I love your recipe for laundry detergent and have been using it for several months now. I blogged about it and mentioned your website and magazine in the blog. Thanks so much for sharing the recipe for free for us! It has saved me so much money and it is earth friendly. Love it!

Thank you,

Sara McFall

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I just wanted to drop you a line and say “thank you” and tell you I’ve linked to one of your Hardyville essays. I can’t tell you how many times I’ve read or thought about the words you wrote…

Now that I have my own burgeoning readership I’ve come to appreciate the occasional email that says, “I read your blog every day and just wanted to say ‘thank you’!” Mark Twain once said he could live two weeks on a good compliment and I’m right there with him. My readers words keep buoying me up when times get tough.

Your words… “Are you racing like a little maze-rat, just to keep yourself in fancy toys?…When it comes right down to it, do you choose convenience over independence? Then you’re not on the road to Hardyville. If you want to be on the road to Hardyville, then turn around”

They made a difference. I started thinking about the life I wanted and how I could get it. It also woke me up to the fact that the whole rat race and more toys and crap were NOT what I wanted. It wasn’t an overnight change, but we are well on our way. And I’ve got a good life, one that makes me happy, and that’s better than it was.

I just wanted to remind you that you touch a lot of lives.

Christine Shuck

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Just wanted to tell you how much I enjoyed your article about designing for, and living in a small space.

I live in a “shoebox” apartment in San Francisco, about 400 sf, but I fantasize about moving to a remote or “unusual” space and living in a very small home.  Maybe even in a motorhome.

But your ideas certainly apply to both urban and backwoods environments.  I look forward to exploring the links at the BHM website.

I wanted to add something to the rack-mounted computers you mentioned:

When I had a “desktop” computer, I bought a strap device to hang it from under my desk.

The straps are $18 on Amazon for a basic type, to $40 for the kind I had — it allowed the computer to be slid forward, and spun around to access cables in the back.  But I agree with you that a good laptop makes more sense these days.

Thanks again for the interesting article,

Jim Lee

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My grandfather did similar things such as making his own string trimmer (weed eater) . This was back in the early seventies. He took an aluminum pole or something like that and attached a old vacuum cleaner motor to the end of it. Attached a pulley at the bottom and drilled holes along the perimeter of it and instead of weed eater plastic string he used sections of bailing wire. My dad said that thing would go through some pretty heavy brush. Heavy but it worked.

He also used to recycle bottles, cans, and scrap metal from his home, and bring it all in to town once a month in his VW van. He did all this before it was even a household word.

I remember working with him on his metal lathe in his shop and I noticed the lights getting dim then bright. I told him something was wrong with is light bulb and he just laughed and said that the light bulb was a 12 vdc type attached to a windmill he had built,and the power source was a 12 vdv VW generator. The cause of the flickering I guess was the wind was fluctuating.

I thought old Gramps was the coolest old dude. Glad to see other people try this stuff out and share with people so they might get an idea and try it out.

Kim Moe

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I found that using petroleum jelly on a cotton ball is a wonderful firestarter, you can fit a month’s worth into a pill bottle or mint tin. Spreading the cotton over the tender helps to get it going.

Also, using dryer lint (we have lots!) pushed into cardboard egg cartons or cup carriers and then covered with candle wax makes a great starter-lasts a long time like the ones Claire discussed in her article.

After having lighters fail and matches get wet I tried making my own “water proof” matches, which works okay except they tend to be brittle and hard to ignite. Now I use a magnesium stick firestarter that never fails to work. I found mine in a camping catalog, they’re also sold at Walmarts.

I love your magazine, have just signed-up for another year.I’m interested in being as self-reliant as possible. We live in a small town on a half acre lot where I keep 4 chickens in a mobile chicken tractor that my husband and son built to my specifications (we built it on top of a garden wagon, with a pen attached on wheels. When it’s time to re-locate the hens we just pick-up the wagon handle and pull it to the next spot. We have about 30 different fruit trees, tons of ever-bearing raspberries, strawberries, etc. I ordered the trees about 3 years ago and I’m excited by the fact that my peach and one of my plum trees are both loaded with fruit and the apples are also beginning to produce.

Keep up the great articles and information.I suspect that more people will be in need of it in the near future and your magazine will be an inspiration to them.

Marie McKinney Stone
Indiana

PS. I love everything that Jackie Clay writes!!!

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Richard & Georgia

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Before some of you dig out your pitch-forks in preparation for attack: Let me inform or remind you that the ratification of the Constitution had its strongest opposition from the most liberty-minded people back then! Patrick Henry of “Give me liberty or give me death” fame, when asked why he refused to attend the constitutional convention, declared:”I smell a rat!” I also recommend the reading of the anti-federalist papers.

My disagreement with this view stems from principles that perhaps they have not yet considered. I am a strong believer in the Non-Aggression Principle, which means that I take a moral and principled stand against force, aggression, and power: nobody, with or without badges or ballots, has the right to agress on any other. We live in a violence based society because we have always had a violence based government.

Had the founding leaders truly believed in freedom for all, then they would have set up a voluntary societies similar to the church congregations that many of them were members of, which raises funds via voluntary donations. Instead, they imposed upon us a coercive government with the power to rob us. Indeed, not long after the ratification of the Constitution, President George Washington led an army to Pennsylvania to rob people that wished to keep their whiskey, which for them was a form of currency. This became known as the Whiskey Rebellion. Alexander Hamilton and his ilk claimed that they needed the revenue to pay off government debts. If it is immoral for a gang down your street to rob a store for the purpose of acquiring enough money to bail out a jailed friend, then it was also immoral for a group of people that call themselves “the government” to rob people for the purpose of repaying investors. The citizens didn’t consent to the loan, and saddling them with the debt ex-post facto was also wrong. The debt could have been paid for by the sale of land, or the debt could have been defaulted on.

There is no question that the people who attended the constitutional convention were highly educated and very intelligent. How is it then that such sharp lawyers, judges, and politicians would include language into the constitution that imposes a death penalty for treason, yet imposes only slaps on the wrists of the ruling class for violating “the supreme law of the land?” This cannot possibly be a mere accident! Indeed, President John Adams and the Federalist congressmen passed the Sedition Act, which was clearly unconstitutional, during the founding generation; yet they were not even impeached, let alone imprisoned or executed. Therefore: we should not cast blame at our fellow tax slaves for failing to remove today’s tyrants from office since our forefathers could do no better with a much smaller government that lacked today’s weaponry. Isn’t it amazing that the very minarchist document which was supposedly intended to limit government led to the most powerful government in world history in so little time?

Improving the Constitution would be of no use because we would have to babysit the government 24/7 in order to make it behave; so why replace it once the government collapses? There has never been a moral government in this world, nor will there ever be one! The very second that a government becomes established; there becomes 2 classes of people: the ruler(s) and the ruled. The belief that government is needed because mankind is evil is erroneous thinking. “If men are good, you don’t need government; if men are evil or ambivalent, you don’t dare have one.”-Robert LeFevre

Positions of power attract busybodies and evil people, and power corrupts even otherwise good men. No man should have power over another in a moral and free society!

Genuine free-market solutions to problems is the moral way of solving problems and filling wants. Natural Law is easy to understand and is explained at the Lysander Spooner website link below.

So, what should lovers of liberty do? Free yourselves! Freedom is mostly a state of mind! Most decisions made by people every day are anarchic in nature despite the state’s existence. I used to be a statist conservative republican, but my thirst for knowledge drove me and drives me toward self-improvement and gradually toward wisdom. I can state from personal experience that the truth will set you free!

Here are some free educational resources for your consumption:

http://tiny.cc/4h01z

http://www.lewrockwell.com/

http://www.freedomainradio.com/

http://www.lysanderspooner.org/

and most certainly BWH’s very own columnist Claire Wolfe:

http://www.backwoodshome.com/blogs/ClaireWolfe/

Please folks; educate as many people as you can. If this government were to collapse today, the masses would foolishly promote an election to choose representatives to form a reincarnated state to replace the one that just failed.

Brian Mast
Abolitionist from Stover, Missouri

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Scott Barrett

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I must write to tell you how much I have enjoyed Jackie Clay’s books.

I just finished reading “Starting Over.” It is a wonderful read, very entertaining but also very educational. On every other page or so, I learned something new. She didn’t just write that some project was accomplished, she explained how it was done, in detail! I expected to enjoy reading about her life and how her homestead unfolded. I never expected to learn so much or be so encouraged by her words.

I also just finished reading the Self Reliance book “Recession Proof Your Pantry“. I thought I knew about all there was to know on the subject, and still learned more. The same with “Growing and Canning Your Own Food.”  I would recommend all of these books to anyone interested in homesteading and self reliance.

“Starting Over” should be required reading for any woman attempting to homestead (or farm) on her own.

Thank you to Backwoods Home and to Jackie Clay,

Mary Hartsock

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