Wild Homesteading - Work with nature to grow food and start/build your homestead

Welcome to Wild Homesteading's home on permies. I'm Daron - a volunteer staff member here on permies and the founder/owner of Wild Homesteading.

Wild Homesteading is a site focused on helping people to work with nature to grow their own food and build/start their homestead.

Why Wild Homesteading?

Homesteading historically has had the image of a family leaving civilization to go out and make a home in the wilds. Today, most of our homesteads are not really separate from modern civilization and often the wilds around our homesteads are degraded and in poor shape.

Wild homesteading is focused on the idea that the modern homesteading movement can bring the wild back to our communities in a way that increases the resilience of those communities to droughts, floods, etc. by partnering with nature.

Instead of leaving civilization to tame the wilds, a wild homesteader takes degraded land in the middle of civilization and brings the wild back by working with nature. But growing food and providing for your family is still at the core of Wild Homesteading.

The Wild Homesteading Site

Wild Homesteading is a blog with 3 topic categories: Start Your Homestead, Grow Your Own Food, and Work With Nature.

Each week I will write a new blog post for one of those 3 categories. The posts will focus on helping you on your homesteading/gardening journey. I will also share what I'm doing on my own homestead from time to time on social media sites and here on permies.

Wild Homesteading is not about my homestead - it is about yours. I want Wild Homesteading to be a resource for everyone currently homesteading and those dreaming of homesteading.

Every week on Tuesday I will send out the Wild Newsletter featuring that week's blog post to those who have signed up for the newsletter.

Blog Posts

If you want to see all the current blog posts check out the blog index page.

Here is an example post for each category:

- Perennial Vegetables: How to Use Them to Save Time and Energy - Grow Your Own Food

- 5 Ways to Transform Your Garden into a Low Water Garden - Working With Nature

- What You Need to Know to Before You Start a Homestead - Start Your Homestead

Each post has a guide or cheat-sheet that you can signup to receive. The guides and cheat-sheets are designed to be easy-to-print companion documents to the blog posts.

Wild Homesteading and Permies

Permies is an amazing site and community and I have really enjoyed my time on this site. Each week I will make a thread here on permies to share the newest blog post. These threads will summarize the content of the blog and be your opportunity to ask me questions and provide feedback.

Each blog post will link back to the corresponding thread on permies. I would love to have the permies community leave comments on my site and have non-permies visitors to my site come here and engage with the awesome permies community.

A bit of cross-pollination could help both permies and Wild Homesteading.

If you are new to permies I recommend checking out this thread to learn all about how the site works: How permies.com works - links to useful threads

As a volunteer staff member here on permies I will continue to help with the site and do my best to answer questions you all have.

Feel free to send me a purple mooseage (message) or reply to my threads if you want to chat. If you visit Wild Homesteading, I can also be reached through that site via the contact page. If you are one of the first to leave a comment you might even get a surprise in the form of pie or apples

I'm also happy to answer any questions on this thread. Who knows - I might just answer your question in a future blog post!

Thank you all and please check out my site and if you like it I would really appreciate it if you could share it with your community.

Thank you!  I'm enjoying your site.

Tyler Ludens wrote:Thank you!  I'm enjoying your site.

Thank you very much! I really appreciate the comment

I just have to say, I've been really impressed by the level of content in your articles. They have a lot more depth and knowledge than most equivalent blog posts about similar subjects that I have read.

No you got me wanting Cosmic Kale (I hadn't heard of it until your perennial article), and you made me want to track down some Old King Henry even more!

Nicole Alderman wrote:I just have to say, I've been really impressed by the level of content in your articles. They have a lot more depth and knowledge than most equivalent blog posts about similar subjects that I have read.

No you got me wanting Cosmic Kale (I hadn't heard of it until your perennial article), and you made me want to track down some Old King Henry even more!

Thank you Nicole I really really appreciate the comment. My site may be a business and not just a blog but I'm really wanting to make sure that I provide very high quality content to people for free through the blog. Even if one day I'm selling some stuff (books, courses, etc.) I always want to make sure to provide high quality free content.

This is my passion and I really want to share it with people - it has been fun but also a little bit stressful/nerve-racking putting this all out into the world.

I'm happy to hear that you are enjoying the content!

I will be doing weekly posts plus the occasional bonus post mid-week. My goal is to keep providing a high level of free content for people to enjoy. The bonus posts will be posts that don't fit quite as well or might not have a wide appeal such as a post focusing on native edible plants in the Pacific Northwest

Thanks again!

Been a great launch week for Wild Homesteading and I'm very thankful to everyone that left comments and visited my site. It really got the site off to a great start and I really enjoyed chatting with you all!

If you missed it Wild Homesteading launched with 5 blog posts:

- 3 Plant Types You Need to Know: Perennial, Biennial, and Annual
- Perennial Vegetables: How to Use Them to Save Time and Energy
- Control Garden Pests without Toxic Chemicals
- 5 Ways to Transform Your Garden into a Low Water Garden
- Read this Before You Start a Homestead

Moving forward I will release 1 new blog post each week plus the occasional mid-week bonus post. Next week's post will be all about fall leaves and how to put them to work on your homestead or in your garden.

If you are 1 of the first 3 people to comment (no trolling or spam) on the companion thread here in permies I will have a surprise for you in the form of pie and/or apples! I also really appreciate comments on the blog post!

Thanks all!

Do you have a bunch of fall leaves but are not sure how to use them? This week's blog post cover 3 ways to put fall leaves to work on your homestead.

Here are links to the new threads from last week and this week. Each week on Monday I post a new blog post with a companion thread here on permies. Keep your eye open for them - if you are one of the first to leave a reply there might be a surprise for you (pie or apples!).

Build abundance with chop-and-drop

Useful and fun gifts for a homesteader

Methods for preparing land for future planting at the garden/homestead scale

If you like these posts please share the blog posts on social media and leave a comment on the blog post!

Thanks!

Got a few more blog posts up and companion threads to go with them. If you missed them take a look - some good conversations on the threads!

(New as of Jan 7th!) Introduction to rocket ovens and what to know before you build

Looking back at homesteading in 2018 and making plans for 2019

What do you love about homesteading?

Thanks!

very cool site daron...got a chance to check it out for a bit...look forward to browsing through the WHOLE thing :)  very cool

teri morgan wrote:very cool site daron...got a chance to check it out for a bit...look forward to browsing through the WHOLE thing  very cool

Thank you very much! I really appreciate the comment. If you have any questions I'm happy to answer.

I realized that I have been forgetting to keep this thread updated! Since my last post I have released a number of blog posts. Here is the complete list broken up by website category:

Work with Nature
- 5 Ways Your Homestead Will Benefit from Native Plants
- What is Mulching? The Complete Introduction to Mulching
- Hugelkultur Beds: The Best Raised Beds for Your Garden
- Mulch Types – What You Need to Know

Grow Your Own Food
- How to Choose the Right Vegetables to Plant in Your Garden
- Planting Vegetables – Are Seeds or Starts the Best for Your Garden?
- 11 Perennial Greens You Will Love to Grow

I have skipped the Start Your Homestead category since a number of my previous posts were in that category. I'm trying to keep each category roughly even in terms of total number of blog posts. After the next couple posts the categories should be balanced out.

Here are the upcoming topics planned for the next couple posts (titles not set yet) starting with next Monday's post:
- Self-seeding Vegetables
- Perennial Vegetables - Root Crops
- Introduction to Permaculture
- Introduction to Working With Nature
- Permaculture Zones

There is a chance these could change but the next 2 are set since I have already started writing them! If there are topics you are interested in feel free to leave a suggestion in the comments!

Thanks all!

Thank you Daron for managing this great blog. I just read several blog posts and the videos embedded for the 11 cold hardy perennial vegetables, salvaging native plants for your homestead, and all the tangents I found myself exploring.

Thank you for sharing another great resource to pull from, and thank you to the greenhouse-ish email for showing me the way to the Wild Homesteading site!

Woo hoo!!! Daron made it to google seach first page, entry #10!!!


Link to the google search.

And the Leaf Mold blog post.

His blog is now called Growing With Nature, all his previous above links still work.