About the Author
Marissa Ames
Articles by Marissa Ames
Early Spring Vegetables List: Don’t Wait on Winter Waning
The snow is melting and daytime temperatures are calling you outside. Leaf buds swell on trees and your hands long to feel the soil once again.
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Old-Fashioned Lard Soap Recipes, Then and Now
Homesteaders cooked a lard soap recipe in kettles over fires. You can make it in your own kitchen.
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How to Make Bath Bombs: An Easy DIY Gift
Often ball-shaped, bath bombs are dry, chalky, conglomerations that fizz and release fragrance when dropped in water. They’re sold as novelties, though additions like witch hazel and skin-friendly oils can add benefits.
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Kids and Soap: Homemade Arts and Crafts for The Holidays
Winter holidays often involve cold weather, hot drinks, and homemade arts and crafts. It also means the kids are out of school for one to three weeks. What homemade arts and crafts can kids do, without risk of injury, that can also serve as holiday gifts?
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Eliminating Weevils in Flour and Rice
Their little legs wriggled on my spoon. How harmful could they be? Casting my eyes to each side, I watched for approaching family members as I dropped the little bugs in the sink and stirred the flour.
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How to Cook Venison and Elk: A Healthy Indulgence
Toward the end of the year, deer and elk seasons open. Avid hunters trek into the wilderness in search of wild game.
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How to Make Green Soap: An Excursion Through Time
Ancient Syrians knew how to make green soap used by Queens Cleopatra of Egypt and Zenobia of Syria. It’s a timeless method that abounds today.
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Sprouting Seeds at Home for Winter Nutrition
Sprouting seeds at home has long been an easy and delicious way to gain nutrition when greens are scarce. You can do it for you or your chickens.
During the springtime and summer, sweet greens grow all over our yard in the forms of cultivated vegetables or simple grass and weeds
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Natural Ways to Get Rid of Mice
For the safest, most natural ways to get rid of mice, start with the most minimum impact and work up from there. I have a friend who insists on using only the level of protection necessary in a situation.
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How Zombie Culture Shaped Homesteading Today
We can thank apocalyptic fiction and zombie mania for a giant surge in self-reliance and homesteading today. It’s amazing how people grow when they question, “What if?”
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How to Make Castile Soap
Vegan, sustainable, and often organic, castile soap is highly sought after. Properties are comparable to soaps made with tallow, lard, or coconut oil but the bar made from olive oil ranks higher.
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Sodium Laureth Sulfate and Soap’s Dirty Secrets
Sodium laurel sulfate and sodium laureth sulfate. What do those terms mean? And will they harm you or the environment?
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How to Make Oatmeal Soap: 4 Techniques to Try
You can learn how to make oatmeal soap within a few minutes of research. It’s one of the easiest and safest recipe additions.
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An Easy Guide to Tanning Rabbit Hides
Many homesteaders see the value of raising rabbits for meat. Rabbits reproduce well, grow fast, eat food you can grow yourself, and produce manure for the garden.
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How to Make Laundry Soap at Home
Not long after I learned how to make homemade soap, I tweaked the recipe and learned how to make laundry soap. Those other “homemade laundry soap” recipes had flaws.
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