Backwoods Home Magazine - Practical Self-Reliance

Raising your own beef for your family

Jim Van Camp: Coffee roaster, painter

Grow some winter squash this year

By Lisa Nourse I love summertime — I love the green of the trees, the warm weather, and growing my own food. I especially love...

Vitamins D and K — way more important than you thought

Boost your immune system with fast and easy fish dishes

Companion Planting

By Beverly Mettot Issue #81 • May/June, 2003 Companion planting is nothing new, and yet in recent years it has made an extraordinary comeback, not only...

Tomatoes, the Essential Garden Crop

Put Your Garden to Bed for the Winter

Follow Jackie Clay-Atkinson and her husband, Will, as they homestead a 120-acre piece of northern Minnesotan woods entirely off-grid. Sharing their homestead are horses, beef cattle, a milk cow, dairy goats, chickens and turkeys.

Massad Ayoob on Guns

This blog, from a retired police captain and self-defense instructor, covers the use of different firearms, political musings, and self-defense tactics.

Building

Build an Off-Grid Root Cellar, Garage, and Bunkhouse

Parge the ugly out of your concrete wall

Woodbarrow

PVC pipe in the home, garden, farm, and workshop

Self-Reliance

Call me plumber

Survival storeroom

By David Eddings Issue #130 • July/August, 2011 This story begins in the mid-nineties when the Y2K threat was in the news. Several members of my...

How we found our remote backwoods home

By Jackie Clay Issue #65 • September/October, 2000 Right now I'm sitting in a south-facing huge, sunny window, looking through our own private valley to a...

Animals

The homestead cat

By Jackie Clay-Atkinson We have had at least one cat in our home ever since I was a young child. So it’s no wonder we...

Cheaper than Store-Bought Eggs

Raising your own beef

Fermenting Chicken Feed

Keeping homestead animals healthy

Science and Education

Gee-Whiz: Dinosaurs

Gee-Whiz: Presidents

Avian Flu — How afraid of this

Gee-Whiz: Alcohol

Energy

Solar power for farm and ranch

By Jeffrey R. Yago, P.E. It may be surprising to learn that there are now all kinds of do-it-yourself solar powered devices specifically designed to...

Power-up bag

Amateur Ham Radio – The Ultimate Tool for Survival Communications

Keep the Ice On

Power Up

Americana and History

Feeling nostalgic? Now you’ll rave! Here’s the story of Burma Shave.

Biological and chemical weapons through history

Farm baseball … with ghost runners!

George Washington Carver — He wrote the book on self-reliance

Firearms

Affordable firearms

Just because

By Massad Ayoob Issue #144 • November/December, 2013 I generally recommend that people buy guns the way they'd buy power tools, or automobiles, or homes. Assess...

Firearms and cold weather considerations

By Massad Ayoob Issue #79 • January/February, 2003 Many of our readers have established their abodes in places which, during the winter months, do not exactly...

Frontier style handguns for the modern backwoods home

By Massad Ayoob Issue #101 • September/October, 2006 The year was 1873. Samuel Colt had invented the revolveror at least introduced it to Americain 1836. The...

Preparedness

With commonsense planning, you can survive hard times

Hypothermia — A real winter danger

Medical kits for self-reliant families

The fire wick fire starter

Power-up bag

Prepper power! Part 1

Articles By Dave Duffy

My View: Call Me Miracle Man!

By Dave Duffy Issue #177 • July/August/September, 2019 Superheroes are the rage these days at movie theaters. Even I am fascinated by them. Old style heroes...