon rises in the sky; both spheres celebrate the continuous cycle of birth and death…rising and falling… A circular passageway designed to welcome visitors to backyards, botanical gardens, and important events like weddings, moon gates are quite stunning in their gravity-bending construction. Traditionally constructed out
Small Wood-Burning Stoves For Small Homes: A Review
Wood stoves are a highly economical way to provide heat for your home if you have access to a woodlot or live in a remote or rural area. To get the most bang for your buck, you should invest in a clean(er)-burning, efficient model. Last year, I spent a fair amount of time researching small,
An “Inconvenient Truth” about Composting
Composting is a really green thing to do, right? I’ve always thought so since my Grandfather taught me to do it in the early sixties. Large-scale composting is getting to be quite the rage. The City of San Francisco attracted a great deal of attention with it’s mandatory food scrap recycling program and lots of local
Pesticide Lobby Bugged by Michelle Obama & White House Organic Garden
Are you worried that an organic garden on the White House grounds might cause some Americans to start eating a wide variety of chemical-free, locally grown produce? The Mid America CropLife Association, a lobbying group for agribusinesses giants, is. Just a few days after Michelle Obama invited local fifth graders to help plant the White
6 Ways to Fight Anxiety with Diet
We all feel stressed sometimes, but if you suffer from anxiety it can make everything appear stressful. Learn some ways to fight anxiety with diet.
How To Grow Victory Gardens
During both World War I and World War II, people with land (even small parcels) planted victory gardens — also known as war gardens or food gardens for defense. It was a means to feed the family, to supplement the restrictions enforced with rationing, and to ease the food chain. Victory gardens provided people with
Welcome to Insteading.
Welcome to Insteading. Every day, we help thousands of gardeners and homesteaders grow their garden and their skills. We have over 1,500 free articles and resources, written by folks out in their yards and fields who have been doing this for years. Truly, it’s over 1.5 million words of content – about 30 books worth!
๐ก Sustainable Energy
What is Sustainable Energy? “Sustainable energy is energy that is consumed at insignificant rates compared to its supply and with manageable collateral effects, especially environmental effects.” Renewable energy is one of the quintessential cornerstones of sustainability. In the homesteading world, investing in renewable energy can be the first step towards living a truly off-grid life. And
Writer’s Guidelines
About Our Audience: Insteading readers are active gardeners, beekeepers, chicken herders, permaculturalists, environmentalists, and many other things. Our readers range from newbies looking to plant their first raised bed, to advanced homesteaders who live in earthen homes powered by solar panels and produce most of what they eat. Our readers make sustainable and organic choices whenever
11 Steps To Make Your New Year’s Resolutions Stick
Face it, everyone is doing it. We feel compelled to join in the tradition of taking a good hard look at our lives, evaluating our faults and flaws, and making resolutions to start anew. We promise this will be the year we finally lose weight, get more exercise, quit smoking, and manage to drink less
40 Smart Uses For Dryer Sheets In Your Home And Garden
When you put laundry in a dryer, static builds up on the clothes, sheets, and towels that bounce and tumble in the heat. Throwing in a dryer sheet can reduce static cling and leave your clothes smelling fresh. That said, dryer sheets have gained a bad reputation because they contain quaternary ammonium compounds that can
Gary Pickering Builds “Tiny House” Survival Pods for the Homeless (w/ video)
Gary Pickering is making the world a better place by donating a number of self-built, portable ‘micro-houses’ to Utah’s homeless people in an effort to help them survive the area’s harsh winter weather conditions. How’d he come up with that? They say that necessity is the mother of invention. For Gary Pickering, years of being
Faiyumi
Characteristics With its silvery head, large single comb, onyx-dark eye, and trim, black-speckled body, this chicken is visually quite similar to the Silver Campine breed, but built a little more like a forward-leaning roadrunner. Those bright, dark eyes of theirs are excellent at scanning the skies for predators–with such alert personalities, itโs hard to take
Buckeye
Characteristics Comparisons to the popular and similar-looking Rhode Island Red abound, but this breed is distinct in character, coloration, and conformation. Resembling the color of the large seeds for which it was named, it is darker in color and meatier in the thigh than the Rhode Island Red. Any resident of Warren, Ohio, where it
Renzo Piano Builds a Haute Shiver Shack For Off-the-Grid Singles
Italian architect Renzo Piano has come up with a small, simple-living home design that could is less of a shiver shack and more of a one-person, off the grid castle โ and, if youโre in the market for a โtiny houseโ and you have an eye for going off grid, youโll want to pay attention, because it doesnโt get much better than this …
Is Milk a Whole Food?
Is Milk a Whole Food?
10 Probiotic-Rich Foods That Are Even Better Than Yogurt
Move over, yogurt! These probiotic rich foods are even better.
๐ Chickens
Ready To Start Your Chicken Flock? With their homegrown eggs and potential to become quite the loveable pet, chickens have been an important part of homestead living for decades. Whether they’re worked into a larger permaculture plan or reside in an urban backyard coop, chickens can be a great addition to your homestead! Whether youโre
20 DIY Wall Art Ideas To Give Your Home Some Personality
Wall art provides the finishing touch to a room and can pull an entire space together. The addition of wall art creates a focal point, adds texture, offers a splash of color, and shows the unique personality that makes your space feel like home. Here are 20 amazing DIY wall art projects to spruce up
Homestead Stories: The Burglar Bear
We were living down the canyon in a big, round house with a 45-minute drive one way just to get to the grocery store. So we grew some of our own produce and raised chickens (and a duck) for eggs. Living out in the woods with gardens surrounding your house and a small flock of
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 seasonโs change, however, comes the age-old game of chicken that gardeners play with the weather —
The 25 Most Gorgeous Garden Stools You Can Buy
You know how you sometimes have a dead space in a room, or on your deck or patio? You needs something that takes the place of furniture, but won’t eat up much space. Garden stools are the answer, and they’re having a moment right now. Their resurgence means we can solve the problem of dead
Heirloom Seeds: What Are They?
Heirloom seeds are what our great-grandparents called โseeds.โ My mother often complained during my childhood that you couldnโt buy tomatoes like her grandmother grew. The tomatoes in the grocery stores were hard, mealy, and tasteless. When a farmerโs market opened in our neighborhood, she would buy a bag of heirloom tomatoes every week and eat
Homestead Stories: St. Benedict’s Herb
โA rose is a rose is a rose,โ I muttered as I worked through my herb garden. โUnless, of course, itโs St. Benedictโs herb.โ The shady perennial plant from the rose family (Rosaceae) has many names: Geum urbanum, Wood or City Avens, Herb Bennet, Colewort, Blessed herb, Goldy, Star of the Earth, and the one
Growing Strawberries
Everyone who gardens knows that homegrown food is more delicious than what you can buy in the store. Strawberries are the prime example. Since a perfectly ripe strawberry is even more juicy and soft than a ripe peach, they are practically impossible to pick and transport commercially. Industrial farms grow hardy breeds of strawberries that
Art From Old Books
Many old books simply get thrown outโeven by libraries. Artists have found a better second life for unwanted books. Jonathan Callan of London – The Defrauder. joseebienvenugallery.com Jonathan Callen uses large screws to hold the books together. joseebienvenugallery.com Jonathan Callen – The theoretical assumptions of management, 2008. Originally found at “https://www.artnet.com/galleries/kudlek-van-der-grinten-galerie/” Cara Barer of Houston,