Here’s some blue oyster mushroom mycellium growing in coffee grinds in a sterilized mason jar. We’re doing this with small batches of grinds to later innoculate garden bed mulch and hay bales, the later of which we’re also conditioning over winter to use as potato beds in the spring. Using…
Ostara came late for us, I guess? Real life egg hunt after finding a pile of 13 eggs near a stump I was checking for mushrooms. I guess we figured out why a few of the hens try so hard to get out of their run. Found another half dozen…
Leftists will often stress that the existence of hunger and starvation isn’t a simple matter of resources not being available, but rather of uneven and unjust distribution. More than enough food is grown for everyone in the world, and that’s typically only counting the output of mass, conventional agriculture. The…
No small “self sufficient” farm is complete without backyard poultry and they’re a part of the archetypical homesteading image for a reason: chickens are easy to keep, provide a source of protein and fat that gardens typically don’t, and allow a quicker conversion of food scraps into usable soil. The…
Autumn olive (Eleagnus umbellata) is one of our favorite things to forage and also one that we get the most of. This small tree isn’t native to North America, but it’s spread to a lot of the continent. Due to its fast growing and nitrogen fixing qualities, it’s been used…
Canning is one of those archetypical homesteading skills that finds itself in the mental picture we all have of the lifestyle. And this isn’t without reason; preserving food in glass jars by way of canning is an extremely useful way to make sure your valuable harvest doesn’t go to waste….
I grew up in what people would now call a “prepping” house. That term wasn’t in vogue for most of my life, but that’s basically what my parents did and as such, influenced how I was raised. Nothing like the Doomsday Preppers made famous by the show of that title…
Another easy food to forage in winter, at least around here in the parts of the Eastern woodlands that are predominantly mixed forests, is the wintergreen plant. Wintergreen is a plant that grows primarily by forming colonies with massive connected underground roots that thrive in the woody duff. For our…
Soil health is something that’s routinely overlooked as it relates to justice and liberation, but it’s historically been one of the major drivers behind the growth and decline of empires and one of the earliest resources on which to base oppressive power structures. Soil is more than dirt with certain…
I realized I’ve put up a few posts now that direct y’all to forage plants for food, but I’d entirely forgotten to set down some foraging basics. Many of the people who read have some foraging experience, but I’m sure there are also plenty coming to these pages who have never foraged.
