Deep Dive articles to help you #Thrive
- Why You Need Multiple Sources of Backup Power
How to Thrive in a power outage. Prepare for a power outage with multiple backup power sources. Battery Bank, Inverter, and generator. - How to Use Historical Resources to Solve Your Homestead Water Challenges
In NE Kansas, we do not get “April showers bring May flowers”. We get May and June thunderstorms. I used Historical Aerials and Google Earth History slider to look at historical water patterns across my land. - Get Stuff Done – How to make a comfrey salve or balm
Make comfrey salve using the cold or warm infusion methods - How I created an Apple Guild – Permaculture
How I created an Apple Guild – Permaculture – Turn a corner of your garden into Hassle-Free Permaculture Perennial Production. Apple, elderberry, blackberry. - How I Created a Permaculture Food Forest
How to Create a Food Forest. Permaculture Orchard From Design to Delivery. How I Hand Dug Swales and Mounds. - How to Find your Homestead Property: the Property Walk
How to Do a Property Walk, to assess the contour of the land and the soil type. Use as a tool with your permaculture business or side hustle. - How to Pick your Homestead Property: Meet the Neighbors
Tips to evaluate the Homestead Property that you are considering. Are your neighbors growing gardens or lawns? Finding land – Check the land use over time. - How to Pick Your Homestead Property: Identify Your Goals
You want to grow your own food. You want your own land. The first step – Identify your goals. - Ep. 129 – How to Find Your Side Hustle Niche
In this episode I will share tips on how to discover and develop your side hustle niche. - How to Forage and Prepare Nettles
In this article I will show you how to forage, cook, prepare, and store stinging nettles. - Interplanting Perennials with Annuals in the Garden
I converted some of my garden into perennials, with annuals in the middle. I get an earlier harvest of perennial greens in the Spring and heat of the Summer. - How to Grow Chestnut Trees From Seed
Tips and Tricks to Grow Chestnuts from Seed You want to grow chestnuts from seed, but don’t know where to start? You have come to the right place. This will give you a step by step guide to grow chestnuts from seed. Grow Chestnuts from Seed Choose local chestnuts, if available, either foraged yourself or from a nursery that you know personally. Even if you get the chestnuts from a nursery, ask them if they treat the chestnuts. Because they are intended for selling in the store for human consumption, rather than planting, the local “organic” chestnut farm sprays or … - Ep. 114 – Sometimes You Just Have to Embrace the Suck
Tips on How to Handle Imposter Syndrome…and January It’s the doldrums of January. Christmas has passed. Deer season is over and I didn’t get a deer. Although I love the snow. I can’t do anything when it’s zero degrees outside and 25 mph wind like it is today. Like many of you, I’m starting to get the seed catalogs and I’m starting to plan my garden, even though I really need to stay in the moment and embrace this season. We live in a world where we want permanence, but we buy stuff that breaks – and we do it … - Homestead Aquaponics, Step by Step – The World’s Greatest Ebb and Flow Bed
Real-world aquaponics – step by step. The World’s Greatest Ebb and Flow Bed. - Thriving The Future – Let’s Build a Philosophy Garden
A garden built to reflect the balance of nature in our daily lives and the model for a proposed intentional community. An Essay by Yardbird Modern culture is out of balance with nature. In fact, I’d say most people in today’s modern culture have a dysfunctional relationship with nature. This is a consequence of people’s separation from truth. The philosophy garden, as I see it, is a system to observe and winnow the grain of truth by living and experiencing life through its daily processes. We transform ourselves through the correspondence between our inner self and aligning our perceptions with … - What Sex Is It? – Chicken Feather Sexing Techniques
How to tell a chick’s sex – is it a pullet (female) or a cockerel (male). - Making Autumn Olive Oxymel Medicinal
Fight the cold and flu season with Autumn Olive Oxymel Autumn olive berries have a high amount of Vitamin C. The Ruby red variety has more lycopene than even tomatoes. I have autumn olive growing in my pasture. I harvested the berries in October and froze them for use in this recipe in the winter. Autumn Olive Oxymel Recipe Ingredients: Step 1 : Blend autumn olive and filtered water in a blender. Step 2: Strain through a fine mesh sieve to remove the seeds and debris: Step 3: Add raw honey to taste. I add as much honey as I … - Barter Blanket and Perceived Value
It’s not about money. Our local group put on a great #GSD Workshop on Saturday. As part of the workshop, we had a barter blanket session. Now if you haven’t been to barter blanket session, this is how it works: Someone puts an item on the blanket-covered table. For example, I put a bottle of my homemade asparagus vinegar as seen below on the left. Other people put trade items on the table as well. The person who put on the original item can choose one of the other’s items as a trade, or choose none of them and withdraw … - How to Make Chocolate Mead
The idea lightbulb came on for this chocolate mead based on the fermentation prep stage for making chocolate vinegar, from: Homebrewed Vinegar: How to Ferment 60 Delicious Varieties, Including Carrot-Ginger, Beet, Brown Banana, Pineapple, Corncob, Honey, and Apple Cider Vinegar by Kirsten K. Shockey: Wait…chocolate vinegar? Yes. The first step to making chocolate vinegar is to make a chocolate mead primary ferment with a chocolate nib tea before adding the raw vinegar or an existing vinegar mother. Chocolate Mead Recipe Prep time: About 20 minutes total (plus 4 hours wait for the chocolate nib tea to steep). Ingredients: Brewing the … - Focus on Your Circle of Influence and Circle of Concern
Focus on What Matters There it is again. My heart races for just a few moments. “What am I going to do about…?” the voice inside my head asks. Anxiety, you are a familiar “friend” in this New Normal, The Dim Age. But with “friends” like this, who needs enemies? Circle of Concern I stop and ask myself: How much of this really matters? – That is the Circle of Concern. Does it really affect me? Let’s get real. That thing that is happening in Texas that is the Outrage-of-the-day on social media. Does it really impact me? If I … - No Expert but still Get Stuff Done #GSD workshop
Skills over Stuff Among our group of friends we get together and do workshops to learn and share skills. We have done apple cider pressing, planting trees on contour, and, since we have farms, we have have processed chickens and ducks. We learn enough on the internet to get going and then figure the rest out together. We learn by doing. The key is to Get Stuff Done. Develop Skills over just collecting Stuff. Spreading those skills. Empowering others. Making a difference. It transfers tribal knowledge, which is especially important to impart to the younger members. You can have all … - The Growing Season Comes to an End
Time to preserve and process that bounty. The growing season has come to an end but the preserving and storage is still going strong. This was a good season, as you can see from this basket full of tomatoes, hatch peppers, purple peppers, and okra. We canned > 25 pints of roasted tomato sauce, stored up four buckets of potatoes in sawdust, and shelled gallons of cowpeas (black-eyed peas) and beans. The totals: Apples were cooked into many pints of applesauce. Apple cores and scraps fed to the horses and donkey. Or turned into apple cider vinegar (recipe and pics … - I don’t care what the news says. I create my own news.
We want to talk about solutions, not problems “I don’t care what the news says. I create my own news.” Justin Rhodes This website, the podcast, and the Telegram group are all about solutions. We want to talk about original evergreen content. Evergreen content is content that still matters a year, or many years from now. Everyone is posting (and re-posting) someone else’s content (usually about the “big C”). All day, everyday, on all social media. I listened to a podcast from a year ago. It was from a few days before the election. It did not age well. The …