When pondering a wedding gift for friends, there are several criteria to consider. The gift should be practical, beautiful and inexpensive. An oil lamp, a bottle of oil and extra wicks meets all three criteria.
Category Archives: Self-Sufficiency
Create Emergency Survival “Grab and Go” Bags for Your Family
Every family should have grab-and-go emergency bags for potential emergencies. Even young children can help pack a go bag and store it in an easy-to-access place. Make grabbing the survival bags part of your emergency drills with your family.
How to Make Homemade Sour Cream From Raw Milk
Making sour cream from raw milk is ridiculously easy, and it allows you to avoid the thickeners, stabilisers and preservatives in commercial sour cream.
Soap Making 101: How to Make Handmade Soap at Home
Making soap for your family isn’t hard and certainly isn’t expensive. Just beware, once they have used homemade lye soap, they may never want to go back to anything else.
The Homesteader’s Pantry
I’ve been thinking recently about the fact that, for some reason ,”Home Economics” doesn’t seem to be taught in schools much any more, but it is needed more than ever. If you haven’t done much cooking in the past but intend to start afresh by cooking more, here are the basics that you’ll want to have in your pantry.
Do-It-Yourself Haircuts: A Review of Wahl Color Pro Trimmers
If you’re like me, you hate taking the family to the barber shop or hair salon. For this reason, I do my best to cut my boys’ hair at home to save time and save money.
So enters the Wahl Color Pro Trimmer set, a complete hair-trimming kit.
Wholegrain Bread Recipe — How to Make Multigrain Bread From Scratch Without a Breadmaker
This multigrain bread recipe is versatile enough to incorporate a range of nuts, seeds and grains according to your taste. I have successfully made the bread with a mixture of kibbled wheat and rye, buckwheat, poppy seeds, sunflower seeds, sesame seeds and coarse cornmeal.
A How-To Guide to Blanching and Peeling Tomatoes
Tomatoes are a fast-multiplying garden vegetable and can be used in a variety of ways. When your tomatoes are ripening faster than you can eat them, take an afternoon to blanch and peel them for future use. This way, when recipes call for crushed tomatoes or tomato sauce, you’ll always have some on hand!
The Self-Sufficient Life and How to Live it Book Review
John Seymour shares decades of experience with readers in this impressive guide to living a more frugal, and self-sufficient lifestyle. This updated version from the 1976 edition includes more information than ever, as well as discussing modern equipment and information relevant for today’s homesteaders. Is it the “complete back-to-basics guide” it claims to be?
Getting Started with Canning — Canning Equipment Checklist
Canning is the best way to preserve all of your fruits and vegetables that are so plentiful in the summer and fall. Whether you are canning your own produce from your garden or buying in season fruits and vegetables from a CSA or farmers’ market, you will save money by canning when the produce is plentiful and cheap rather than buying it off season. Plus, by canning produce from your own garden or from a trusted source, you will not have to question the ingredients and quality.
