Your Practical Guide To Self Reliant Living
If you’ve ever tried to catch game with your bare hands you already know that the ability to hunt at a distance can mean the difference between a meal and disappointment. Most the time anyway. I have an old Vermonter neighbor that routinely brags that he hunts deer with a knife. He has a lot…
I’ll be honest, I was really only looking for a way to use up gigantic cucumbers that were way too big to make a decent pickle. You see, the best pickles are made with tiny cucumbers, about the size of your little finger. Anything bigger and it’ll turn to a sad mushy excuse for a…
Earning a little bit of money from your homestead is easy enough. Sell a dozen eggs to a few neighbors, or take a few home made jams to the farmers market and you’ll have a bit of pocket money. What happens when you need more than pocket change from your off grid homestead? How do…
Pressure canning is my absolute favorite food preservation method. It’s really easy, and an almost foolproof way to make food shelf stable for years. Living off grid, freezer space is at a premium and while freezing green beans is a great way to preserve them, a single power outage will completely wipe out your stores….
It’s my dream someday to live an entire summer on foraged food, and in many cases that will mean giving up some of my favorite treats and comfort foods. While there are many foraged coffee substitutes for example, none of them contain caffeine. That’s going to be a hard adjustment for me personally. Chocolate, on…
If you’re just getting started growing mushrooms, I highly recommend growing your first batch from a kit. They’re generally fool proof, and you’ll be able to see the stages of mushroom growth so that you can recognize them later on if you choose to continue cultivating mushrooms. If you’re growing mushrooms with kids, it’s especially…
Herbalists know jewelweed (impatiens capensis) as a powerful anti-itch remedy that is safe and effective for mosquito bites and poisson ivy, but when you’re out foraging for your summertime anti-itch medicine there’s also another tasty part of the plant to consider: the seeds.
My first dilly beans were given to me by a true native Vermonter. I mean ancestors back to the Abenaki old school Vermonter. Beard so big you couldn’t see his chest mountain man Vermonter. And here he was telling me. “You gotta be kidding me girl. You ain’t never had dilly beans before? What’s wrong…
Honey wine or mead is one of the oldest forms of alcohol, and with archeological evidence of early meads going back to 7000 bc. If our ancestors could brew it without running water, modern sanitation or equipment, I’m pretty sure you can manage it in your kitchen. Mead is especially simple when compared to all…
Have you ever run across what looked like hops while hiking deep in the woods? Actual hops are a vine that require a good bit of sunlight, but hop hornbeam is an understory tree that produces hop like catkins that litter the forest floor in July and August all across the eastern half of the…
My parents often question the life we lead. Well meaning as parents are, they want our lives to be better than their own, and to them that means easier. Why on earth do you bother raising your own meat? Meat comes from the grocery store, pre-packaged, sliced and ready to go. Modern conveniences are designed…
Every fall we go on a quest to find new apple varieties we haven’t yet tasted. It all started out a few years back with an informal gathering of friends for “apple day” where we spent the week before hunting down every variety we could find for a blind taste test. That year, we found…
Linden is one of my favorite summertime teas to enjoy on a relaxing afternoon in the sun. Linden blossoms have an exotic orchid like fragrance that comes through in a mildly sweet floral tea that’s perfect on its own or with a bit of raw honey. Midsummer if you know how to identify linden trees…
Tomatillos are one of those garden vegetables that even brown thumb gardeners just cant seem to kill. They’re known to produce 10 lbs or more per plant, meaning you’ll need to preserve most of your yields to keep them from spoiling before you can get to them. The first year we planted them the rest of our…
