Tag: homesteading

Via The Survival Blog

Why I will continue to homestead

It’s really fun to watch videos of the perfect “permaculture” setup.  It’s quite another to implement it.  Sitting down and thinking it all through is a great idea, even drawing up plans – which will require you to know the lay of your land, the slopes, the direction the wind comes from, where the morning sun comes up, what shadows are thrown during the day, the climate and growing zone, etc.  But, what if you have no idea what you’re doing?

Continue reading “Homesteading – A Cautionary Tale – Part 3”

Via The Survival Blog

The urgent drives out the merely important on a homestead

Maintenance is of critical importance.  If you do not maintain the fencing, for example, you may find yourself chasing animals down a country road.  That seems to happen often around these here parts.  Someone’s horses or cows are always out.  Dogs abound.  I have a neighbor who brings their pregnant cows to the adjacent acreage to calve.  I only had to track my neighbors down once to let them know a cow was out.  The cow was peacefully grazing in the graveyard nearby!  They have since repaired the fencing.  Thankfully, there are no nearby bulls that want to bother my dairy girls.

Continue reading “Homesteading – A Cautionary Tale – Part 2”

Via The Survival Blog

Living The Dream

First off, why do I homestead?  My passion is to provide a safe haven for my large family away from the world’s chaos.  A place where food can be grown, the air is clean and fresh, no noise or people pollution, no homeless encampments, and precious little crime.  A safe, productive, hideaway.  Realizing that nowhere is completely safe, we know that some places are better than others.  Just look around.  If you live in the country, you might have a million-dollar view from the porch of a humble home.  I do.  I can scarcely take it in.  It’s restful to the eyes and soul.

I take no credit whatsoever for this place.  I stumbled upon it for a variety of reasons and feel that it was a gift from the Lord.  After possibly decades of reading Survivalblog, I had a mental checklist for a retreat property and this one fit the bill.  I had no intentions of “homesteading” other than a deep desire to become as “self-sufficient” as possible.  I didn’t even know what I was going to do with this property other than raise some chickens.  That’s how it started.

Continue reading “Homesteading – A Cautionary Tale – Part 1”

Guest Post by Dr. Robert Malone

The nuts and bolts of a new beginning

At the end of 2007, Jill and I bought a farm in Jasper, Georgia. We did this because of a new job. It was one of the dumber things we ever did. We sold a lovely farm near Point of Rocks Maryland, one that we had spent years rebuilding. We were finally starting to reap the rewards of years of hard, back-breaking work rebuilding old barns, a house and putting up fence. Once there, the company I had gone to work for quite literally lost the government contract (because of executive actions to hide problems) and pulled up stakes from the USA a few months after we relocated. All of the sudden, I was out of a job, and then the housing market crashed. Big time. Our farm lost at least 50% of it value overnight.

We continued on with our consulting business, but the real estate market in rural north Georgia never recovered. Our mortgage was well underwater, and as it was a farm, the interest rate was high. Farm loans are considered commercial loans and interest rates are always higher than residential rates.

Finally in 2013, we managed to get out of the mortgage, but we lost our all the equity and more. We fled Georgia back up to the Virginia area – where most of our clients were located.

Continue reading “Homesteading: Part One”

Guest Post by Samantha Biggers

Given our intense focus on COVID and its economic repercussions over the past crazy year, we want to make sure we also give sufficient attention in 2021 to the many other topics important to building greater resilience into our lives.

So we’ll be adding the voices of other specialists and experts in the future weeks/months as we’re able (along with Chris and Adam’s regular contributions, of course), guided by the PeakProsperity.com audience’s feedback.

Today we hear from Samantha Biggers, who has written regularly over the past decade for a number of homesteading websites.

Many people dream about homesteading on some level.

While having a larger parcel of land is often part of that dream, it’s not essential. You can accomplish many homesteading projects while living in the city or the suburbs.

Setting realistic goals for homesteading will make your experience more enjoyable and allow you to get good at the skills you’re gaining. Just remember to pace yourself.

Taking on a lot at once doesn’t allow for enough time to get good and knowledgeable at any one skill. When you take on too much at once, you are more likely to make mistakes too.

My husband and I started our own homesteading journey in 2008 while in our mid-20s. It was tough. We didn’t have much money. But we did have a piece of overgrown land.

Continue reading “Setting Realistic Homesteading Goals”

Via Survival Sullivan

Homesteading and prepping are not the same thing, not exactly anyway, but they definitely can and should be linked. Homesteaders and preppers stockpile food, are focused on making available and conserving resources, understand what living off grid truly means, and strive to be self-reliant both now and well into the future…whatever it may bring.

We began as small town preppers. Our goal was always to buy a little bit of land to enhance our survival preparedness on all levels. It took only one nearly two week power outage for us to grasp our town prepping had taken us as far as it could, and that, dear readers, was not far enough to ride out the mini apocalypse as well as we would have liked.

The experience was enough to convince my beloved husband to put our rental properties on the market, and buy more acreage than we had originally anticipated and go all in as homesteading preppers.

Continue reading “Is Homesteading the Best Way to Prepare?”