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Homestead, Homemaking, Simple Living & Homestyle Recipes Blog

6 Signs That Signal You are Ready to Start Homesteading

6 Signs That Signal You are Ready to Start Homesteading

Let us start homesteading! Modern life encourages consumerism. Goods are mass-produced unsustainably to cater to an ever-growing hyper-consumer culture. Most people eat too much food, overuse energy, and buy things they don’t need. Excessive consumerism deteriorates...

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Homesteading a Growing Trend Among Millennials

Homesteading a Growing Trend Among Millennials

Homesteading ... a growing trend. Whether you're new to homesteading or you're a professional homesteader, what you may not know is how much of a trend homesteading has become in recent years. As society becomes more focused on technological living, millennials have...

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Finally a pair of garden boots I LOVE!

Finally a pair of garden boots I LOVE!

Best women's garden boots I've ever owned! It's early morning. It rained yesterday, the yard is muddy, and I need to get across the yard to feed the chickens. I have my shoes nestled near the back door, but which pair do I grab? I know full, and well, they will be...

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What Should You Consider When Building a Trash Shed?

What Should You Consider When Building a Trash Shed?

We're Building a Trash Shed After round and round with our neighborhood family of raccoons, we've spent the last week or more researching trash shed plans and found some great information to share with you.  Nothing ruins the look of your homestead, like gaudy blue,...

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Growing Herbs on the Homestead

Growing Herbs on the Homestead

Herbs have multiple benefits and have been used for centuries. Chefs love the flavors they give to food, while herbalists adore them for their medicinal properties. Whatever plans you have for your herbs and their uses, it’s essential to know how to grow them. And...

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5 Simple Ways to Add Permaculture to Your Backyard Farm

5 Simple Ways to Add Permaculture to Your Backyard Farm

Permaculture isn’t all about food forests and natural water supplies - it’s more about having a positive and holistic attitude to life.  When Bill Mollison coined the phrase back in 1978, he described it as “a philosophy of working with, rather than against nature; of...

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How To Keep Bugs Out Of A Vegetable Garden Naturally

How To Keep Bugs Out Of A Vegetable Garden Naturally

No matter where you live, you are likely going to have to deal with bugs in your garden. It is a real bummer to have your vegetables you have worked hard to grow eaten or destroyed by bugs. Knowing how to keep bugs out of a vegetable garden naturally will help ensure...

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Starting a Vegetable Garden for Beginners

Starting a Vegetable Garden for Beginners

Gardening for Beginners I encourage you to take this time in your life to get serious about learning how to provide for your family's most basic needs. FOOD by using theses starting a vegetable garden for beginners tips. If you are not in a place where you can plant a...

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78 Kitchen Hacks from Our Homestead Kitchen

78 Kitchen Hacks from Our Homestead Kitchen

Straight from my homestead kitchen. 78 Kitchen Hacks every cook needs. Write in your cookbooks. Take some notes when you make a recipe from your favorite cookbook. Perhaps a recipe needs a little more oregano, or it could have used 10 more minutes in the oven.  Add...

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Restoring This Old Homestead – Starting from Scratch

Restoring This Old Homestead – Starting from Scratch

I never dreamed I’d be thinking about restoring an old homestead again. But here we are staring all over again with new little farm, I can already imagine what it will look like a year from now. If you haven’t gathered, we bought a new homestead, new to us, because...

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How to Freeze Corn

How to Freeze Corn

How to freeze a bushel of corn in 15 minutes! Thanks to a couple new farming friends I'll never dread freezing corn again! This past weekend I had the pleasure of spending time with my friend’s family, who happens to do a lot of vegetable farming. I spent all my time...

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How to Build a Cheap Raised Garden Bed

How to Build a Cheap Raised Garden Bed

Cheap Garden Beds - Using Recycled Building Supplies After four years of heavy use, my raised garden beds are starting to fall apart and need replacing. Before I gave in to spending money on supplies, I wanted to make sure there wasn't anything lying around the farm...

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All-Natural Cleaner Recipes Using Essential Oils

All-Natural Cleaner Recipes Using Essential Oils

Clean your home with all-natural cleaning products using essential oil. There are so many options when it comes to cleaning our homes. All-natural cleaning products are very popular, which is why more and more people prefer to save some money and time by making their...

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9 Tips for Raising Baby Chickens

9 Tips for Raising Baby Chickens

Raising Baby Chickens  for Beginners I would consider us seasoned baby chicken growers. We have successfully raised over one hundred baby chicks within the last couple of years. So when I got a question from one of my readers asking if I could give her any tips on...

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What does it mean to live a simple life?

What does it mean to live a simple life?

Old Fashion by Nature - Simplistic by Choice What it doesn't mean is depriving yourself of the good things in life. What it means is to slow down life and enjoy life. I was born in a small rural town in Pennsylvania where waking up to chickens crowing and gardens...

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Living with Less is Liberating – Living Simple

Living with Less is Liberating – Living Simple

Goodbye to things, hello to simple living and living with less! Living a simple, minimalistic lifestyle is all about reducing the number of possessions you own to only those things that add value to your life. In our home, we live by the unspoken rule that if it’s not...

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Old Fashion Jump Rope Songs – Memories from the past!

Old Fashion Jump Rope Songs – Memories from the past!

Jump Rope Songs and Rhymes One of my first memories of singing jump rope songs were in elementary school jumping rope to "Down in the valley where the green grass grows there sat Tracy sweet as a rose..."  What I also remember is my white knee-high socks falling down...

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How to Make Beef Bone Broth

How to Make Beef Bone Broth

When life makes a complete circle here on the farm ...it's time to make beef bone broth. Our freezer is once again full of grass-fed beef and with it always comes plenty of beef bones for beef broth.  It's one of the many staples I always like to have on hand. It's...

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Must Have Home Canning Supplies

Must Have Home Canning Supplies

My home canning supplies list I am in the midst of the canning season, and while  I was looking through my canning cupboard I realized just how much I have collected over the years. Most of my canning supplies came from second-hand stores, yard sales or passed down. I...

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25 Vegetable Gardening Tips + Old-time Planting Lore

25 Vegetable Gardening Tips + Old-time Planting Lore

It's Vegetable Garden Planting Time There is something magical that happens in the spring, things that I can count on every year. The birds sing louder, the sky seems bluer, the grass is greener and I love planting a garden. I have an old book that I devour every...

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Tracy at Our Simple HomesteadHidden away in the Upstate of South Carolina is a little farm where we call home. Surrounded by century-old pecan and oak trees, we live on a 120-year-old homestead. By the grace of God, we were called to restore this 1890 farmhouse along with its barns, gardens and long-forgotten cotton field to its original working farm. Dedicating ourselves to reusing, recycling and making do we are living a very simple life building our backyard farm.

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