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Claude Thompson

Homesteading Life Conference teaches self-sufficiency

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Homesteading is an ideal lifestyle for those who see a future in which cheap fossil fuels won’t pave the way for the food, goods, and materials we take for granted. But it’s not a life for everyone.

Homesteading requires hard work and learning new skills. But it also brings families closer together as they work side-by-side.

HANNIBAL, Mo. (KHQA) — The Homesteading Life Conference wrapped up on Monday in Hannibal.

The two-day event took place in the star theater and was put on by Doug and Stacy, owners of the Off Grid with Doug and Stacy’s YouTube channel.

Attendees learned about being self-sufficient.

Skills talked about included gardening, bee keeping and solar power.

Doug feels the closer you are to your food, the better off you are.

“A lot of people are returning to the garden, so they can get the benefits from eating foods from the vine, right, that’s how it’s designed to be,” Doug said. “The average plate of food right now is traveling about 1,500 miles to get to your table, the closer you guys eat to the vine, the healthier your food will be for you, and that’s what we teach here at the homesteading life conference.”

The event event featured some local businesses and activities for younger kids.

Source: khqa.com

what to plant now for a fall vegetable garden

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I’M WATERING THEN SHADING the garden beds where peas grew fat and sweet until early July, when their time was done.  The heat and calendar told them to stop, but I’m carrying on—making the now-empty spot hospitable for something else by cooling the soil a bit so something delicious for fall harvest will be happy to germinate, and get growing.

But what will it be? Perhaps kale or more amazing ‘Piracicaba,’ broccoli (above, for which I have seedlings started) or carrots, beets, and more green beans? Or fall peas (a short variety like ‘Sugar Ann’)! Those are only a few of many possibilities for a sustained harvest, even here in the North.

WHEN TO SOW OR TRANSPLANT what is always the question, and so I am including some links by state or region at the bottom to factsheets that might help you with cool-season choices. The possibilities here would work in much of the Northeast and similar zones to my 5B, in a spot where frost is expected no sooner than around early October. You can push it a bit in slightly warmer zones than mine, adjusting the timing according to how much later your frost date is than mine. And in the warmest ones all this happens in fall for winter harvest–plus you get a wider palette of crops (again, those factsheets linked below will help).

my possible july-august plantings, northeast zone 5b

  • Arugula, from 21 to 40 days (baby or mature leaf size)
  • Bush beans, about 60 days (have insulating fabric ready if early cold threatens)
  • Beets and beet greens
  • Braising greens mix (mustard, kale, collards, Asian greens…)
  • Broccoli raab, about 40 days
  • Broccoli (60 days from transplants started about 15 weeks before first frost; do try ‘Piracicaba,’ whose florets are looser, delicious, and which easily produces lots of side shoots)
  • Cabbage (60 days from transplants started about 15 weeks before first frost) or Napa cabbage (about 10 days faster)
  • Carrots (a storage kind like ‘Rolanka’ plus some smaller types for fall eating)
  • Cauliflower (60 days from transplants started about 14 weeks before frost; needs covering if frost threatens)
  • Chard
  • Chicory, endive, radicchio
  • Cilantro
  • Collards, about 60 days but nice as a baby green
  • Cucumbers (bush type rated 60 days; I sowed these June 15)
  • Daikon (60 days) and other faster radishes
  • Dill
  • Kale, about 60 days but nice in half that time as a baby green
  • Lettuce, leaf and head type and mesclun mix, about 30 days to first cutting
  • Mustard greens, about 45 days (faster as baby greens to spice a salad)
  • Peas, shelling, sugar snap, and snowpea type
  • Radishes
  • Scallions and other hardy bunching onions, for fall use and to overwinter for spring
  • Spinach
  • Squash, summer variety, bush type (I sowed a 48-day variety July 1)
  • Turnips, 40-50 days, faster for greens, or rutabaga (90 days) if sown in earliest July or late June here; rutabaga

And don’t forget: Leave room for your garlic! It goes in around October locally, and stays till the next July or August. How to grow garlic, my favorite crop of all.

hints for making late-season sowings

  • Don’t skip the prep: Do cool down soil by shading for a few days and moistening so seeds have a chance, in particular.
  • Select a variety that’s a shorter number of days to maturity than its peers, or rated for late-season growing.
  • Count back from frost date but add extra time to the calculation, an extra two weeks perhaps that’s often called “the fall factor,” since days are getting gradually shorter and cooler as fall plants mature. Don’t expect them to produce as fast as in warming, lengthening springtime days.
  • As cold arrives, have insulating fabric (and hoops in some cases) at the ready.
  • The later timing may slow things and require a little extra help, perhaps, but it’s also a benefit: Often you outsmart pests, who might be done multiplying, and some crops (greens, peas, crucifers) may taste sweeter when ripening in cool weather.

sample fall planting calendars and guides

I SEARCHED FOR REGIONAL calendars for fall vegetable sowings–or in the case of the warmest zones, that would be a fall-sown, winter-harvested garden. Note that many of these links will pop up as pdf’s, not web pages, as they are formatted that way by their expert creators. Also note that in some cases, the late-season information is far down the page, below the timing and how-to for spring, so keep scrolling/paging through.

more?

Source: awaytogarden.com

Ozarks Homesteading Expo to be held Aug. 26-27 in Marshfield – News-Leader

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For many people, Homesteading is about becoming self-sufficient in order to live without having to rely on local utilities. This lifestyle involves gardening, canning, sewing, folk medicine and raising animals.

While some may dream of jumping in with both feet and going completely off the grid, it’s important to work with what you have. Even apartment dwellers can plant a garden, learn to bake and can produce.

Ozark Homesteading Expo logo

Have you always wanted to grow your own vegetables but don’t know where to start? What about soap-making, or maybe making your own strawberry jelly? 

Well, this August you can head out to the Webster County Fairgrounds in Marshfield to learn about all those things and more. 

Described as an “educational experience for sustainable living,” the fourth-annual Ozarks Homesteading Expo is a two-day event on Aug. 26 and 27 that will host dozens of sessions on a variety of topics led by industry experts. 

“We will have more than 40 sessions for people to learn from,” said Cheryl Franklin, Ozarks Homesteading founder and event organizer. “Everything from raising and processing hogs and chickens to making your own bread and cheese, preserving food, building your own green home, milling lumber, building your own solar set-up, gardening, beekeeping and more, there will be more than something for everyone to learn about.” 

From Vanilla Ice to monster trucks, what you need to know about the 86th Ozark Empire Fair

“Whether you live in an urban area or a rural area, many of these skills are not only great to know, but many people just find it very fun and satisfying just to know how to do some of these things for themselves,” she said. “There’s nothing like pulling out a loaf of bread from the oven that you made yourself or making jam from strawberries you picked or bought fresh from the farmers market.” 

https://ozarkshomesteading.com/2022-homesteading-expo.

Source: news-leader.com

Homesteading Utah

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My family and I just got back from an extended road trip. And one of our first stops on that road trip was Homestead National Historic Park in Nebraska. It was actually our second time visiting and, seriously, if you get the chance to visit, you absolutely should. (It’s only about an hour and a half from Winter Quarters.)

The Homestead Act was fascinating. Signed by Abraham Lincoln in 1862, it allowed heads of household or anyone over 21 to claim a 160-acre parcel of land, provided they were, or intended to become, a citizen.[fn1] To get the land, a homesteader had to live on the land for five years, built a home, make improvements to the land, and farm it. At the end of five years, for only the cost of a filing fee, a successful homesteader would own the land.

The Homestead Act encouraged the settlement of a significant portion of the Midwest and the West. Roughly 10% of the land of the U.S. was claimed under these provisions. Of course, it’s not like the land was uninhabited before homesteaders staked their claims, and the Park doesn’t gloss over the harm it did to Native Americans or, for that matter, to the environment, as farmers tore up prairie and cut down forests.

Still, it’s a fascinating and important part of U.S. history (happy Fourth of July to our U.S. readers!), one that is, at least in my educational experience, largely overlooked.

And it’s a not-insignificant part of Mormon history.

See, Utah had almost 17,000 homesteaders that proved-up their claims. I assume not all of them were Mormon, but some were. At our visit, the Ranger pointed us to some computers with access to a Bureau of Land Management website that allows people to search for homestead records. I did a quick search and discovered that Charles A. Brunson, my great-great-grandfather, successfully got 160 acres in Millard County, Utah, in 1915 after (I presume) homesteading it for 5 years.

I may well have other ancestors who also homesteaded in Utah (and I’ll probably look at some point), but the point of a vacation where I didn’t bring my computer was not to spend a ton of time sitting on computers at an NPS site, so I then did a quick search and discovered that at least one of my wife’s (non-Mormon) ancestors also successfully homesteaded in Wisconsin.

At that point, we enjoyed the rest of the displays and farming tools and cabins and other things the site had to offer. (Seriously, you should go!)

The Homestead Act did significant work in creating the United States we have today. And that work did not exclude the Mormons.

If you discover you had ancestors who homesteaded, I’d love to hear about it in the comments!

—

[fn1] Which included women, immigrants, and formerly-enslaved persons.

Image from Shelly. CC BY 2.0.

Source: bycommonconsent.com

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