Welcome to Our Permaculture Homestead
After 13 years of researching “doomsday preppers” and homesteading for my apocalyptic novel, We Can Save Us All, I realized I had none of the survival skills I’d been writing about. I wanted to change that. Without becoming a total weirdo.
We began preparing our home to survive a grid-down situation, and dove into homesteading projects to inform our new lifestyle.
Here’s what happened next…
Permaculture Homesteading How-Tos and Articles
Emergency Food and Water “Insurance”
Yes, Food and water insurance. Because I get it: you don't want to be the person who buys a “food bucket.” So my suggestion is merely to add a couple small one-time expenditures — covering EMERGENCY FOOD & WATER — to your insurance portfolio.
Whole House Water Filtration Systems
After we got a quote for $6000+ to install a water softener system to address the sediment and heavy metals issues in our water, we instead created this custom 5-stage water filtration system for less than $1500 installed. Here’s how we did it.
Core Maps #3: The Permaculture Sector Map
Most permaculture sector maps mark the pathways of natural elements like: wind gusts and flowing water, manmade products like noise or smoke or crime, destructive animals, insects or plants, underground networks of utilities (water, cable, electrical, etc.).
How To Build a DIY Solar Water Heater
At the start of pool season, Jack got it in his head that we could heat up the water with some combination of pumps and tubing and buckets and fire. He gets a lot of these ideas—they keep him up at night—and sometimes he organically shifts to a new project or else I can redirect his energies, but this one stuck around for weeks. He kept presenting me with new hand-drawn schematics and eventually I had to admit, "I. DON'T. KNOW. HOW. TO. DO. ANY. OF. THAT." Nevertheless, he persisted.
