Homestead Planning

So Your Loved Ones Think Your Rural Living Dream is Crazy: 5 Benefits to Help Convince Them Otherwise

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If there’s one thing I hear over and over from readers who have a dream of rural living, is that it’s their spouse, family or friends who are keeping them from their modern homesteading dream. Let’s face it – while the number of people desiring a rural lifestyle is growing, most of North American society [...]

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Prepping for Minor Emergencies

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With all the talk these days about prepping for major events like earthquakes, floods, tsunamis, tornadoes and all the other wildness Mother Nature is throwing at us, there’s something getting lost – and that’s emergency planning for less dramatic occasions. Bottom line – if you’re prepping for major emergencies, you’ve probably got the minor ones [...]

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The Beginner Vegetable Garden – 7 Simple Strategies for Success

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There’s just something about having a vegetable garden. Imagine – your own organic market, right outside you front door.  No more running to the store for salad, no more worrying about pesticide residues, no more concern about having nothing to eat in an emergency. A beginner vegetable garden is a key piece of your self-sufficiency [...]

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Living Your Dream – 3 Strategies for Embracing Fear and Resistance

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Homesteading, even the modern kind, is ripe with opportunities for fear to rise up and cripple us from living our dream. In this post, we’ll talk about where that fear comes from and how you can embrace it to finally get your dreams of a more resilient life, in whatever form you desire, into the [...]

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Modern Homesteading – Lessons Learned So Far (Part 2)

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Living in the country comes with rich lessons. Every day some situation comes up that tests your endurance, your skills, or your sanity. In almost two years on our rural 6 acres, we’ve had occasion to learn a lot of things.  Some are funny (‘gifts’ hidden in miscellaneous drawers by our tiny four-legged friends), some sad [...]

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Modern Homesteading – Lessons Learned So Far (Part I)

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This rural living gig is still fairly new to us. We’ve been living in our little cabin in the woods for almost two years.  After growing up in the country, 22 years living in the city and then 6 months in temporary digs while we renovated our 80+ year-old heritage log cabin, I finally moved [...]

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Planning Towards Self-Sufficiency for 2011 (and Beyond!)

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I spent yesterday going over my goal-setting mind map from last January. This time last year, I had no garden, no greenhouse, an old, decrepit woodshed, an overgrown brush pile where the pasture now stands, no blueberry patch (tiny though it is) and no website! Amazing how much you can get done if you actually [...]

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