Excerpted from Neil's latest book LandBook - An owner's manual for rural land (second edition) ~~~~~~~~ I’ll bet that, if you’re old enough to read,…
My 20-year-old daughter called at 8 pm on a 95-degree Texas Sunday night. “Dad, the air conditioner on my RV went out. I’m hot,…
Two Decembers ago I was sitting on the porch enjoying the smell of wood smoke rising from our little outdoor cooking grill, and I…
Dreaming about living in the country is easy, even when you’re not quite there. Rural images ripple unbidden through burbling brooks of the mind…
So, you’ve done your homework. Your barn or pasture shelter is ready for its new tenant. You have prepared, fussed, researched the breeds you…
Our number one priority on our homesteads is to pay attention to the care of everything and everyone on it. Proper maintenance is paramount…
One of my favorite homestead assets is our woodstove. There is nothing quite like the heat of a woodstove on a cold winter’s night. …
The popularity of keeping chickens is undergoing a dramatic resurgence since the turn of the twenty-first century. Laying hens are making appearances in astonishing…
The collapse of the financial system makes this about as good a time as there’s ever been for you to break loose and live…
At sixty years old, I live alone in a circle of trees in the middle of twelve wild and wooly acres. People are either intrigued…
A girl about the age of twelve, sporting a French beret, stands to the side with her face tilted, looking over the fields as…
To many homesteaders and would-be homesteaders, “money” is a four-letter word. After all, money is all about materialism, and that's the antithesis of homesteading,…
A Portlander guy walks into a butcher shop, tells the man behind the counter he has to kill his beloved chicken, it's old and…
“There's no way this car will make it the rest of the way home in the dark. The alternator belt is gone,” I said.…
An early American coinage, the Mormon Dollar, in this case a $5 denomination, was minted by the Deseret Mint 1849. Each coin was engraved with…
In readying for retirement, the world changed. As a result, we redirected our efforts into an endeavor which would mitigate the reduction of purchasing…
Every day as we read our newspapers, scan our internet forums, or click through the channels on our television, we witness scenes of a…
Except in the 1516 novel by Sir Thomas More, Utopia is said to be impossible. That is probably a blessing—it would be terribly boring after…
In life it doesn't seem to matter what undertaking you do, be it getting married, changing careers, going into business, starting a family, buying a…
My engineer friend in Dallas said, “This is the third year my health insurance has gone up. It's now over $550 per month just for…
