In their quest for self-sufficiency, a lot of families start out quite logically by moving to their own piece of land in the country and cultivating a large garden. Once they feel they have mastered this step, they begin thinking about livestock.
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Recommendations For Planting Fruit, Nut and Shade trees
Most of us think of fall as a time of winding down on gardening activities. True, there are fewer chores to do than when the spring garden was begun followed by mulching, harvesting, canning, and so on, but fall is also the preferred time for planting most fruit and nut trees.
Growing The Best Crops For Coping With The Next Crisis
If the next crisis hits hard, one of the best friends you can have is a practical garden. A key consideration in such a garden is which types of produce can be harvested and simply dumped into a root cellar or dark closet, without processing, and left there until needed.
How To Keep Deer Out Of Your Garden
Last summer I returned home from vacation to find my vegetable garden devoured by Bambi. My first instinct was to run for the shotgun, but since that wasn’t a legal option in July, alternatives had to be found.
More Than A Dozen Reasons To Practice Self-sufficiency Gardening
It often amazes me that when many people think of self-sufficiency, home food production is usually the last item on their list—that is, if it makes the list at all. We all tend to take certain things for granted, such as foods that are plentiful.
How To Enrich Your Soil With Cover Crops
Use it or lose it. That expression did not originally refer to soil, but it could have. Nature improves soil by growing plants on it continuously. In the wild, good soil is never without a cover of vegetation. Something will grow there, so it may as well be something you choose.
Plant propagation Techniques For Multiplying Your Plants Easily
Nearly all gardeners are familiar with saving seeds and the benefits and reasons for doing so, but there are numerous reasons and benefits in learning other techniques for plant propagation. These techniques involve division, layering, stem cutting, and grafting.
Harvesting And Canning Wild Greens
Winter’s dreary end seems to drag on and on into early spring. We itch to get planting the garden, poring over seed catalogs and babying those tiny light green tomato, pepper, and other infant plants in the south windows. How lucky we are that the very first delectable greens that our bodies crave are already growing in sunny, protected areas around the homestead, planted for us by God, himself.
Tips For Preparing Gardening Soil In Winter
We have to prepare for everything, whether it’s for a career, a city council meeting, a country fair, a junior’s first day at school, a well-stocked pantry, or anything else. It’s the same with gardening. You can’t expect to reap much of a crop if you throw your seeds out on the ground with nature’s wildflowers, weeds, and debris.
How To Create Food Plots For Bow Hunting
Since moving to northern Idaho and purchasing our own slice of wildlife habitat, my attitude toward whitetail hunting has changed completely. I no longer view whitetail habitat as something to be sized up and conquered on a limited time while traveling to hunt.
Smart Ways To Preserve And Enjoy Your Apple Harvest
There’s nothing like an abundance of apples. You pick those first few buckets of ripe fruit with glee, anticipating the delights you can make with the sweet fruit, but a few bushels later, what to do with them becomes a quandary. The good news is that there are plenty of ways to enjoy your apples until next season’s harvest.
A Few Tips For Easy Weeding
Weeding is the bane of every gardener’s life, an unending, unpleasant, onerous, exhausting chore. It can’t be eliminated, not entirely. And it can’t be made effortless. But it can be made much easier and less time-consuming.
Protect Your Chickens From Their Top Predators
I’m a member of quite a few backyard chicken enthusiast groups on Facebook, and it seems like every day someone is telling a gruesome story about their backyard chickens being attacked by a predator.