Claude Thompson – Page 521

Enrollment skyrockets for OSU Master Gardener vegetable course

CORVALLIS, Ore. – More than 17,600 people – at a growing clip of about 1,000 more each day – are signing up for a vegetable gardening course offered by the Oregon State University Extension Service, as people nationally abide by stay-at-home pandemic orders.

From Jan. 1 through March 19, 15 people had registered for the on-demand, online course. On March 20, OSU Extension’s Master Gardener program decided to waive the $45 fee and promote it on Facebook. As of 10 a.m. on April 1, 17,656 people had registered for the course.

The results have been stunning, said Gail Langellotto, a professor of horticulture and statewide coordinator of the Master Gardener program.

The introductory course covers basics including planning, soil, care, and harvesting. It will continue to be free through at least the end of April. The course, which has been offered online since 2008, is part of the OSU Master Gardeners Short Course Series offered through OSU’s Professional and Continuing Education unit.

“We were inspired to do what we could during this very difficult time, after seeing the actions of our colleagues,” Langellotto said. “Master Gardener programs in Polk and Lincoln counties were turning cancelled plant sales into opportunities to get free vegetable seedlings to food pantries and into their communities. Labs in OSU’s horticulture department were donating personal protective equipment.

“When we asked what could we do, we knew we had this course, and thought it might be of interest to a few folks.”

Master Gardeners play a large role in providing food to their communities, Langellotto said. OSU Extension Master Gardeners supported 23 school gardens and 46 community gardens in 2019. They also make significant donations to food banks and food pantries each year — 52.5 tons of fresh fruits and vegetables in 2019.

But these activities are on hold due to the pandemic. For example, one of the biggest food providers, Grow an Extra Row Garden in Clackamas County, can’t be planted this spring.

So, Master Gardeners are pivoting to alternative ways to provide that community support. They’re encouraging people to use the free gardening course at home to contribute to a national Plant a Row for the Hungry effort.

On March 20, Langellotto announced the free course on the OSU Master Gardeners Facebook account. The post has been shared more than 24,000 times — including more than 4,500 times in its first hours –and has drawn more than 1,700 comments.

“Because the Facebook post went viral, we’re also reaching lots of folks from across the country who may not know that they have a university Extension office in their own backyard,” Langellotto said. “So, I’m also trying to use this as an opportunity to introduce folks to their local Extension office.”

Growing Your Own, an OSU Extension publication that covers a wide range of gardening topics and written by Langellotto, is assigned reading for the vegetable gardening course. Supplementary materials include Extension publications Vegetable Gardening in Oregon and Vegetable Variety Trials 2017.

Source: today.oregonstate.edu

Start a Homesteading Club – Mother Earth News

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When my wife, Cara, and I moved to a small town in a new area in 2015 and wanted to start homesteading, we felt rather alone. Many people starting a homesteading journey have a network of nearby family or friends to rely on. What could we do?

We frequented the local farmers market to spend time with like-minded people. It was great to meet a wide variety of farmers who knew how to grow food in this area. We’d previously met a homesteading couple who sold food at the market, but because they were trying to sell their wares, it was a bit awkward to just hang out and chat.

While attending the local Earth Day Fair one year, we met an experienced homesteader, Jim, who was talking about root cellars and chickens. We kicked ourselves later for not getting his contact information. Then, I joined the local Master Gardeners club. Many of the members have a lot of experience growing food in our climate. They continue to be a wonderful resource.

Despite all these outlets, I still suspected there were dozens of homesteaders in our area to meet.

Many readers might now be wondering, “Why not use Facebook or Meetup? There are lots of regional groups for any possible thing you could be interested in.” Well, we’re not into Facebook. And we suspected that many of the people we wanted to meet were even less interested in online friendships than we were.

What I really wanted was a club for homesteaders, much like the local clubs for beekeepers, homebrewers, gardeners, and blacksmiths that dot the country. Only, this one would cover all the topics that would interest a homesteader.

So, after some planning and dreaming, I took the plunge.

At the 2017 Earth Day Fair, I reserved a booth. Luckily, the reservation was free because we weren’t selling anything. Cara and I made some cute posters to hang on the wall that said “Beekeeping,” “Maple Syrup,” “Chickens,” “Canning,” etc. We set out some show-and-tell items, such as canned jelly, bean seeds, and MOTHER EARTH NEWS magazines. We presumed that passersby would key in on a word or item that resonated, and then we’d have something to talk about. Lastly, we put out a sign-up list. Our primary goal was to determine whether there was enough interest to start a club. We expected 10 people to stop and chat.

It turned out to be one of the best days of my life. By the end of it, we were exhausted from talking to more than 50 people about what this club could be. Thirty-eight people (including Jim and his wife, Nancy) signed up to get more information once the club was formed, and several volunteered to help plan how the club would work.

In the weeks that followed, I found a free conference room we could reserve monthly. Our first meeting was in June 2017, and the topic was keeping chickens. Soon after, we did a coop tour of four homesteads in the area. My ulterior motive was to glean tips, since we were building a coop.

We have a sign-in list at each meeting; if a person is new, they provide their email address if they choose. Since that first booth at the fair, the club email list has grown to 149 people, with monthly meetings averaging a dozen attendees.

The wide variety of people who live in our little area is truly amazing. We have a grafting expert with 100-plus heirloom apple cultivars; fermenters; brewers; hydroponic enthusiasts; a buffalo breeder; metalworkers; mycologists; pig breeders; foragers; lumberjacks; and a guy with a tropical greenhouse. A network is developing that just keeps getting stronger as word spreads.

I was interviewed by a local radio station about the club for an interest piece. That interview resulted in about 10 new members. Otherwise, our club growth comes from word-of-mouth and having a booth each year at two fairs.

Should you start a homesteading club in your area? Absolutely! How hard is it? Not nearly as hard as you might think.

I personally like the approach of starting with a table or booth at an event that draws sustainability-oriented people together. If your area has a gathering for gardening, small animals, steam power, Earth Day, arts and crafts, or even the county fair, odds are a number of homesteaders will be in attendance.

You could also use an online network or Meetup to get things going. I posted our club events to a related Facebook group for a while, but despite there being several hundred people in that group, few joined us in real life.

Our club has no membership fees and is open to the public, and workshops are priced to break even. All club communications are by email, which works for most people in our group. I probably spend two hours a month organizing the activities and keeping up on emails. Who knew so many people would have chickens to give away?

We meet monthly at the same time and place. I arrange for a presenter about every other meeting. Presenters are usually either club members or from a local organization or business (Master Gardeners, butcher shops, nurseries, etc.). The remaining meetings are either a roundtable on a particular subject, or a panel made up of club members.

While the meetings are fun and keep us learning together, the homesteading workshops are even better. We do an annual apple grafting class, maple syrup cooking, foraging walks, homestead tours, potlucks, cider pressing, sourdough bread baking, and more.

Even today, Googling “homesteading club” returned a question posted to a forum; the radio interview with me; my own post on Permies; a MOTHER EARTH NEWS article on homesteading; and little else. Let’s change that. Start a homesteading club for your area today!

Mike Haasl lives in Rhinelander, Wisconsin, where he grows food, makes maple syrup, raises chickens, and builds community while pursuing permaculture.

Source: motherearthnews.com

Vegetable Gardening to Grow Health

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By Michele Sequeira
| January 30, 2020

Study to help cancer survivors improve their health by helping them to grow their own vegetables

Most gardeners say that homegrown vegetables taste better than any found in a store. And gardening, they know, requires modest amounts of outdoor work. Since cancer survivors need vegetables, fresh air and exercise, Cindy Blair, PhD, is bringing a new vegetable gardening study called Harvest for Health to New Mexico.

“Vegetable gardening is a holistic approach to promote a healthful diet and physical activity, and improve quality of life,” she says.

Blair is a cancer epidemiologist at The University of New Mexico Comprehensive Cancer Center and UNM School of Medicine. Prior to joining UNM as an assistant professor, Blair spent two years working with Wendy Demark-Wahnefried, PhD, RD, on the initial research conducted at the University of Alabama at Birmingham in collaboration with the Alabama Cooperative Extension Office.

The pilot study in Alabama paired cancer survivors with local master gardeners who visited the survivors at their homes and taught them how to start and care for their gardens. The study found that survivors who grew their own vegetables ate more vegetables and increased their physical activity, too. At the end of the study, all survivors said they would “do it again,” and 86 percent of the survivors were still gardening one year later.

Blair now wants to adapt the Harvest for Health program for New Mexico’s unique culture and environment. To do that, she and her UNM team have partnered with Eduardo Servin, PhD, state manager for Master Gardeners at New Mexico State University, and the Albuquerque Area Extension Master Gardener Program.

In the New Mexico pilot study, each cancer survivor will be paired with a local master gardener who has been trained in gardening techniques that address New Mexico’s growing challenges. The pair will create a vegetable garden at the survivor’s home using gardening supplies, plants and seeds provided by the study. The gardener will visit each month to answer questions and troubleshoot gardening problems; the survivor will maintain the garden and, of course, enjoy the harvest.

The New Mexico pilot study will be limited to Bernalillo and South Sandoval counties so that the research team can assess the cancer survivors’ health and the program’s needs. After the pilot study is completed, Blair plans to expand the program to other counties, and eventually, make it available statewide.

–

If you would like to join the Southwest Harvest for Health Study as a cancer survivor or master gardener, please contact Elizabeth Harding, PhD, by email at Harvest4Health@salud.unm.edu or by phone at 505-272-2274.

Categories:
Comprehensive Cancer Center

Source: hsc.unm.edu

20 Homesteading Skills To Learn In 2020 – Hobby Farms

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It’s time for another new year, and many people have set their sights on resolutions—things to do differently and, presumably, better during the next trip around the sun.

For a good many people, this means learning new homesteading skills to become more self-sufficient. That may lead to leaving the grid for some, but lots of folks these days are just looking to do more for themselves—whether by becoming full-on, self-sufficient homesteaders or simply gaining a little more control over their lives and finances by picking up some new skills.

Are you among those people looking to gain some self-reliance this year? Great! We’ve compiled a list of 20 homesteading skills to learn in 2020. It’s by no means comprehensive—homesteading is a lifestyle, not a checklist—but these are some important skills for sustenance living.

1. Gardening

This one’s at the beginning of the list for a reason—growing your own food for the first time feels like a kind of magic. Whether you grow kale in raised beds, start a no-till tomato patch or raise peppers in containers, watching food grow and ripen under your care is an absolute joy, and it’s one of the most important homesteading skills you can learn.

2. Caring for Fruit Trees

Fruit trees need their own kind of care, and it’s important to know how and when to prune them as well as grafting techniques. If you have fruit trees (or are thinking about getting some) research proper care to maximize their yield come harvest season.

3. Cooking

After you harvest your garden’s yield, you’re going to need to cook healthy meals from it. Sure, you can nibble on carrots or cabbage raw, but cooking increases the bioavailability of certain nutrients, maximizing your energy takeaway from fruits and vegetables. Science stuff aside, a home-cooked meal is a satisfying and savory celebration of self-reliance.

4. Baking Bread

Most homesteaders will say you need to master art of making sourdough bread, a cornerstone of homesteading skills, and it’s true that you’ll probably want to eventually—capturing and nurturing those yeasts is both economical and special. But sourdough can be intimidating for beginning bakers, so don’t feel bad about buying some dehydrated yeast to get you started on your bread-making journey.

5. Making Butter

Is butter making one of the essential homesteading skills? Probably not (the book title “Make the Bread, Buy the Butter” comes to mind) … but it’s pretty cool to see the cream pull together into a glob of yellow butter. If you’re not up for working a churn for hours on end, a whisk attachment on a stand mixer does the job a lot quicker.

6. Preserving Food

It’s difficult to keep fruits and vegetables producing inside over cold winters (and it’s not very economical, either), so you’ll need to learn to preserve your harvest to enjoy on snowy days. Canning—either water bath or pressurized, depending on the acidity of the contents—will keep food safe and fresh, but make sure you learn correct techniques, as bacteria is not the canner’s friend. Bacteria is your friend with fermentation, though, and there are tons of cool recipes for letting food “spoil” for delicious flavors and shelf stability. You can dehydrate almost anything either in a stove, dehydrator or the open air. And of course there’s always the freezer.

7. Making Hard Cider

The home brewing movement has taught many of us to make our own suds, but for those who don’t routinely brew their own beer, fermenting cider is a great entry into home-crafted libations. All you need is some cider, brewing yeast (I like champagne yeast, which yields a less sweet product), some honey (to increase the ABV) and some basic home brew supplies. While making alcohol may not the most critical of homesteading skills, there’s no feeling quite like opening a bottle of homemade hard cider after a long day of work around the homestead.

8. Recognizing Good Firewood

Not all wood is created equal when it comes to heating your home. Learn to recognize different kinds of wood at a glance, and know which species of woods are best for burning. Even if you end up buying firewood to get you through the winter, you’ll understand what you’re getting and know how long a particular piece of wood will provide heat for your home.

9. Safely Cutting and Splitting Firewood

If you have your own woodlot, it makes a lot of sense to cut your own wood to heat your home in the cold months. Depending on how many trees you have, you might be able to get by on naturally fallen trees, but it’s still essential to know the basics of safely felling trees. You’ll also need to cut the tree into plugs and, once they’ve cured, split the firewood you’ll need to get through the winter (whether by maul or by machine).

10. Cleaning Your Chimney

When an early cold snap hits, you’ll quickly learn you’re not the only one calling the chimney sweep to clear out a ventilation system. Stay comfortable and save some money by learning to sweep your own chimney. You can purchase the right-sized brush and extension poles at the local hardware store, then it’s just a matter of scaling your chimney (carefully and with proper securement) and working the brush down until all the collected creosote has fallen down into your fireplace or stove. (A powerful wet/dry vacuum can be very helpful in the cleanup.)

11. Hunting

Gardening is great, but for practicing omnivores, there’s a lot of protein to be collected in the local animal population. Learn proper hunting techniques for your preferred weapon(s), study the laws in your area, and always make sure you’re practicing utmost safety while out in the woods looking for prey. And unless you plan on taking your kill to a processor, you’ll need to learn to gut, clean and butcher the carcass of whatever animal(s) you kill.

12. Foraging

If you like the idea of the woods providing food but maybe aren’t too keen on taking the life of an animal, the forest floor can source a plethora of edible items for your dinner table. Of course, proper identification is key to making sure you don’t end up downing toxic plants and fungus, so take the time to learn, always carry a guidebook and remember—if you’re not sure, leave it alone.

13. Using Herbs for Healing

When illness or malady strike the homestead, nothing beats homegrown healing herbs to soothe the suffering. Not sure where to start? Well, here’s a good place—Hobby Farms has tons of information from a handful of writers on what to grow to ease discomfort and improve human health.

14. Beekeeping

Bees are powerhouse pollinators, and providing shelter and care for the winged friends will reap rewards in your garden. And while native bees are arguably more beneficial than their European counterparts, honeybees make that sweet, viscous foodstuff that’s long endeared their species to ours. Look for some classes offered locally to learn alongside a community of enthusiasts.

15. Chicken Keeping

This is one of the more obvious homesteading skills, right? While eggs are, admittedly, less critical than fresh fruits and veggies to one’s sustenance, it seems kind of silly to go without when you get dinner and a show—chickens are endless fun to watch and interact with. You’ll need to provide shelter, as well as answer some basic questions about how you’ll deliver food and water. And there’s some upkeep in terms of cleaning up poop and spent bedding, but, overall, chickens are a fun and easy addition to most homesteads.

16. Processing a Chicken

This may not be the most appealing of homesteading skills, but you’re going to need to know how to dispose of a hen once its laying capabilities no longer meet your family’s egg needs (or you need to deal with a surly rooster). Processing a chicken, as a physical act, is fairly easy—though the killing part is emotionally challenging for some. After that, it’s a matter of plucking, gutting, rinsing and getting the body temperature down in time for safe storage (or you can just pop it in the oven).

17. Soapmaking

The further you go down the homesteading trail, the more critical soap becomes—a hot shower is very important after you muck out a pig barn. So why not learn to make your own? There are varying levels of commitment to this task, from melting and pouring it into shapes, to making soap from fat and lye, to making your own lye with ashes from the fireplace. How you want to make soap is up to you, but nothing beats a homemade bar in the shower, and the extras can provide a nice source of income on the side.

18. Building and Maintaining Fencing

Whether you need to keep animals in or people out, you’ll need to be able to build a secure fence that’s up to the task at hand. And there are so many ways to approach this task—post and rail, chain link, electrical wire … the list is long. Do the proper research to determine which style of fence meets your tactical and aesthetic needs, as well as what tools will allow you to do it efficiently, then get to work building (and maintaining) it right.

19. Playing an Instrument

Is this necessary? No, but if you want to be able to provide your own entertainment and while away the hours productively, it’s really hard to go wrong picking up a musical skill. Guitar, banjos and mandolins are staples of homesteading traditions for their portability and ease of maintenance … but no one’s telling you not to take up the zither if that’s your heart’s desire.

20. Talking to Your Neighbors

This is important—there will come a time when you need your neighbors’ help, and you want to have established relationships long before this point. Also, if you’re in an area attractive to fellow homesteaders, it won’t take long for a neighbor or 10 to wander over to say howdy for an hour or two. The farther out you are, too, the more important neighborly relations are—porch stories under a clear, starry sky can be the perfect ending to a long, hard day tending the garden, chopping wood and processing chickens.

Source: hobbyfarms.com

39 Years Off Grid Homesteading: Time to Move On – Mother Earth News

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After what seems a lifetime, 39 years of off grid homesteading in Maine and Saskatchewan, we decided to move on. We’ve left our ultra remote homestead in northern Saskatchewan to move to a more accessible site in Nova Scotia; one that is on the ocean. You really didn’t think we were giving up on this lifestyle after all these years did you? This is a way of life for us and it’s much too late for us to tie in to the grid and become dependent on society. I know it’s been quite a spell since we last wrote so let me bring you up to date.

We were blessed to have lived in the wilderness of northern Saskatchewan for 17 wonderful years. You might remember that we wrote many Mother Earth News articles over a year ago about living ultra remote. Access to us was by float plane only and as a general rule, we didn’t see another human for 6 months at a time. Every 6 months, we chartered a float plane and did our shopping, picked up mail and took care of any appointments. We sure loved that feeling of self-sufficiency while living deep in the wilderness.

Nineteen years ago, we were faced with the daunting task and logistical challenge of flying by float plane, our worldly possessions and all the building materials necessary for a 2 story house to our remote lake homestead site. Although the house stayed when it came time to move to Nova Scotia, it was still a major chore to pack up all our belongings and appliances along with all of Johanna’s kitchen cabinets, lug everything down to the beach, fly all of it back out and ultimately drive everything across the country for a new start in Nova Scotia.

That was hard! Sure, it was a physical ordeal, but the real hard part was saying goodbye to a place we cherished. A site on a remote lake 100 miles deep in the wilderness which was all forested except for a small plot we had cleared by hand for our homestead. Hockley Lake will forever have a special place in our hearts.

Ever since we finalized the decision to move from Hockley Lake, our life has been total chaos. Most of our possessions were boxed up and much of our stuff remains in boxes. Talk about frustration. We need an item. We know we have that item. But which box holds the magic trinket we are looking for?

We departed Saskatchewan March of 2017 and arrived in the promised land of Nova Scotia early April. We owned and had a choice of two ocean front properties from which to choose. One property was boat access only and the other had an old, overgrown logging road that needed serious work.

It wasn’t an easy choice but since we had opted for a remote property with difficult access the last time, we ultimately decided to build on the property that afforded easier entry. But that’s the only thing that was “easy”. It would have been great to pull in to the property with some semblance of a ready made homestead. But what greeted us was another forested property.

Once again we were facing a massive amount of work because of having to start from scratch on our new home site. The previous homesteads in Maine and Saskatchewan were of similar ilk. All 3 properties were forested. In Saskatchewan, we searched long and hard for our perfect site. It was virgin forest on the shoreline of a remote lake and we were able to assess the lay of the land from the vantage point of a flyover via float plane. Then when we landed to view the site from the ground, we immediately had a good idea of where the house, garden and orchard would reside.

Here in Nova Scotia, the property was all forest with even the road being overgrown with alder. After all these years, we know exactly what criteria our perfect homestead location should possess but thrashing through the forest made it quite difficult to assess the land and envision the final product. Especially when the growth is so dense in places, one can barely bull their way through. Complicating matters is the fact that this is a large woodlot with over a mile of ocean frontage to choose from. Where to begin??

One has to rely on their instincts and judgment to visualize in their mind what the future homestead will look like once a patch of forest becomes cleared land. In future posts I write, I will go into depth on the selection and decision making process we took to ultimately call this spot the right place. I’ll detail our house building and orchard and garden endeavors.

Once we flagged out our site, it was time to have an excavator recover the gravel road that runs across the property, build a new section of driveway and clear a small patch of ground where we lived in a tent for roughly a year while we built our house. That was quite a novelty to be able to drive a car on our new road to our tent dwelling. The last time we could drive a car to our house was 18 years ago when we lived in Maine.

Can you imagine living in a tent for almost a year? Actually it wasn’t too bad. We had acquired lots of experience with tent living when we built our homestead in Saskatchewan. Last year we survived a Nova Scotia winter while living in a large canvas tent that was a couple hundred feet from the ocean. Those months proved quite interesting. Especially when we had multiple high wind events including one with hurricane force winds. To say we were living in a noisy, flapping tent would be an understatement. Our Windy Tent Thankfully we didn’t get blown in to the next County nor did we freeze to death. Although at times, we were a bit chilled. To be honest, we essentially lived with hat and coat on. But in reality our new location is like the tropics compared to where we previously lived.

Join me next time when we will thrash through the forest together searching for the perfect spot to call home.

Ron Melchiore and his wife Johanna are currently building a new homestead on the coast of Nova Scotia. Ron is the author of Off Grid and Free: My Path to the Wilderness published by Moon Willow Press and is available on Amazon and Barnes & Noble. Connect with Ron at In the Wilderness and on Facebook and Pinterest . Read all of his MOTHER EARTH NEWS posts here

All MOTHER EARTH NEWS community bloggers have agreed to follow our Blogging Guidelines, and they are responsible for the accuracy of their posts. To learn more about the author of this post, click on their byline link at the top of the page.

Source: motherearthnews.com

Learning How to Live Like a Pioneer—From Instagram

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Running late after several wrong turns, I made a final, desperate attempt to locate Shaye Elliott’s home by driving into what appeared to be an apple orchard. Down a dirt path, past a gaggle of squawking geese, in the shadow of the town’s 10-story cross, there it was: the two-acre property outside Wenatchee, Washington, on which Elliott cultivates nearly all the food she feeds herself, her husband, and their four children. The Elliotts’ squat three-bedroom house, which they renovated themselves, was nestled among a pigpen, a rabbit hutch, a chicken coop, two pastures, and three gardens, the sum total of which Elliott refers to as her “homestead”—a nod to the back-to-basics, pioneer-inflected movement that inspired her lifestyle.

Shortly after I arrived, Elliott started preparing breakfast. As she poached eggs taken from her coop and sizzled potatoes in fat rendered from ducks she’d slaughtered last fall, she recounted a recent trip to Los Angeles. She still seemed scarred by the experience. “I couldn’t bear it,” she told me. “Everything smelled like Lysol and Febreze, and I was just like, ‘Oh my gosh, the sound of the traffic!’ ” That visit had admittedly been better than her previous one, when she ate “that kind of food”—a restaurant salad prepared with conventionally grown ingredients—and promptly threw up.

Elliott, who is 32 years old, “homesteads” not because it’s practical (it’s not) or because she grew up farming (she didn’t) but because, she says, modern technology “has stripped people of their purpose.” In hopes of “drawing on and learning things of the past,” she has for eight years rejected an increasing number of modern conveniences. Like the 19th-century homesteaders who traveled west in covered wagons, she churns butter, stocks her larder before winter, and treats illnesses with herbs. Unlike the pioneers, however, she enthusiastically broadcasts her life to an audience of Instagram followers, YouTube subscribers, book buyers, and 100,000 monthly readers of her blog, The Elliott Homestead. One of her chickens, Helen, has become a celebrity for antics like sneaking into the house to peck at butter. “You think these Instagram Stories are made up,” Elliott said as a less famous chicken wandered through the front door. “Very much not.”

Elliott belongs to a growing network of bloggers who have tapped into—and fueled—the growing homesteading movement, which encourages self-reliance through the embrace of traditional skills and subsistence farming. A homesteader seeks to “be a producer and not just a consumer,” Elliott said. (She and others distinguish themselves from farmers in harvesting food solely for their own needs, not to sell.) The appeal of this retro-agrarian lifestyle transcends ideological differences, uniting farmwives and feminists, hippies and Christians, preppers and yuppies, from Brooklyn to rural Alaska. Despite its ostensible rejection of consumerism, the subculture has spawned a brisk trade in homesteading-themed TV shows, books, gear, and courses. Last year, the inaugural Homesteaders of America conference drew 1,500 attendees—more than twice the expected turnout—and organizers expect hundreds more this year.

No single definition qualifies someone as a homesteader, but bloggers’ neo-frontier dispatches generally combine elements of Goop, Little House on the Prairie, and Mad Max. The more extreme ones offer tips on building yurts without plumbing (but with Wi-Fi) or finding water in the event of societal collapse. Most provide instruction on insourcing necessities, such as forging knives, making deodorant, and spinning wool.

Like a disproportionate number of these bloggers, Elliott is a white woman with a bearded husband, homeschooled children, faith in Jesus Christ, and many photos of soulful cows. Her posts range from the practical (“Homemade Fly Spray (That Really Works!)”) to the personal (“Date Night With My Man”). Generously sprinkled with ol’s and Amens, they read like emails from a down-to-earth friend. Her vision of homesteading is nostalgic but comfortable, escapist but accessible, even to followers who still shop at supermarkets. She milks her cow Cecilia each morning and forages raspberry leaves for tea, but also invests in shabby-chic chandeliers and a refrigerator. (“Indoor plumbing is a really beautiful gift,” according to Elliott, who does not aspire to total self-sufficiency.)

The top social-media influencers’ followings dwarf Elliott’s, but she has one of the larger audiences in homestead circles. Her reach has been amplified by a Food Network pilot and four lushly illustrated books, which have been sold in Target and Costco stores.

Homesteading, romanticized by nearly every generation save the one that originally endured it, has routinely been embraced by Americans during periods of anxiety and upheaval. “The entire history of America is that in times of political and economic insecurity, people revert to a very visceral sense that taking control of their food and of their homes is where security lies,” says Toni Smith, a homesteader and an English professor at Vancouver Island University. Smith notes that the back-to-the-land movement especially resonates with middle-class white Americans: “The Little House on the Prairie touchstone is their default.” (Not surprisingly, the term homesteading has been criticized by some observers of the current movement, in part for its associations with a government policy that had disastrous consequences for American Indians.)

Versions of homesteading flourished after the Great Depression, during the Vietnam War, in the years before Y2K, during the Great Recession, and again more recently, amid the rise of an anti-establishment ethos. When I asked Elliott, who leans libertarian, why her lifestyle resonates among progressives and Tea Partiers alike, she said, “I think a common thread is a mistrust in the Man.”

Elliott’s interest in homesteading increased as her faith in the food system waned. The daughter of a probation officer and a dental hygienist, she grew up on low-fat Oreos in Wenatchee, the self-proclaimed “apple capital of the world.” While dating a boy who raised livestock, she fell in love with cows. She studied beef production at Washington State University and then worked at a feedlot, but she quit after six months, disgusted by the mistreatment of the cattle. “The entire system just didn’t seem to add up,” she said. She juggled various jobs—in real estate, insurance, floristry—while small experiences nudged her toward a more hands-on approach to life. Reading The Balanced Plate—a celebration of organic, macrobiotic, and Ayurvedic cuisine—convinced her “that what you eat affects your health.” Meeting a co-worker who knit—“just the most romantic, old-fashioned thing I’d ever seen”—inspired her to do the same.

Although Elliott says she and her husband, Stuart, were “stupid poor” when their first child was born, in 2010, she stopped working and began doing more by hand, while the growing family lived off Stuart’s $28,000 teaching salary. Elliott studied homesteading blogs to master skills like making chicken stock and canning, then launched a blog of her own, even though her “homestead” then amounted to little more than potted herbs. Within three years, she’d purchased her first cow, which she found on Craigslist.

Making staples from scratch has since become second nature. While we spoke, Elliott picked kale to garnish the eggs; after breakfast she seamlessly transitioned to baking bread, marinating a leg of a lamb she’d butchered last fall, tidying up with homemade cleaning products, and washing the dishes, which she enjoys doing by hand. “It forces me to slow down a bit, which I appreciate,” she said. Meanwhile, her husband fed animals, chased down a stray lamb, and repaired the fence through which it had escaped.

Their activities echoed scenes on other homesteading blogs: men hammering and sawing, wives cooking and caring for children. At a time when women are advocating for more equitable treatment, was Elliott’s shift toward traditional gender roles deliberate? “It’s kind of just the natural form of things in this lifestyle,” she said. She is a devout follower of Reformed Presbyterianism, a sect of Protestantism that views the Bible as the literal word of God, and she believes that men and women “were designed with specific roles.” “We’ve spent so much time and energy fighting that,” she told me. “And I don’t think that makes people happier.” She tends to her crops in makeup and false lashes; after tidying up the kitchen, she disappeared to apply lipstick and concealer.

Although homesteading sites tend to celebrate the cult of domesticity—Elliott has a post commending the modest femininity of long skirts from the Edwardian era—the offline reality is more complicated: Like many young women who’ve amassed large online followings by documenting their lives as homemakers, she is her family’s breadwinner. In 2014, a fellow blogger recruited her to sell essential oils for doTerra, a multilevel marketing company whose logo is plastered across homesteading sites. Within a year, her business was so profitable that Stuart quit his job; Elliott now makes $500,000 a year selling to fellow “oilers.” Her blog, which helps her recruit customers and salespeople, is heavy on suggestions for using oils. In one 10-day period on Instagram, she demonstrated how geranium oil could heal a duck’s infected foot, how lemongrass could repel pests, and how Roman chamomile and rosemary had cured her son’s hives.

Instagramming from a haven established to escape technology’s frenzied pace may seem incongruous, but Elliott insists that social media provide advice and moral support, which are lacking in the isolated areas where many homesteaders settle. “Most people still don’t live this way. You’re kind of the odd man out,” she said, adding that she’d met her best friends, who all live in different states, through their blogs. “If I have a problem with my cow I have one local person I can call that would know what’s up. If I go online, I can ask 10.”

Bianca Bosker is a contributing writer at The Atlantic and the author of Get the Picture: A Mind-Bending Journey Among the Inspired Artists and Obsessive Art Fiends Who Taught Me How to See.