The Digital Homesteader (Beta)

Mary and I have been fairly busy getting things done.  We added some MRE’s, a new Berkey Sport, and I finally got a new mantle for my beloved Aladdin lamp. Can’t wait for that.

Let me clarify a few of these purchases and why we got them. First the MRE’s. Mary likes to say that this just gives her a few days of breathing space until we have to be concerned with food. There will be a lot of concerns and finding food shouldn’t be one of them.  So each of the kids now have a 72 pack being built and they will have MREs.  Since we have 2 kids in college we told them that we wanted a square foot of their dorm closet space to keep the pack. One of them rolled their eyes. “Here go my nutty parents again”.  Too bad, we care and we want provisions just in case.

The Sport Berkey is a sports water bottle with a built in Berkey filter. The sport bottle will provide over 100 refills to give absolutely pure water. Since water is so essential we felt that this was VERY necessary.

Finally my mantle. I have been searching for a mantle for my Aladdin lamp for over a year. They stopped being produced and literally started shipping today. The price is a little higher than before, but it is worth it to me. The Aladdin is the finest lamp in the world. It produces a beautiful bright light.

While I have been TRYING to not spend a lot of money on the garden, there are times that I just can’t resist. Since this was a birthday present to me, it technically won’t go into the budget. I grabbed this mini-greenhouse which is perfect for starters at Lowes this weekend. If you are using Jiffy starter trays (72 per tray) you can get 216 starter plants per level or over 850 plants in the whole greenhouse. That is amazing to me! I don’t just use the Jiffy trays so I only have about 540 plants in there right now.

There are many added benefits to having your starters in a greenhouse like this. First, my wife loves having the kitchen table back. Having the plants in a vertical way really utilizes your space well. Second, this greenhouse is pretty portable. The warning stickers warn against moving everything when loaded, but I find that moving the greenhouse indoors at night ensures that I won’t have to worry about the cold weather at night.

I will likely move all my plants to the garden in the coming week, so I will have an empty greenhouse. I think that I will do some experimenting with ways to use this “off-season”.

The farther I go, the more I am looking at things for the purpose or recycling and doing my garden as inexpensively as possible. Today I found just one more thing that I can do for free, and it helps me and not some land fill.

Today I was delivering a coffee for my wife (it was one of THOSE mornings) and I started to look at the stir stick that I used to stir in her half-n-half. All wood and just the right length and width to use as a plant marker. I grabbed my favorite pen and listed the plant and for fun drew a little picture. I don’t think I will do the picture going forward, just too small. But, this is a great way to use something that you might normally throw in the trash and doing something useful with it. My coffee came from Starbucks and I know that they really work hard to recycle and reuse. My old coffee cups are becoming the pots for my starter plants (more on that later).

You don’t have to be a radical environmentalist to preserve the earth. It is really all of these little things that add up. If for no other reason, its something that you can do to help your garden for free.  But the end results are that these don’t help pack our landfills. As a wood product they are bio-degradable and they can just be buried in the garden at the end of the season.

Ferry Morse Company is terrific. I was just in my local big box home improvement store and I couldn’t help but walk over to the seed section. I was so surprised to see that they now have a nice selection of Ferry Morse heirloom seeds. Had I not already purchased my seeds this year I would have walked out with one of every variety that they offer. The next time you are looking for seeds, take a look at your local retailer for Ferry Morse heirlooms, and pass them on to your kids and grandkids.

This is a weird topic for a preparedness blog, but to do some things you need to have someone to hold you accountable when you have something that you need to do. So, this is my accountability to you, the digital world. I bought my seeds today! I didn’t get them all, I still have to get some corn, but I think I have the bulk of what I am going to get.

I got my seeds on eBay. I looked at a lot of places and just want to get some heirloom seeds in the ground and get this going. So far I have spent $11 and I got 20 different types of vegetables. I have to add corn yet, and I am probably going to spend $6-7 more for that. I just ran out to the barn and my tiller didn’t fire, but its freezing outside and a little ether in the carburetor will probably fire it up. A good task for later in the week (when I have some ether).

In 1944 amid concerns of food rationing (as was happening in Britain), American’s were asked to grow a Victory Garden.  We responded with 20 million of them and they produced 40% of the all the vegetable produce being consumed nationally.^[4] That’s pretty amazing! By the end of the war those gardens raised crops equal to $1.2 billion.

Its time to start thinking about Victory Gardens in a whole new light.  While our country may indeed be in a war again, the bigger concern is the war on poverty, or just survival! I recognize that not all people can grow a garden. I have family who live on a tiny lot with not enough space to put out more than just a few containers and friends who live in inner city lots that are not only deprived of necessary light, but would likely be a target for thieves if they tried. But for the rest of us there is a solution, Victory Garden v.2.

I see the vegetable garden as providing us with the freshest of vegetables at a minimum cost, and if we use heirloom seeds they provide a sustaining source of food. Could a person survive of what they produced in just their garden? Probably, but not likely in most cases. Our tastes require far more diversity than most people can grow. However, if we learn a little about canning and preserving we can greatly decrease our food costs. I think eventually we will begin to prefer the produce of our own gardens and may at some point eat only that which we can grow.

This year I am building a Victory Garden v.2 (or VG2). I hope you join me. If not, I hope you enjoy the ride as I blog about it here.

Whether preparing, surviving, or thriving, there are certain basics that I keep coming back to.  Security, shelter, water, and food. Everything else is extra.  Security can be maintained mostly through isolation and vigilance.  Shelter is either where you live or some place far away that is safer than the urban place where you are currently living. That is a choice that we all need to come to terms with quickly.

Water is a big problem in a lot of places, but not that many places in the USA.  Throw a tarp out and you are going to likely going to catch a lot of rainfall that will provide for the family.

But food is a whole other problem, and not one easily solved. We can store up a year’s worth of supply, but then what. Wouldn’t it be better if you had a perpetual supply of food? Heirloom seeds are the answer. Heirloom seeds are seeds which are not genetically modified and haven’t been implanted with terminator modification so that they can’t naturally reproduce as God designed. All hybrid seeds that you buy at your local farm store or big box discount store are modified so that you can’t reproduce with them. That means when you get that delicious ear of corn you can’t dry the seeds and replant them. This is a marketing device that requires that you come back year after year to buy seeds from that company. While they might be in business next year, we can’t be sure.

The solution is heirloom seeds. These seeds are natural.  You can plant them and let them go to seed to have as much seed in the future as you want.  You can spend as little as $35 for a collection or as much as several hundred dollars. Some market themselves as “survival seeds”, others just as collections of heirloom seeds. They usually will state that the seeds will store for 5-7 years. Of course you can seal them from oxygen and store them at 55 degrees and they will go a lot longer.

But the thrill isn’t in storing but growing. Make this the season that you will plant at least something heirloom. Eat 90% of what you grow and hold back that last 10% for next year.

First, sorry for the absence. I plan to be back at least once a week.

This week I want to present a challenge.  I saw an early TV show called “Food for $99 a Week” or something like that on the Food Network when the network first started. What a great concept! The plan was for a family of 4 to eat for $99 a week. Totally doable.  This is $15 a day, or $5 per meal for a family of four. Sounds a little tough, but this is really easy. Breakfast is typically a cheap meal in our house, lunch can simply be a sandwich. I would think that you could do $10 for dinner a lot, and have a really healthy and tasty meal. This show was 15-20 years ago, but I think that we can do it still today, what do you think?

I decided that I will try to have regularly weekly features that will make this a little more enjoyable than just random posts on stuff that we all need to know. So Thursday is going to be “Tool Day”. I will introduce you to some of the greatest tools out there. Of course you can’t go far without using the best tool that we have – the brain.  Having our wits about us can do so much more than any fancy set of tools that we have, if we use it. Alas, I think that so often we get into a panic mode and act like we really don’t know what is going on.

Of course, to do this, you have to fill that gray matter with substance, and that is what this feature is really all about; knowledge.  The first tool is really one of the most essential books that you can have, and must have. Carla Emery’s “Encyclopedia of Counrty Living“.  Now I can already heard some of you: “Hey, I don’t live in the country!” Well the truth is that much of this book is indeed how to live in the country, but so much of it is just how to live off the land, wherever that land may be. Probably the best money you can spend!

I am so glad to be able to put together this web site. As a beta it will be hosted at one of my sub-domains, but should have its own domain shortly, and then a new name. The purpose of the site is simple. I want to provide a ready source of information to people all over so that they can become more self-reliant, not relying on “the system” to survive.  I will publish recipes for good and cheap cooking. I will explain how to raise your own food supply. I will share how to prepare for short and long term interruptions of service. I don’t plan to write this as some general information site however, it is a dialog between you and me, and therefore it is personal. You won’t agree with me all the time and that’s okay. No one agrees with me 100% of the time.  But I hope that I can impart some information that will at least cause you to pause and think about the way that you do things, and hopefully consider how you can do things better in the future.

I am writing this for you. You may live on a farm in a rural area, a suburb, or an urban mess of cement and steel (but I hope not!).  Since I don’t know your situation I am going to do a little writing to all perspectives. But I encourage you to read it all because the information that you gleen might help someone else, and isn’t that what its all about?

For the purposes of this site, I consider homesteading the intentional lifestyle choice of living off one’s own land. That land can be a quarter acre lot in the suburbs of California or a 1,000 acre farm in South Texas.  It is coming to a place where you don’t worry about whether or not the power stays on, the stores stay open, the water flows, or anything else disrupts what 99.99% of the population depends on every day. Why? Because we have had the wisdom to look at the future and see that nothing is certain. And so we prepare to protect our families and make sure that if anything does happen we are at least better prepared than those without a vision for the future.

I am not an expert, just someone along life’s journey with a little more passion towards this stuff than the average. I think “preparedness” almost all the time. I strongly consider purchases in light of what we may need in the future. I have been looking at preparedness and homesteading material for a little over 10 years, so I got a lot of stuff in my noggin. I have gigabytes worth of files that I am really looking forward to sharing.  I have some great tips that will help those just starting out as well as those who really have their stuff together.  I have made some mistakes along the way (a herd of goats comes to mind) and really don’t mind passing that stuff along as well.

People get into homesteading for a variety of reasons. Some just are tired of the “rat race” of city life. Some are escaping for religious freedoms.  Others (like me) see the economic indicators and feel that our economy might collapse and they better get ready just in case.

I hope you enjoy the journey with me.