8 Ways to Build a More Self-Sufficient Homestead

Would you like to have a more self-sufficient homestead? Homesteading is a great way to be more prepared for disasters. But did you know that when the country of Venezuela began to collapse, many small farms and homesteads were actually abandoned? Because these homesteads depended so much on outside resources, such as fertilizer and feed for animals, they weren’t sustainable in a time of disaster. Our family has been working toward making a more self-sufficient homestead that can easily go off grid if needed.

 

8 Ways to Build a More Self-Sufficient Homestead

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If you are homesteading for the purpose of being more self-sufficient and more prepared for disasters, it is vital that your homestead is actually sustainable.

What would you do if suddenly you were unable to purchase fertilizer or potting soil for your garden? If the feed store was out of feed for your animals?

What if one day you woke up and there was no electricity?

It’s so important to consider these potential problems ahead of an emergency!

Over the past few years, we’ve been working on making our homestead less dependent on the grid. I’ve been researching older farming techniques that didn’t require electricity, and experimenting with growing different kinds of livestock feed.

Thanks to ongoing well problems, we’ve also gotten a lot of practice recently with living without running water. Last summer we went days at a time without running water. This spring we went a whole six weeks! It wasn’t fun, but we learned a lot, like washing dishes by hand in a series of bowls (definitely not fun, but I got pretty good at it!).

Hopefully these 8 ways to make a more self-sufficient homestead will give you some helpful ideas!

 

#1: Add a Fertilizer Source to Your Homestead

There’s nothing wrong with bringing in outside fertilizer and compost, especially to get a new garden spot going. In fact, if your garden needs more fertility, I’d recommend doing it now, while you can! But for long term fertility, you should get good at making compost from scratch!

Compost or some form of fertilizer is something you simply have to have for a self-sufficient homestead.

For compost, you’ll need a combination of “green and brown”. Greens are high nitrogen materials, such as manure, green grass or fresh cut weeds. Dry, brown materials, such as leaves, straw, dried grass and weeds, or wood chips are all high in carbon.

If you are able to keep a flock of chickens or other farm animals, they will be a great source of fertilizer for your garden. But if not, you can also grow green materials just for this purpose!

Comfrey is an excellent choice for a green compost material. This vigorous perennial herb has deep roots that bring up minerals from deep under the ground. It can also be fed to livestock and makes a powerful healing salve!

Comfrey is considered a dynamic accumulator. Dynamic accumulators are plants that effectively bring up nutrients and minerals from under the ground and concentrate all this good stuff in their leaves.

Common cover crops such as alfalfa, clover and oats are all dynamic accumulators. So are many culinary and medicinal herbs. Some plants we consider weeds fit into this category as well. This includes dandelion, chickweed, mustard, horsetail, mullein, tansy, sow thistle and purslane.

Dynamic accumulators can be laid directly on the soil between plants and used as a mulch, or they can be added to the compost pile.

 

#2 Learn How to Dry Garden

Prior to the 1900’s, dry gardening was the norm. Without the luxury of sprinklers and modern drip irrigation, people depended on rain water, or water hauled in buckets to water their garden. That’s something we’ll have to go back to if we truly want a self-sufficient homestead!

Intensive gardening, where plants are all crammed together in a small space, has become increasingly popular since many of us today have limited space. If you have ample supplies of fertilizer and water, you can harvest an incredible amount of food from a small space.

Plants used to be spaced much farther apart, so that they didn’t compete for limited water and fertilizer.

Although we still use sprinklers in our main garden most of the time when we have water, we’ve been experimenting outside the main garden with “dry gardening”.

 

How well dry gardening works will depend a lot on your climate and soil. You can’t rely on a book or someone else’s experience to tell you exactly how much water your garden will need. That’s why it’s a good skill to practice ahead of a disaster.

My soil is sandy and fast draining. It’s hard to grow much of anything with just rainwater. But I’ve found I can grow potatoes and garlic, as well as fall-sown greens mainly with spring rain. My house doesn’t have gutters, so all the water runs right off the sides of the roof. I’ve taken advantage of this free rainwater by putting in garden beds the whole length of my house. The rainwater from the roof runs right onto my garden beds. I only have to water them a few times each summer.

Some of the best crops to grow if you have limited water include potatoes, which are actually more flavorful with less water, garlic and fall-sown greens.

Carol Deppe, author of Breed Your Own Plant Varieties and The Resilient Gardener, says that the F1 hybrid squash “Sunshine” is the best choice for dry gardening. Sweet Meat was second best in her garden.

If your climate has a rainy season, you can take advantage of it!

Fertigation is a technique where you fill a bucket that has a small pinhole in the bottom with compost tea and place it near the plant. This deep watering is made more effective by the nutrients from the compost tea.

If you’d like to learn more about dry gardening, I highly recommend Steve Solomon’s books, Gardening When It Counts and Gardening Without Irrigation: or without much anyway.

Steve Solomon is the founder of Territorial Seed Company and has many years of experience with dry gardening. His books include helpful charts with suggested plant spacing depending on how much water your garden will receive.

 

Also be sure to check out our article about gardening without electricity!

#3 Save Seeds for a More Sustainable Garden

 

Irrigation and fertilization won’t do much good if you don’t have seeds to plant. Seeds are the life of a homestead and you can’t have plants without them!

If you would like to have a self-sufficient homestead, saving seeds is essential.

You can save seeds from most vegetables with no special equipment, but some seed saving knowledge is a necessity.

To successfully save seeds from your garden, it’s important to know which plants will cross with each other and how. A certain number of plants need to be in your seed saving pool for pollination and to avoid inbreeding depression. Some plants make seeds their first year, while others should be overwintered to go to seed their second year.

The easiest way to learn how to save seeds is with Simple Seed Saving. It’s an online class you can complete in your own time, and in less than two hours!

The class includes detailed reference charts for more than 20 common garden vegetables. You’ll learn everything you need to know to successfully save seeds from your garden.

You can check out Simple Seed Saving right here!

#4 Focus on Growing Calorie-Dense Storage Crops

 

We love to have salad and fresh broccoli in the summer and fall, but unless you live where you can garden year round, you’ll need to focus on crops that can be stored all winter.

Our top storage crops that can be stored at room temperature are potatoes, winter squash, garlic and onions. All four will last for months at room temperature in our home.

If you have a cooler storage area or root cellar, you can also grow root crops such as carrots, parsnips, beets, turnips and rutabagas. Cabbage is another excellent storage crop if you have a cool enough place!

If you haven’t read it yet, I talk more about these crops in my article on Survival Gardening.

Another great resource is Carol Deppe’s book, The Resilient Gardener. Her book is packed with information from years of trial and error and is a great resource for developing a more self-sufficient homestead! She focuses on five crops for year round sustainability: potatoes, flour corn, winter squash, beans and duck eggs.

I appreciate all the detail she gives about exact varieties, growing and storage methods.

 

 

#5 Grow Food For Your Animals

 

It’s normal nowadays to buy most of the feed you need for your livestock. But if feed is ever unavailable, you’ll either need a way to grow it yourself, or slaughter your animals. This makes it super important for a self-sufficient homestead!

But growing feed for your animals doesn’t mean you have to produce chicken feed just like what is found in the store. Livestock can eat a wide variety of garden produce as a large portion of their diet!

Depending on your property and resources, you may have lots of options. Here are some ideas for unconventional feeds. The majority of these we’ve personally experimented with…

Poultry:

• Cooked summer and winter squash
• Cooked or raw root vegetables
• Milk from our cow and whey from cheesemaking
• Bugs and worms if birds are allowed to free range
• Painted Mountain corn
• Sunflower seeds
• Pumpkin seeds
• Flax seeds
• Kitchen scraps
• Weeds

Horses:

• Grass cut from wherever we can find it with a scythe
• Cooked or raw root vegetables
• Black oil sunflower seeds
• Flax seeds
• Non-toxic weeds
• Cooked winter squash

Cows (most of these would be good for goats, too!):

• Cooked winter squash
• Cooked or raw root vegetables
• Black oil sunflower seeds
• Flax seeds
• Alfalfa
• Raspberry leaves

 

Winter squash is the big one I grow for animal feed, since it keeps a long time without any special storage conditions. In our book, it’s a must-have for a self-sufficient homestead!

A hand scythe is a useful tool to cut down grass for your animals wherever you can find it. I found mine at a yard sale for $3 and have been using it for several years.

A short handled scythe is an inexpensive tool to have for emergencies and light use. If you really want to get serious about cutting grass or hay, you may want to get a long handled one instead. We have a European style scythe, which is custom made to your height and arm length. They are much easier to use than the American styles, although a bit of an investment. You can find them at Scythe Supply (we’re not affiliated with this company, just use and recommend their scythes!)

 

 

In addition to growing feed for our animals, we keep as much hay and grain on hand as we have room to store, never letting our supply get too low. This will get us through a temporary crisis and gives us time to ramp up production of homegrown feeds.

 

#6 Stock up on Essentials You Can’t Grow

When it comes to essentials you can’t or don’t want to grow yourself, keep as much of a stockpile as you are able to.

I already mentioned animal feed. Some examples for the kitchen would be flour if you don’t grow it, salt, sugar, oil, baking soda, soap or ingredients to make it, anything you regularly use and don’t want to be without. I’m not talking about hoarding stuff you’ll probably never use. Stocking up on and rotating through pantry basics is an essential part of setting up a self-sufficient homestead. For most of us, that’s a combination of preserving what we grow to last until the next harvest, and buying what we can’t grow.

We get most of these staples in bulk from Azure Standard, a natural foods co-op that delivers to most of the US. They offer both organic and conventional products, and have a huge selection of allergen-friendly foods. It’s a good way to save money, stock up, and support smaller farms and businesses.

I’ve been using Azure my entire adult life, and my family shopped with Azure when I was a kid, too. I still HIGHLY, HIGHLY recommend them!

You can find out more about Azure and how it works here!

 

#7 Get a Wood Stove

 

If you live where it gets cold, having a wood stove is essential to building a more self-sufficient homestead! Our power grid is so vulnerable, and yet we depend on it so much.

If the power goes out for a day in the winter, do you have a way to keep warm? What if it goes out for a week? A month? What if it was off and on for years like in Venezuela?

I know, many of my readers are in a position right now where they are renting or just can’t afford the costs of installing a wood stove. I get it, I’ve been there too. I’d encourage you to do whatever you can to get in a position where you can do it. In the meantime, stock up on blankets and food that doesn’t have to be cooked.

 

#8 Network with your Neighbors

 

And finally, network with your neighbors. If you can’t grow it yourself, look for someone nearby who can. You might be able to barter, or just buy things you need locally.

If you can’t grow it yourself, buy your beef or chicken directly from the farmer down the road. Cutting out the middle man saves you both money, and if things get crazy you’ll have peace of mind knowing your food is a lot closer to home!

 

I hope you found some helpful ideas in this post. There are so many more things I could add to this list, given the crazy times we live in! What are you doing to make your homestead more sustainable? Let me know in the comments!