Backwoods Home Magazine - Practical Self-Reliance

Build this sturdy large-capacity food dehydrator

10 tips for selling your homemade product

Hog butchering — Using everything but the squeal

Practical Ideas for Self-Reliant Living

Woodbarrow

By Setanta O’Ceillaigh When I first abandoned a slum town and fled back to the countryside I gathered and carried firewood with a laundry basket....

Grow some winter squash this year

Vitamins D and K — way more important than you thought

Boost your immune system with fast and easy fish dishes

Pruning Blueberries

By Kristina Seleshanko When we purchased our mountaintop homestead, I was excited to discover four blueberry bushes that were already established on our property. Not...

Garden Seeds — A Great Winter Pastime

Time to Forget About Snail and Slug Bait

Grow Open Pollinated Seeds for Self-Reliant Gardening

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

How safe is your electric fence?

Tools and hardware for the backwoods home

Build a cistern out of corrugated road culvert

Build A Hybrid Go-Kart For Kids For $150

Self-Reliance

Tips for finding your affordable home

Seed art — It’s fun to collect the seeds and create these unusual pictures

By Alice B. Yeager Issue #42 • November/December, 1996 Seed art is an old craft going back to long, long ago. Where the art of turning...

A view of self-reliance from a more timid perspective — A woman’s opinion

By Claire Wolfe Issue #94 • July/August, 2005 My fellow Backwoods Home writer Jackie Clay is a domestic wonder woman who can do anything from can...

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: Sleep

Can we make a Tyrannosaurus rex from a chicken?

Gee-Whiz: Coffee

Gee-Whiz: Trees

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

Habeeb Salloum — Poet, Traveler, Recipe Writer

Quilts — Masterpieces of the heart and windows into women’s history

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

Presidents’ wives of the past Part 4 — Cunning, vindictive, and one may have been a murderess

Firearms

Consider the 20-gauge shotgun

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...

Canning game meat

By Linda Gabris Issue #166 • July/August, 2017 Attempting to can meat (or any other low acid food, for that matter) without the use of a...

Big boomer guns

By Massad Ayoob Issue #125 • September/October, 2010 For you long time readers, I know what you're thinkin'"Hey, isn't this the guy who within the last...

Preparedness

Gee-Whiz: From Paper to Canning

7 Mistakes of food storage

Battery-Powered Tools are Changing

The fire wick fire starter

Power-up bag

Survival firebuilding skills

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...