Typically I try to point my readers to a specific article on other sites that is relevant to homesteading or I just wanted to share.  But, today I wanted to share with you the list of 5 homesteading blogs I think you should be reading.  All five were picked because they publish articles on a regular basis and contain great homesteading information.

* In alphabetical order:

1. The Backyard Pioneer: It’s no secret that Mike over at The Backyard Pioneer is our brother-from-another-mother.  He’s a great guy who, more importantly, writes a terrific blog.  His articles range the gamut from gardening to cooking to equipment review.  The Backyard Pioneer takes a rustic, cost-conscious approach to his projects and we highly recommend his no-nonsense approach to gear and technique.  Oh, and don’t forget about his recipes – I can vogue for the high quality of the food he makes! (His Chicken and Dumplings are awesome!)
2. Home Ready Home: The owner/author of Home Ready Home is Julie and she describes herself as someone who “used to dream of being a guest on Oprah, but now, [wishes she] could go on location with Survivorman.”  That says it all in a nutshell. The articles on Home Ready Home are top-notch and Julie definitely takes a “family-first” approach to her tutorials and instruction.  The content is gardening and cooking heavy – concentrating on how to eat what you grow and grow what you eat. (Check out her 5 Items You Should Be Growing In Your Garden)
3. Homestead Dreamer: Homestead Dreamer is a new addition to my reading repertoire and, so far, it has not disappointed at all. The blog is very interested because it is basically chronicles a young Alaskan couple as they work towards self-sufficiency. As you can imagine it’s very homestead driven with flavors of self-sufficiency. Highly recommended! (The article on Unraveling the Mystery: Drying and Dehydrating Food is a nice intro)
4. Survival At Home: While probably the least homesteading-centric blog, Patrick has a great site over at Survival. He regularly publishes good articles on survival, prepping and homesteading which cause you to pause, think and re-evaluate your approach. It’s been my experience that he is helpful and always willing to talk to folks and send them in the right direction. (like his article on 45 Ways to Save Money on Your Monthly Bills)
5. Tenth Acre Farm: This list wouldn’t be complete without a site that concentrates on permaculture. Amy and Vince have a (shocker) tenth acre lot in Cincinnati, Ohio where they grow most of their own food and implement permaculture principles on a scale relevant to their land. I highly recommend getting up to speed on their project/homestead and becoming a regular reader. It’s amazing to see how permaculture and a desire to change your life can manifest itself in a very cool project. (Their article on Front Yard Rainwater Catchment was awe inspiring).

More?

Tell us in the comments what other homesteading sites you follow and why. Or why you already read and like the sites I mentioned.

What comes to mind when you hear the word compost? Do you think of some stinky pile where food scraps get thrown and flies live? If that’s what comes to mind then you need to know something – you’re doing it wrong! Compost is a decidedly simple yet effective process that anyone on a small suburban lot can partake in.  You’ll see incredible benefits in your garden once you take the plunge into making good compost.

Compost Science

The ‘art’ of making compost is actually quite easy – it’s less art and science and more…well, just doing. You need to make sure you have the right ingredients and keep them moist (not wet). You also need to make sure you’re turning it often to keep the heat up inside the pile. And, while it’s a very forgiving process, it’s also good to have an understanding of what goes into compost.

Temperature

Temperature can be a fickle creature in the world of compost. On one hand, an elevated temperature can help you. Keeping the compost at a minimum of 104°F for five days (hitting 131°F for five hours during that time) will make sure that all the weed seeds and pathogens in your compost are killed. Likewise, if you get too hot it’s not good either. For example, if you hit 160°F, all the microorganisms – basically bacteria and fungi – that make the compost action happen will die.

Heat is caused in the compost pile when the microorganisms begin to decompose the plant material you’ve included. You are most likely not going to have to cool down your compost pile (it’s pretty hard to get it that hot). But, if you do see smoke on your compost pile, all you have to do is add water to cool it down. Adding a mixture of high carbon ingredients (dead leaves are great) after the water is a good idea.

Browns and Greens

If you remember the post about Mulch and Your Suburban Homestead, you’ll remember how we talked about the C:N ratio. This ratio is commonly thought of as the ratio of browns to greens. The table below gives you a few examples of browns and greens:

The easy way to remember which is which is to remember that greens are typically moist and colorful (with the exception of coffee grounds and manure – both of which are moist).  Everything else is browns.

You want to start your pile at a rough C:N ratio of 30:1 meaning your browns are 30x more prevalent than your greens.  This scenario will whittle down to roughly 10:1 or 15:1 as the decomposition occurs.

An ammonia type smell coming from your compost pile means you have too many greens.  Likewise, if you don’t see a lot of decomposition action going on, you’re probably too high on the browns.

If you’re the analytical type, check out this compost calculator to see how well you are doing.

Particle Size and Shape

Believe it or not, size and shape greatly influence your compost.  As a rule of thumb, the smaller the better.  The microorganism can more easily digest small pieces.  A good example of this phenomenon is an apple.  We put a whole apple in our compost pile and then chopped one into small pieces and placed it in there as well.  After a certain amount of time, the small pieces were barely recognizable and the whole apple was more or less intact.

Remember that shape is equally important.  If you have material that is so small that it can mat together when wet – whole sheets of paper, full lettuce leaves, or very finely ground up food – the air and water will not be able to get in and help the microorganisms work their magic.

Aeration

As I eluded to above, air is critical to the decomposition process in a compost pile.  Much like humans, microorganisms take in oxygen and expel carbon dioxide.  If these little guys can get oxygen, they’ll eventually be smothered and replaced with anaerobic microorganisms (anaerobic = no oxygen).  These guys stink (literally) and don’t decompose your compost nearly as well as their aerobic counterparts.

So how do you aerate your compost pile?  Easy – keep it open to the air and turn it often.

Moisture

Again, the microorganisms are like you and I in that they also need moisture to live.  But, much like temperature, moisture can be a fickle situation.  Too little moisture and your microorganisms will perish.  Too much and they’ll drowned; being replaced by their anaerobic counterparts.

You can tell if your compost pile is sufficiently moist by grabbing a handful of the compost.  If it feels like a wrung-out sponge when you squeeze it, it’s good.  For the most part, you won’t have to worry about this problem as your greens and rainfall will give the pile enough moisture.

Turning

Turning is one of those things that people have differing opinions on.  Some folks say that nature does this kind of process without turning a forest floor.  And they’re completely correct.  But those people are usually more patient and willing to wait a year or more for a compost pile to be ready.

Those of us who are a bit more impatient will turn the pile on occasion.  Turning the pile provides a few benefits to the compost pile.  First, the temperature at the middle of the pile is always going to be greatest so turning it allows for a more thorough compost.  Second, turning the compost pile helps aerate it and break up clumps that may shed water.

We here at the Suburban Steader Homestead turn our pile because we believe it provides a better quality compost in a shorter time.

Compost Bins

Good news – science class is over!  Now we’re getting into the hands-on part of this post.

The question also becomes: What should I make my compost in?

My answer is usually a simple Nothing.

To be perfectly frank, the compost pile on the Suburban Steader Homestead is just a pile on the ground.  We add our table scraps, scrapped paper, straw, etc to it and turn it on occasion.  We’ll water it during especially dry spells but those are far and few between considering where we live.

But, you may not want to have a compost pile just laying on your property somewhere so let’s talk about what you can do:

Pallet Compost Bin

This concept is very simple.  Make a four-sided area out of wooden pallets and put some hinges on it so you can open up one pallet.  Now make another one next to it in the same manner.  Once one bin is full, use a pitchfork to move it to the second bin.  This movement will aerate the compost pile for ‘finishing’ in the second bin.  You can now start a new pile in the first bin.  By the time you’ve filled the first bin again, the second bin material should be ready to use.

Compost Tumblers

You can either buy these at your local big box store or make one out of a plastic 55-gallon drum (with a cover) and a pipe.  Put the pipe through the barrel length-wise so the barrel can spin around it and support the pipe with a wooden frame.  Now all you have to do is cut and opening in the barrel – make sure you can close it again – that you can both add material and retrieve your compost from.  Now all you have to do is add material and give it a spin.  These aerate your compost quite well and generally produce quality compost at a faster rate.  The problem is that the amount you produce is significantly smaller than what you can with a pallet bin or pile situation.

Using Compost In Your Garden

Using compost in your garden is soooo simple.  Follow these three rules:

1. Pull back mulch
2. Apply compost
3. Reapply mulch

That’s it.  Following these simple will help build up the health of your soil.  The sponge-like capability of the compost will retain moisture in the garden, the nutrients will attract earthworms which will work the compost deeper into your garden.  Pretty soon your soil will be darker and richer with a higher level of microorganisms.

Wrap Up

Compost is a wonderfully easy and inexpensive tool that every suburban homesteader should have in their toolbox.  While there’s a plethora of science behind, the premise is pretty simple.  Throw some browns and greens together, add moisture and oxygen, turn it occasionally and get out of the way.  Nature will do the rest of the work.

You’ll see incredible benefits in your garden and you’ll enjoy knowing that your soil is getting more and more fertile which means you can grow better and better produce.  Everyone wins!

Additional Resources

• The Dirty Truth About Compost
• Compost, Vegetable Gardener’s Gold by Mike the Gardener
• How to Brew Compost Tea
• Solve These 3 Common Compost Problems
• SMART Composting – Turn Your Spoil into Soil
• Fall Leaves: The Perfect Ingredient for Compost

Please let us know any tips you have for making compost in the comments or on our Facebook Page.

When you hear the word homesteading, even suburban homesteading, I’m sure one of the your first thoughts is of complete self-sufficiency. You dream of being able to completely provide for your family in all aspects of life, right? Unfortunately, that’s just not realistic. You can’t do everything yourself, whether you’re on 40-acres or a little quarter acre suburban homestead.

You’ll need to rely on teamwork to get it all done.

Teamwork On Different Levels

Anna Hess tells a great story in her book The Weekend Homesteader about how a lack of teamwork nearly wrecked her farm. She tried to do it all herself and found out the hard way that she couldn’t. In the end, she found that teamwork not only helped her get farm up and running, but it also introduced her to her husband.

I’m not going to guarantee that teamwork around your suburban homestead is going to find you a spouse, but it will allow you to grow your network and skill set, as well as take some of the burden off your hands.

After Anna tells her little story about how teamwork, she goes on to describe the different kind of skills and traits that teamwork can help build within your community. Some of the more important ones to suburban homesteading are described below:

Strength and Stamina

I have no intention of starting a battle of the sexes here, but we can all admit that men and women have far different levels (and types) of strength. Personal experience has shown that men tend to be stronger in the upper body and women have more stamina for tasks like shovelling. Having a group of people with different levels of strength and stamina, regardless of gender, is always good to have when doing work around the suburban homestead.

Patience

I know this particular trait is something that I am short on. Having a wife who is patient and able to handle situations where either we’re having difficulty getting a task done or we have a repetitive task certainly helps.

Record-Keeping

We keep records of just about everything on our little suburban homestead – what plants were planted where, how much of each crop we harvested, where we bought certain supplies and how much they cost, etc. Having someone with meticulous attention to detail is a great addition to the teamwork aspect of suburban homesteading.

Building Skills

You’re invariably going to build something on your suburban homestead. There’s not way around it – whether it’s a new shed, raised bed, chicken tractor, or water collection system. Having someone on your team who can think in this manner is extremely helpful.

Teamwork On the Suburban Steader Homestead

As I’ve mentioned in the past, we have a little quarter acre lot on Long Island, NY. It’s nothing special and, from the outside, doesn’t look much different than your typical suburban plot. But, we do live a little differently and need to rely on teamwork to get it all done. Here’s how we do it:

Immediate Family

My wife and twin girls are the main support system on our homestead. I wouldn’t get half the work done without their teamwork. My wife is great at harvesting veggies and ‘master planning’ how we lay things out on our land so they are both functional and aesthetically pleasing. That’s not to mention her amazing skills in the kitchen!

My twin five-year-old daughters are an awesome help as well. They help me plant, harvest and compost. They love seeing the worms in the compost pile! As time goes on, they’ll acquire more skills and more responsibilities. For now, they’re learning more than they’re doing…and that’s part of the teamwork aspect as well.

My role is multifaceted. I’m kind of the manager of the homestead (don’t tell my wife I said that!). I manage when we’re going to plant and how to harvest. I’m also responsible for a lot of high-intensity physical labor aspects such as rotating the compost, building/fixing items around the homestead and most of the heavy duty yard work.

In addition to the immediate family, we harness the knowledge of extended family members when needed.  Two that come to mind are my father and brother.  My father is a plumber with a great mind for construction.  He has helped me do a ton of work on the house and in the yard.  My brother has a degree in plant and soil science and is my first call when I run into issue in both the garden and the yard.

It’s a wonderful blend between the four of us and our extended family.  The work is hard and, usually, we have fun doing it all.

Outside Resources

We have a lot of outside resources to help us with the homestead, some of whom don’t even know they’re part of our team. They include:

Security

I’ve hooked up with a great group of guys who I go to the range with on a fairly regular basis. While we always have a good time, we also spend a good amount of time working on our skills from a home defense perspective. The teamwork aspect of training – and making it fun – keeps me coming back for more.

Knowledge Base

I spend a good amount of time communicating with people online at places like The Survival Podcast Forums, When SHTF Forums, PermaEthos Forums and a private Facebook group for Preparedness & Homesteading bloggers. The people I meet in these places provide a great wealth of information for all aspects of suburban homesteading. Terrific teamwork mentality!

Local Support

I also have a good local support system in addition to all my ‘virtual friends.’ Most notable out of these folks is Mike over at The Backyard Pioneer. We regularly meet-up to discuss projects, bounce ideas off each other and discuss the challenges we are each facing. Sometimes just having an external sounding board and hearing that they’re facing similar challenges is enough to keep you going. In addition to our semi-regular meetings, Mike and I also lend a hand to each other whenever we can. And, being that we have families roughly the same age, we’re trying to get together more as a large group. I’m sure it’ll be good for our kids to hang out…and our wives can commiserate about their crazy husbands!

Wrap Up

Teamwork is a key part to the suburban homesteading lifestyle. As much as you’d like to think you can, you cannot do it all yourself. You need some help and the sooner you start working on building your team, the happier you’ll be. Remember that, as a suburban homesteader, you’re even more exposed to the community lifestyle. Why not try to build on that exposure and develop a group around you that can help you achieve your goals?

Please let us know any teamwork-related tips or question you have in the comments or on our Facebook Page.

photo credit: USDAgov via Compfight cc

Suburban homesteading is a different animal than normal homesteading. Finding room to homestead can be a tricky task for the typical suburban homesteader, especially those who live on small plots of land or in apartments. Granted, if you live in the suburbs but have a large plot, this task may be easy for you.

Those of you with minimal to no land need not fret – we’re here for you. This article will help you find room to homestead on your lot. We’ll use our lot as an example and concentrate on three main areas:

• Lawns
• Container Gardens
• Areas Beyond Your Yard

photo credit: gfpeck via photopin cc

Lawns

A lawn is one thing most suburban homesteader have at their disposal. Even if you live on a small lot, there’s a lot of room to homestead on that nice green carpet you have.

But how, you ask? That’s simple – landscape integration!

Even though it’s a lot of land from a homesteading standpoint, your lawn is something many suburban homesteaders don’t want to completely get rid of. Plus, what would the neighbors think?

First, forget about the neighbors. They don’t pay your rent or mortgage, so what they think doesn’t matter (unless you are unfortunate enough to live in an HOA). If you’re really concerned about your neighbors, you can keep your front yard untouched and hide your homesteading in the backyard.

Second, realize that you can incorporate homesteading into your lawn in a way that is aesthetically attractive while still functional.

Here’s a few examples of how you can incorporate homesteading into your lawn:

• Incorporate bushes (blueberry, strawberry, etc) into areas where you’d normal put box hedge or other partioning bushes
• Place fruit trees in areas you want to create shade
• Build garden boxes and raised beds into your landscape rather than large inground gardens
• Stick with hens if you are going to have chickens (and build an attractive tractor for them)

How We Use Our Lawn

We follow most of the suggestions above at the Suburban Steader homestead.

First, we do not have an in-ground garden. All of our gardening area is built into the landscape as raised beds. They allow us to landscape around the garden and provide a more aesthetically appealing element to the backyard.

Second, our backyard is fenced off and we have mulch beds around the majority of the fencing. We have been planting many perennial plants like strawberries and blueberries in these areas. This approach stacks functions as it puts an aesthetically pleasing plant in the mulched area and also provides an additional  food producers. If I’m going to maintain a plant, I’d prefer that it produces food for me.

We have primarily worked in the backyard.  The front yard is currently untouched but we do have plans for it. As we clean up the remnants of the former owner, we do plan on putting in some fruit trees – probably apple – in the future as well as some more “fedge” (food hedge) type plants on the peripherals.

photo credit: Bad Alley via photopin cc

Container Gardens

You’re not out of luck if you don’t have a lawn. You can still find room to homestead with container gardens. A sunny balcony, stoop or window can provide more room than you think for growing food. You’ll obviously be limited to what you can grown, but if you center on herbs and easier to grow plants like tomatoes and peppers, you’ll do just fine.

The one thing you need to pay attention to with container gardening is light. South facing areas will get more sun than others, but you can work with just about any light source. Do a little research on what grows best with the amount of sun you’ll get.

Soil will also be a concern. You don’t have the advantage or having seemingly limitless nutrients from the ground so you need to be sure to use a good soil full of organic matter at the onset and then supplement it with something like compost tea (we’ll talk about that later on in this series) on a regular – probably monthly – basis.

How We Use Container Gardening

Our use of container gardening goes back to the aesthetic approach. For the most part, the Suburban Steader homestead uses container gardening for easy access items like herbs. We place containers on the wall of our patio during the summer and grow items such as oregano, basil, parsley, rosemary and mint in them. These items are easily accessible when we are cooking (especially when cooking outside) and provide a fragrant aroma to our patio area.

Areas Beyond Your Yard

Taken up all the space your little window and stoop offer and want to do more? Here’s a few places you might be able to find room to homestead away from your home:

• Community gardens
• Empty lots
• Neighbor’s lots
• Churches or schools

Definitely talk to the folks who own the land before you go ahead and start homesteading on land that isn’t yours.

I want to make a point that, while we have talked almost exclusively about gardening, homesteading isn’t all gardening. You can do a lot of other suburban homesteading tasks like canning, cooking and food storage if you don’t have a piece of land to garden on.

How We Expand Our Homesteading

The Suburban Steader homestead is currently confined to our lot. We haven’t expanded much beyond our quarter acre other than to build community.

Wrap-Up

So there you have it – how to find room to homestead. Most of these steps are pretty easy. Take a look at your own little spot in life and see how you can tweak it to your needs.

Please let us know any tips you have for finding room to homestead in the comments or on our Facebook Page.

photo credit: Al_HikesAZ via photopin cc