I love my rabbits. They offer me therapy, handling them and working with them each day is soothing to me. They offer me some of the best manure I can find for my gardens, allowing me to make my great soil in my raised beds even better. And of course, they provide wholesome meat for […]
Posts in the self sufficiency category:
The Value of Properly Handled Foods
(There are two pages today, a new thing for me here. Please be sure to read both pages) I was digging through my chest freezer a few days ago, and ran across a package of venison, simply labelled “bs”. Now if you’ve read ANY of my other posts, you must be thinking that this is […]
My Bookshelf – The Ashley Book of Knots
There are a lot of self-sufficiency, survival, or homesteading books that I own. I wanted to start listing them, but won’t include books like “Stranger in a Strange Land” by Robert Heinlein, even though I’ve read it over a dozen times, and consider it to be a must-read. I will list each book one at […]
animals, chickens, equipment, gardening, meat, Muscovy ducks, plants, Quail, rabbits, self sufficiency
Farm Update Feb 2013
I called this “Farm update” because “Backyard Update” just doesn’t have a nice ring to it. Plus it doesn’t look like a back yard…it looks like, well, a farm…a tiny, narrow, crowded farm. This has been a fairly busy week for me, and I just wanted to
The Simple way to Start Food Storage: Copy Canning
I stopped by a cousin’s house today, I hadn’t seen him in over a year. It was good to touch base, we have a lot of common beliefs. He conceal-carries, is self-employed, has a problem with what is happening to our country, and doesn’t know how to get ready for it. In particular, he didn’t […]
Grow your Own Sugarcane
I’ve read articles about growing beets for sugar, but beets are a cold weather crop, something that, other than the last few days, we just don’t have much of here in Zone 10A. (I actually got the idea for this article when I was eating a can of beets this evening, and no I didn’t […]
Backyard Aquaponics – The Solar Power and the Pumps
Ive introduced my aquaponics project, talked about the magic of the bell siphon, and discussed my containers and what is in them. Now I want to go over the power system, the pumps, and moving forward. I’ve wanted to establish a 12v solar charging system for years, since I live so far south and have […]
Backyard Aquaponics – The Intro
I grew up in and around nature, watching how Mother Nature developed systems of organisms that worked together in a fascinating symbiotic relationship. Anemones and clownfish, bees and flowers, humans and gut bacteria, and many others. One of my favorite systems is a
Guns and Ammo
I went to a gun show this weekend, one that happens several times a year and that I’d been to many times before. The crowd is usually decent, but not so crowded as to be elbow-to-elbow at every turn. Not so this show. Not only were there about 40% more people, but there was a […]
My Long Term Storage Arrangements
If you didn’t know, I’m what you’d call a “prepper”. But I find it amusing that what I grew up doing now has a trendy label. Its not like my parents were tinfoil hat wearing paranoids. Far from it. We put food up for the future because it simply made sense. You can’t grow green […]