countryside
Wild Plant Identification: Foraging for Edible Weeds
Add to Favorites On a sleepy Sunday afternoon, on the grounds of an ex-horse stable, Nate Chetelat presents a wild plant identification tour for a local gardening group. The focus …
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Growing Herbs Outdoors? Try These 7 Garden Themes
Add to Favorites By Gayle, Blossom’s Herb Farm – We are all inspired to plant a gigantic vegetable garden every year to cut costs at the grocery store. But have you ever …
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How to Grow Asparagus — The Garden Wonder
Add to Favorites Asparagus is the most worry-free perennial plant there is for the home gardener. If you have bought some lately, then you know how expensive it is. In …
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Why Rotating Vegetables in the Garden is Crucial
Add to Favorites Could over a million lives have been saved between 1844 and 1846 by rotating vegetables in the garden? Several factors contributed to the Great Famine. Irish families lived …
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The Joy of Raising Highland Cattle
Add to Favorites Story & Photos By Tom Fuller – Cattle have been a part of my life for as long as I can remember, and Highland cattle are by far …
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Building Planter Boxes for Strawberries
Add to Favorites By Sue Robishaw – It wasn’t that the old chicken wire covers we’d constructed five years ago didn’t work, they did. I had an idea for building …
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Building Elevated Planter Boxes for Easier Gardening
Add to Favorites By Anita B. Stone Building elevated planter boxes helps bring plants closer. They’re great for children, disabled gardeners, or the elderly. Gardening can be an incredibly rewarding …
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Build a Backup Off-Grid Water System
Add to Favorites By Robert Sulek – Whether natural or man-made, rips in the fabric of modern civilization can occur with devastating consequences. Disasters seem to be happening more often, …
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Lambing Problems Can Arise From Abnormal Birth Positions
Add to Favorites By Lyn Brown, Shear Perfection Ranch – Lambing is always an exciting time on the ranch, but it can also be a scary time for the first-time shepherd. …
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How to Tube Feed a Calf
Add to Favorites By Heather Smith Thomas – There are times you must get fluid into a newborn calf that needs colostrum or a sick calf that needs fluid and …
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Dairy Sheep – Consider Icelandic Sheep
What struck me right away when my first Icelandic sheep lambed were the similarities that these sheep had with dairy goats. I had a commercial goat dairy in years past and these ewe lamb mothers had udders that would be respectable for a good milking dairy goat.
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Get An Early Start With Carrots
Carrots are one of the most versatile vegetables I grow in my garden. We plant them once a month through spring, and again after Labor Day. Except during summer’s intense heat, I harvest a continuous supply for salads or for cooking.
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Know Your Firewood Moisture Content
Knowing firewood moisture content can make the difference between creating steam or heat. Most folks agree that water doesn’t burn, not unless you break H2O down into H and O, both of which are highly flammable, and that doesn’t happen in your stove or furnace.
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Cold Weather Tips for Raising Hogs for Meat
Cold weather requires some planning for any homesteader raising hogs for meat. In the area of proper nutrition, thought and extra effort must be given to available supplies of fresh ice-free water at all times for all classes of hogs—the piglet, the weanling, growing/finishing, gestating and the lactating sow.
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What You Can, and Can’t, Can
Just about anything you would grow in your garden may be preserved by canning. Only a few foods cannot be safely canned at all, some may be canned in one form but not another, and still others don’t hold up well under the prolonged heat of processing.
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