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Ways To Treat Wildlife Humanely When Creating A Homestead

May 5, 2020

Raccoon
 Photograph by Pixabay (Pexels)

Ways To Treat Wildlife Humanely When Creating A Homestead

Beginning a homestead and trying to live as sustainably and being self-sufficient was once a lifestyle for a huge proportion of the population, but today this low-impact way of living is seeing something of a resurgence. One factor that can sometimes be overlooked when starting a homestead is the impact that this type of lifestyle can have on wildlife in the area, but by being conscious of the implications of the homesteading approach, you can take steps to ensure that you are living in harmony with the wildlife around your homestead.

Preparing The Area For A Homestead

Once you have obtained the land on which you want to build your homestead, one of the first steps is to try and remove and keep wildlife away from where you will be building. A temporary fence here can work very well, preferably one with a relatively small mesh so that even small animals cannot get to the building area and hurt themselves. If you are seeing signs of animal activity in this area, it may be worth speaking to an animal removal expert so they can be safely removed before you start the building work.

Building Your Homestead And Outbuildings

Building sites can prove to be great spaces for animals to hide and build their nests, so when you are building the homestead, try to leave as little material as possible around where animals could try to nest. When it comes to dealing with the debris, waste materials and other building materials, you should also try to ensure it is kept in a dumpster or debris skip before it can be disposed of safely. Otherwise, birds or other wildlife can get access to this debris, and could harm themselves.

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Should You Relocate To A More Resilient Area?

November 11, 2019

Should You Relocate To A More Resilient Area?

 What factors to look for when considering relocating

Likely a symptom of growing social unease, we’re seeing a surge in interest amongst our readership in relocation.

Many are folks living in urban and suburban areas worried that local resources and/or rule of law will not hold up well during a serious economic crisis, civil disorder or natural disaster.

Others have watched Peak Prosperity readers successfully transition to more resilient destinations or even build their own self-sufficient homesteads.

Specifically, we’re seeing a hunger for guidance on the key factors to assess when asking:

  • How resilient is my current location?
  • Should I relocate?
  • If so, where to? And what criteria should I prioritize in making my decision?

Several years ago, we recorded an interview with SurvivalBlog founder and former US Army intelligence officer James Wesley Rawles addressing these exact questions.

It remains one of the best discussions we know of on the topic of relocation, and it’s this week’s recommended listening for anyone wondering if a fresh start in an area with better natural and community resources might be one of the single best ways to improve their future prospects:

(Full transcript available here)

For those motivated to action by this podcast, Peak Prosperity is now offering Consultations specifically-designed to help you think through & execute on the relocation process. 

Given your specific situation, does it make sense? Given your unique goals and needs, what requirements matter most when targeting communities and properties? How should you be structuring your search efforts?

As an output of the planned cohousing project he’s leading, Chris is now exceptionally knowledgeable on both the strategic and tactical realities of intentionally relocating to an area richer in resilience.

 …click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

How to build a self-sufficient garden on as little as a quarter of an acre

January 2, 2019

Image: How to build a self-sufficient garden on as little as a quarter of an acre
(Natural News) Modern conveniences like countless grocery stores and food delivery services make it seem like the average American family has no use for home gardening. But when SHTF, you could starve if you don’t have access to fresh produce growing in your own garden. (h/t to SHTFPlan.com)

Starting a home garden is one of the first steps that you can take to become self-sufficient. Like other aspects of prepping and survival, home gardening requires dedication and hard work yet it is also incredibly rewarding.

With some planning and the use of certain techniques and principles, your home garden can provide vegetables for the whole family. You won’t even need that much land since you can make do with as little as a quarter of an acre. This means even preppers who live in the suburbs can try their hand at home gardening.

Home gardening basics

Before you start sowing seeds, you must figure out how much food you need and can grow. These two things will depend on various factors, like the climate, garden space, the size of your family, and how much food everyone requires. (Related: A simple 5-step guide to starting your own vegetable garden.)

Back in the 1970s, research by John Jeavons and the Ecology Action Organization determined that 4,000 square feet (or 370 square meters) of growing space, with another 4000 square feet for access paths and storage, is enough land area to provide for an individual on a vegetarian diet for one year. This land is enough to cultivate a garden plot that’s about 80 feet x 100 feet (24 meters x 30 meters).

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Seven Acres and Independence

May 16, 2018

Seven Acres and Independence

Any size homestead that fulfills your needs is a good size but here are some things to look at when designing one. Different people desire different things and that will determine how much land you need.

I have determined that 7 acres is a good size small homestead that can provide all of the items you need to be self sufficient to a large degree.

Two acres for a wood lot
One acre for buildings, garden, orchard
Two acres for pasture
Two acres for grain crops

Two acres of mature timber will produce about 1.5 to 2 cords of wood per year sustainably. That will provide you with wood for cooking and heating during the winter months.

One acre is enough for a home and out buildings, a large garden and a small orchard. This will provide enough food not only for your family but extra to sell.

Two acres for pasture will provide enough grass for two cows. A milk cow and a beef cow to provide dairy products and meat throughout the year.

Two acres will produce enough grain for your family’s needs and extra to feed hogs or chickens and still have extra to sell.

The amount of acreage you need will depend mainly on the systems you decide to have for food production and how much extra you want to produce for sale but the 7 acres outlined above will satisfy the needs of most people. It is important to understand that different people will have different needs. Some people may not want to produce meat for consumption and elect to rely on a vegan diet. This would require much less land, while others may want to produce excess meat for sale that requires more land.

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Fumbling Toward Independence

January 21, 2016

Fumbling Toward Independence

Foggy road

Some blogs focus on single-word subjects like knitting or superheroes. This one wanders a bit; one week I might write about our neighbors here in rural Ireland, the next about our garden, then about old black-and-white movies or reading with my daughter. All of it, though, deals with our attempts to discover an older and better way of living, and learn the values and skills that were normal before everything became cheap, fast and easily discarded.

Thus, I study the past to see what worked better. Our elderly neighbors grew up without electricity, cars or mass media, and I see how different their village culture was from our own frantic and lonely society. I read diaries and letters from a century of two ago, and see a complexity of thought and language that gives college students trouble today. The writers — in colonial America, Victorian Britain or 20th-century Ireland — might have been farmers, but they often grew up reading the same classics as their forebears — Hesiod and Sophocles, Livy and Marcus Aurelius, Aquinas and Dante. Now I’m reading these works one by one, and teaching what bits I can to my daughter. For that matter, I’m learning how to genuinely read again, and not just scan text on a screen.

We try to learn the ways people used to provide for their own basic needs rather than relying entirely on companies and governments, so we built a chicken coop, got bees, grow a garden, and learned to forage wild plants and mushrooms. We have make our own pickles, sauerkraut, beer, bread, wine and jam, and have taken courses in tree grafting, oven building, black-smithing, wood carving, and so on. We fail a lot, but we have fun learning.

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Olduvai IV: Courage
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Olduvai II: Exodus
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