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Category: Homesteading

Here you find all kinds of tidbits on homesteading.

Building Your Dream Home? You Might Need Insurance

Building a new home can be an exciting time in your life, especially if it is your dream home. When you have worked, scrimped and saved to build a new home, the last thing you want is for some horrible unforeseen event to happen that could potentially ruin it for you. That is where insurance comes in. If you are considering building your dream home, you might need insurance to protect you.

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Save Money and Live a Greener, More Sustainable Life

It is more important than ever to focus your attention towards a more sustainable way of living. Not only will this be great for the environment, it is also great for your finances. The carbon footprint of heating homes in many develop countries can be as much as 20% of a nation’s total carbon footprint. This is a significant figure, which needs to be addressed.

Burning wood is a great way a household can take action and lead a more sustainable life. Many people still do not realize the benefits, both environmentally and financially that come with burning wood.

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5 Effective Ways to Improve Garden Cultivation

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Today’s post is a guest post from fellow blogger Ann, who owns the Sumo Gardener blog. Enjoy!

 How to Improve Garden Cultivation

We always want to maximize the crops we harvest after a season of hard work. Our goal as gardeners is to produce sustainable food for our own consumption while maximizing our use of land and minimizing waste and losses. However, gardening should not only be focused on taking care of the crops that we will harvest at the end of the planting season.

One of the most important steps in determining your planting season’s success is usually the first step that you have to do: land cultivation. Today we’ll talk about five different ways that you can improve land cultivation in your garden, no matter how big or small it is. Read more

What You Should Consider Before You Buy a Farm

 

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It will be four years ago next month that we sold our home in the ‘burbs and moved to a hobby farm about forty-five minutes out of town. The farm life is in many ways a much harder life than suburbia life, but the blessings are well worth the effort and we wouldn’t trade it for anything. Since a fair number of people seem to be considering moving out to the country these days, I thought I’d share a to-do list of things one should consider before making the move to a farm, whether it be a smaller hobby farm like ours or a larger working farm. Here are some thoughts. Read more

Four Heirloom Tomato Secrets for Maximum Yield

Tips for Maximizing Your Tomato Yield
Tips for Maximizing Your Tomato Yield

Happy Monday, my frugal friends! Today we feature a post from our blogging pal Cameron over at Thrift Hounds. Cameron shares on his blog funny and inventive ways to save money and live frugally. And as a bonus, his wife has an awesome food blog. 🙂 

There’s probably still a snowstorm or two on the horizon here where I live in Denver before summer arrives, and yet I – like you, maybe – am already already obsessing over how to coax as many pounds of tomatoes as possible out of my beloved tomato plants this year.

Tomatoes, like zucchinis, have the reputation of surprising gardeners with more produce than you thought possible (to the point where you start bribing reluctant coworkers to take them off of your hands).

In fact, most gardeners are ecstatic to get 10 or 15 pounds of fruit out of each plant.

But with some careful planning and maintenance, you can push your plants to produce up two or three times that amount. Read more

two chickens next to the side of a red barn

Finding My Frugal Farmer in Spain

two chickens next to the side of a red barn
Finding Love and Farming Joy in Spain

Greetings, my frugal friends! Today we’re featuring a fun and heart-warming post from life coach Lisa Hoashi. Lisa shares about the hard work and also the inevitable joys of living life on a working farm. Her words will bring a smile to your face and warmth to your heart. Enjoy!  

 

How I Met the Love of My Life

I didn’t set out to find love. Truly.

The reason why I quit my job and gave away most of my possessions was because I’d long had the dream to travel for at least a year, unfettered and carefree. Sure, as I talked about my plans with my other single friends, they often looked at me with a twinkle in their eye. “You’ll be sure to meet someone when you’re traveling,” they said. Read more

Gardening for Self-Sufficiency – Our 2016 Plan

canning spaghetti 3Gardening for self-sufficiency is different than gardening for fun. When we lived back in the suburbs, we had a small 10×15 or so garden plot, and each year we’d sit down and talk about what “fun” types of things we’d attempt to grow for the year. Preservation had that same “fun” theme, as we’d can pickles for the purpose of always having one of our favorite foods around, and we tried freezing green beans simply because we wanted to learn the process.

However, one of our goals in ditching suburbia for the sake of country living was that we wanted to begin to really turn our garden into a serious source of food for our family of six. What started out as a fun hobby is slowly becoming a vital source of food for the entire year. As such, the gardening we do now is vastly different than the gardening we did back in the suburbs. Read more

The Benefits of Long-Term Food Storage and Preparedness

This article was originally published in November of 2014, but I felt led to re-publish in order to stress the benefits of preparedness. Preparedness isn’t just for “zombie apocalypse” type of situations, but can help us to weather personal basic emergencies well too.

Greetings, friends!  Later in the week I’ll have another post on organization, but today I wanted to share a post that my new friend Lance wrote for us.  As regular readers know, I’m a huge believer in preparedness.  Lance is too: he and his wife not only have a six month emergency fund, but a six month food storage supply as well.  Lance was generous enough to share with The Frugal Farmer readers today about the hows and whys of his stellar food storage system.  Welcome, Lance! Thanks to Laurie for the invitation to write on The Frugal Farmer. What a cool opportunity after leaving a short comment the other day on one of her articles. That turned in to several wonderful e-mails and the opportunity to share a little about us and how we prepare for the future. I know my wife has dreamed of us sharing pictures of our garage and basement with people all across the world, sorry honey 🙂 . I really should have cleaned things up first! Read more

The Prepper Garden

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The Prepper Garden

When we first started gardening years ago, it was more of a fun hobby than a means to provide cheap food for our family. Then in October of 2012 we moved to the farm, and created a gardening plan that was truly meant to save money and be a reliable resource to provide food for our family of six. Now, our goal is to have a Prepper Garden. Read more

Macrobiotic Diet vs Paleo Diet: What’s the Difference?

Strawberry Spinach Salad
Our favorite Strawberry Spinach Salad

Well, since we began our un-frugal practice of juicing at the beginning of the year, we have, quite by accident, delved into a world of clean eating.  Before our juicing experiment, we had a pretty balanced diet, compared to most Americans, that is.  We balanced eating processed food with eating whole foods, kept sugar to a minimum and always drank plenty of water.  We liked our balance.  It felt like we got to have our cake and eat it too, so to speak.   Read more