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Salivate onto the Homestead Cookbook
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Raising Animals That May Try to Eat You A Pastured Pigs Experience By Sue Dick
"We planned on raising them in our pastures and oak forests, supplementing their foraging with soaked grains and garden waste. Deciding on the right breed was important to us. Living in Manitoba, Canada, our winters were long and harsh. With no barns and only small shelters our pigs would have to overwinter well and come through at the end of it still able to raise a litter. Research promoted the Berkshire and Tamworth breeds for our circumstance. Of British origins, they were ideally suited to pasture life. Hardy and good mothers, they were our pigs. After locating a breeder we decided on one boar and two gilts (a young, female pig). At this point we felt only a small hesitation at dealing with a boar when we had no knowledge of how to deal with pigs, but experience is the best teacher, we reasoned." |
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Basement Bunnies and Grow-box Gardening
The Challenges of
Urban Homesteading
By Barbara Bamberger Scott
"Tammy is a sturdy woman with a clear gaze, a ready smile and a well-developed vision for her family. Daughter of a Marine father and a hippie mother, who put Tammy to baking bread as soon as she could reach up to the table, Tammy is a domestic powerhouse who manages the homesteading side of the family income. But how does she balance all this - two kids, meat 'n' pet bunnies, chickens for eggs and baked bread and veggies for customers whose boxes must be restocked weekly - on a postage stamp of rented land? Answer: very well." |
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By Mallorie Flynn
"When was the last time you read the ingredients on a package of food you bought? Okay, when was the last time you could actually pronounce the ingredients on that package, or for that matter, had any idea what those seemingly foreign words meant? Ingredients like disodium inosinate, ferric orthophosphate, silicon dioxide, mixed triglycerides, Red 40, Yellow 5, partially hydrogenated soybean oil, and monosodium glutamate (MSG)... What is this stuff, really? It doesn’t sound like food, and it certainly doesn’t sound healthy. If all of these added ingredients are supposed to save me time, then I say no thanks, I’ll save a little money and possibly a few years of my life and buy some basic real food ingredients." |
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The Myth of Simple Living
By Sheri Dixon
"Read the directions! It’s Easy! It’s Fun! Follow the steps and reap your harvest. Except it’s not that simple. Oh, there’s no lack of books on the subject(s). There are shelves and shelves of ‘em at the Barnes & Noble and cyber-pages of ‘em on Amazon all promising happiness, success and bountiful harvests. Unfortunately, most of them won’t work in your situation. Don’t give me that paranoid sideways look, I’m not singling you out--they won’t work in my situation either." |
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By Karyn Sweet
"...will things deteriorate quickly or will there be a gradual decline? Will we see major effects in our lifetime or will the effects hit our children and grandchildren? Finally, what will the effects of peak oil be? Will we be able to rally some sort of defense? For homesteaders, it almost doesn't matter. A lot of what we do to work towards self-sufficiency is also useful when planning for peak oil. However, being aware of peak oil may help in planning and prioritizing. In what I will call a peak-oil world or a post-oil world, the government will probably not be equipped for handling the consequences of declining oil. The leaders don't have a Plan B… but you can." |
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A Portrait of the North American Reindeer By Victoria Varga
"Unlike other members of the deer family (such as White-Tail, Mule-Deer, and Moose) who deliver their young in the late winter/early spring months, Reindeer carry their foetus from Sept/Oct to May/June, when spring weather is more conducive to calf survival, and when access to more abundant forage will result in a larger milk production for the calves. Reindeer, with their thick, warm coats have every adaptive requirement to survival in the far North, where many animals would never survive such harsh elements." |
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By Neil Shelton
"Adding a farm pond to your property is probably the best thing you can do, short of building, to enhance the appraised value of your land, but the potential benefits to the landowner are far too valuable to express in terms of mere money. If you have the right soil and location, you can provide yourself and your great-grandkids with food, recreation and beauty for lifetimes to come. On the other hand, if your location isn’t right, you’ll be wasting machine-hire which can run $75 to $150 per hour and destroy part of the ecology of your place in the balance, so you’ll want to check your site carefully." |
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A Meditation By Barbara Bamberger Scott
"Beautiful as the Painted Desert and its adjunct park, the Petrified Forest are, I couldn’t imagine living there. Even in mid-March it was hot and the air was devoid of moisture, making for magnificent sky-scapes and annoying dry coughs. I could picture little bands of hardy nomads wandering through this barrenness seeking water or shade and moving on, but –- staying? – and farming? I knew of course that there is such as thing as dry land farming, but here? Really? Much of the National Park region is 'badlands,' where to enter on foot without a significant water supply is to court the Grim Reaper. Gazing at the endless stretches of sand, the occasional bizarre rounded hills of striped ore, and the few small wretched plants that can hang on in such a clime, it amazed me to think that anyone ever bothered to do more pass through as quickly as possible." |
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