Homesteading

Some really good tilth

This is my Israeli-style farming method that I learned from my family. It's simple and relatively low-tech but very labor intensive. First you take a hoe to the sod and hack off the top layer of grass and its roots. Throw all that in a wheelbarrow and dump it in a pile somewhere else. Rototill what's under that. Or if you can't get a rototiller do your best with a shovel and then a pitchfork to break it up, sweating and swearing (please don't do this to yourself, rent a rototiller if you can). Double-dig or single-dig that, adding in a lot of compost, fish meal, and manure as you do (rabbit pellets, chicken manure, goat manure, well-rotted horse or sheep or cow manure, whatever you can get). Add as much straw as you want. Water it well. Wait two weeks. Pull up all the weeds. Mound up the dirt into rows about a foot tall, and two feet wide, and compact the sides with the back of a shovel, leaning your weight onto it. Plant your stuff. Water it well. Wait two weeks and pull up all the weeds. Water and weed slavishly throughout the growing season. If you can afford to add both drip irrigation and straw (or I imagine leaf mold from non-acidic trees such as maples) as mulch to the top of the beds and the paths, so much the better. Each year, add as much new compost and fish meal as you can and manure as needed; re-mound up the raised beds for a few years, then taking down the raised beds and re-forming them with more additives is all the "tilling" you should need. If it somehow gets compacted enough to require another rototill you done fucked up and need to rethink (and use more compost). Also add permanent stuff like trees and perennial crops like rhubarb, herbs, and asparagus. It's not easy but the results are unbelievable. You can also prepare ground like this first, and then mound up all that good dirt into raised beds of brick, wood, or similar, putting gravel in between for permanent raised beds. Fluff 'em up every spring with a hoe to aerate that soil and don't forget to feed the dirt with its goodies. More room for roots and more food for plants = more food for you.

12/4/22 A pretty good example of this kind of farming can be seen in this Instructable by Strambeer, organization called Earth's Promise. As you can see, a city plot in Israel or a desert area like it, or probably somewhere like LA, would have less of a problem setting up a community garden or personal garden because it wouldn't be covered with grass, sod, or other wasteland plants to begin with. Also as you can see, in Israel drip irrigation is crucial. It's quickly becoming that way everywhere.

10/26/22 Some musings - it'd probably be a good idea to lay down an organic mulch of some sort, such as leaves, on top of all that, and then cedar or deciduous tree mulch, in order to keep more moisture in those raised beds and keep weeds in check. I was against this years ago before the climate got hotter because mulch rotted my plants then and gave them all kinds of diseases. Now, it doesn't have the chance to rot them before they bake due to lack of rain and heat. Sighhh. Anyway, I also wonder if granular potassium polyacrylate (basically water beads designed to help trees and landscapes weather drought, works like little sponges) could be incorporated into said beds for, again, less moisture loss. It's also a great idea to install vertical structures on top of these raised beds such as tomato cages or bean teepees or squash teepees so the crops get all that good air circulation.

For a good compost pile, either construct something with lots of aeration, buy a few compost drums, or dig a pit about 3' wide and 2' deep. Chuck stuff in it. There are a million and one guides online for what you can add to the compost; the best idea is literally add all of the suggested things you can. A lot of organic gardening manuals will eternally suggest adding lots of mulch to the top of the garden. Just say no. Use straw for that, and put all the other stuff in the compost pile. Leaves, mulch, buckwheat hulls, manure, food scraps, tree trimmings, into the compost with ye. You want these compost piles to be huge and you want lots of them. Stir them around with a shovel every time you feel like it. Name each compost pile if you like, with a little sign next to each with messages such as Feed me!, Shroom Pit, and Here Are The Bodies

6/14/22 Idea: What if, in a noncontaminated but poor-soil weed-infested chunk of city land, instead of having to pay out the ass for cinderblock, brick, wood or what have you in order to make raised beds, and even then needing to fill the fuckers with fertile dirt trucked in from elsewhere, you ripped off the top layer of sod with a hoe, chucked it somewhere else, and then made a raised bed by digging out the dirt area and using the excavated dirt to create walls as material for raised beds? Then filling that with all the compost materials you could find, like coconut coir, potting soil, dead leaves, kitchen waste, natural food store rotting food, manure, etc. for like a good couple years? You'd probably be able to reduce food bills by growing in that. Edit 10/12/23 I'm sorry Instructables user agatornz. There's a pretty good chance the hamster wheel in my brain was churning this idea, the NO-DIG-GARDEN in there for a good 8 years or so but as mentioned previously on this site my memory's like swiss cheese

Tips

Gardening By The Yard is on Discovery Plus. I highly recommend it.
You can find the best indoor gardening resources on online forums specifically for growing weed, like r/Spacebuckets, because of course.
Find gardening books, resources, and clubs for your local area, because gardening conditions locally are wildly different from the general advice given in most books. It is totally game changing. Plus, if you find an organization or club, you can swap cuttings, and that's always good. Obviously no meeting in person til the pandemic's over.
Give yourself plenty of time to learn how to do this and get it all set up. You don't want to be learning as you go, learning the hard way. That's a sure way to burn out and fail, or at least put a massive strain on yourself. A little bit done at a time, done over time and consistently, is the best way to get going as a homesteader. Slow and steady progress that you can sustain over time.
Hoard knowledge and learn it well. Work smarter not harder. If at all possible, should you homestead with a college degree? Will it help? Boy will it ever. Some degrees that would definitely assist include just about any engineering degree, an architecture degree, accounting, finance, agriculture (duh) and business degrees. Trade schools also teach good stuff and you can put that knowledge to use on a homestead. However the real issue here is that homesteading requires you know as much as possible so I recommend getting a good well-rounded education and as much of it as possible. Ignorance on a homestead (or really anywhere) can easily kill. It's halfway between camping and living in a trailer a lot of the time and if you screw up, you're the one who gets to live with (or die of) the consequences.
Have a financial plan for this homestead, and in said financial plan make sure you plan for everything in the homestead to fail. Meaning: if you live in the country, and have just moved out there, keep your city job despite the commute. Be super frugal and manage resources wisely. If at all possible, don't even make the jump until you have a nest egg, a steady reliable income stream, and the land already (carefully) bought. If you want the homestead to sustain itself, make products that can be sold at the city's farmer's market or have some other way of earning a living, and in all cases have several income streams. Machines break, crops fail, fences need repairing, upkeep costs get steep, Murphy's law seems to rule just about everything on a farm or garden. Even if all you're doing is just camping on the land and never buying anything from town or whatever, if you own land, there are property taxes, and you've got to have a way of paying those. Also, have a plan B in case something bad happens and you for instance become disabled or otherwise can't or won't work the land and maintain the property.
Have a business plan for every income stream you want to set up and make sure it's a full business plan. Half-assing it will get you nowhere. Neither will cutting corners or producing inferior or inconsistent product. Above all if you're going to be selling stuff, be honest with your customers. They never forgive dishonesty or poor quality in agricultural products. Better to tell them about the crop failure due to mildew and burn the crop than to sell it to them anyway and lose them for good.
Understand the initial setup costs of a homestead will probably always be humongous. DIYing as much as possible will reduce said costs by a lot but you have to know how to do it all right, and that takes time. Understand that you'll be putting an enormous amount of money, time, effort, and resources into this project, no matter how much you try to reduce costs, and plan accordingly.
Homesteading only seems simple. In reality it can be constantly improved through a process of kaizen, and it really should, in order to reduce crop failures, diseases, the impact of drought, animal stress, and other myriad problems. If you keep learning and improving the methods used, then your animals, your crops, and your family will be healthier and happier than ever. Also you won't have to constantly do ridiculously boring chores day in and day out for 12 to 16 hours a day as you improve efficiency so there is that.
Global warming is going to be your constant companion in the next 20 to 50 years unless someone comes up with solutions, and realistically speaking those solutions could probably only be fully implemented 30 years from now. Plan for that. You do not want to be for instance drench irrigating crops or guzzling down an aquifer to then make your whole farm into one big sinkhole.
Farm small and farm smart until you really know what you're doing. What good is 12 acres if you fucked up the soil on the whole goddamn plot?
You are going to want four notebooks. One to be a yearly daybook so you can record what tends to work best on what day and what labors to do at what time of year, etc. - this will improve over the years. One to be a farmer's journal to record what is going on over the year, to review next January and see what worked and what didn't, then plan for the future. Another to be a planner so you can write down the to-do's for each day, with a page of to-dos for the week, the month, the four seasons, and the year. I often write down weekly to-do lists on the Sundays of the planner to ensure that I at least get the most important stuff done in the week. And finally a financial logbook for every day of the year. If this recordkeeping system is not to your taste then find one that works just as well for you. Farming and homesteading is essentially married to good accounting, record keeping, and planning skills so keep on top of that.
Try to find as much reliable help around the homestead as you can. Then communicate and overcommunicate and make sure the other parties repeat back to you what you want to get done to ensure you understand each other.
If you think gardening or farming is hard, livestock is a lot harder to maintain. Think twice before you get into that indentured servitude. It's not for everyone.
3/5/23 Whenever someone says "oh farming and modern life is too mechanized, we need to get back to basics," in my mind it's a little something like "AAAAHHHH SHUTUPSHUTUPSHUTUP!!!!" Why? Well, because a very good and old school workout is called farming without oxen or plows. All ya got is a shovel and a hoe. Ready? Recruit the local high school's football team to double-dig your backyard instead of using a rototiller.* They'll be back later to egg your house. Anyway, the moral of this story is that if and when you can make something more efficient through machines, automation, or plain old better practices, by all means do it. Just don't poison the land with monocropping, pesticides, exhaust from burning fields instead of composting, herbicides, and other archaic practices to make a problem for the next seven generations. There are better ways for all of these things and all other aspects of farming nowadays.

*Some other torturous old-fashioned farming and gardening practices for your perusal

Using a push mower instead of a lawn mower. Or, if you really want to go ham, a scythe.
Cutting and baling hay and straw by hand
Cutting and stacking wheat up into shooks by hand
Planting entire fields of grain by hand, and throwing rocks at birds throughout the day to keep them off the crops
Gathering the village together to find a place where water naturally puddles, packing it with clay, mud, and powdered clay, then herding the animals from the village commons over it to make a pond (source: Creating Small Habitats For Wildlife In Your Garden by Josie Briggs)
Picking the bugs off the crops and dropping them into buckets of soapy water
Loading up the village's kids onto the back of a pickup truck and having them pick the weeds from the fields by hand as the truck goes over them at a slow speed (true story)

Links

Cooperative State Research, Education, and Extension Service Definition Find the local one of these in your state and get as much info as you can from them to farm or garden better
Cob Building with Plastic Bottles EcoBricks It took me ten years to find a website that actually laid out the process of building with cob/adobe. This is it. However, it does not explain methods for ensuring that the cob sets rock hard but resilient, not easily breakable. You should definitely experiment to improve the mix with additives. Start small, experiment a lot, and remember that no matter how well you work on the cob, it's not for roofs! I would also recommend surrounding the cob with some kind of water resistant sealant like whitewash to protect it, like it was once used in history. There's a reason for it: it will prevent the stuff from eroding. DO NOTE: you can also fill tires and surround tires with cob and use that as a building material. Earthships are notorious for using tires and dirt, but this should last longer. Bonus: cob and earth-based construction is excellent as an insulator, meaning inside such a building it's cooler in summer and warmer in winter
Earthbag construction Owen Geiger on Instructables
Raising Livestock
Constructing Fences
Construction
Farming
Buying Land - Country Women by Jeanne Tetrault and The Encyclopedia of Country Living by Carla Emery cover this in the first couple chapters

Home Ec

Home