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
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.
How To Build a DIY Mud Kitchen Using Wood Pallets
Jack and I wanted to make something for Rose's 3rd birthday, and we settled on this DIY mud kitchen because the girl loves to cook. We used salvaged wood pallets, and a few other inexpensive materials, here’s a step-by-step.
Renovating Our Outdoor Studio
With new baby Rose on the way, my upstairs office was slated to become her nursery, so Kate informed me that it was time for me and my personal archive of business papers and Phish tapes to GTFO.
In March 2017 we hired our good friends Scott Wilcox and Gabriel Allan (more about these impressive men in a moment) to help transform this villainous outbuilding into a functional lair...