Category: Self-Reliance Articles
Practical self-reliance is learned by doing. Here we share lessons from our own experiences with gardening, greenhouses, off-grid living, tools, repairs, food, preparedness, and everyday homesteading.
Some things work as planned, others teach us what to do differently next time. Our goal is to share both so you can learn from our successes and our mistakes as you become more self-reliant.
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If you handed me another bare two-acre lot tomorrow and enough money to develop it, I’d do it again. Absolutely. But I wouldn’t do everything the same way. I’ve been involved with developing our property at Riverbed Ranch in Utah’s West Desert for about five years, although we’ve only lived in the house for about…
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The first night we slept on our property at Riverbed Ranch, our house didn’t even have a roof. We had a crawl space, a floor, and two partial walls. We set up our cots and slept under the stars. I don’t remember seeing or hearing any mice that night. They apparently waited until we finished…
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Lessons from trying to turn two acres of Utah desert into a dependable food-producing homestead I Thought Two Acres Would Feed Us When we moved to Riverbed Ranch and began developing our two-acre homestead, I had a pretty ambitious goal. Eventually, I thought we could feed ourselves completely. I didn’t mean that we would somehow…
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Living off-grid means becoming your own utility company. We’ve learned when to do laundry, why some solar panels face east and west, and how one wiring mistake can become very expensive. Here are the lessons our solar system taught us.
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We expected a greenhouse and a couple dozen barrels of water to keep our plants above freezing. Our first Utah winter taught us otherwise. Here’s what we learned about thermal mass, row covers, greenhouse design, and the difference between extending the growing season and actually creating a warm winter climate.
