Pioneering Skills for Everyone: Modern Homesteading

Explore the many ways modern homesteading can bring some of the spirit and benefits of traditional homesteading into your life. Once you identify your own goals and skills—both the skills you bring and the ones you want to learn—you’re ready to get started. Even with a tiny garden, you can begin your own version of modern homesteading.

There are many benefits of apiculture, but you’ll have a bit to learn if you want to stay safe. Discover your options for building or buying the hive itself, how to recognize bees in various stages of development, and see the best way to harvest the honey. With just a few hives, you’ll have plenty of honey for yourself, family, and friends, and your garden will be pollinated.

Goats are relatively easy and inexpensive to maintain as livestock. But you’ll need to build your goat shelter before the animals arrive! With step-by-step directions, you’ll learn how to shelter, feed, and breed your goats to develop a healthy herd that’s the appropriate size for your homestead.

Examine the nutritional relationship between nannies and their kids, and learn the “when, why, and how” of milking goats. Discover how to make paneer, chevre, ricotta, and mozzarella cheese, fresh from the milk of your own livestock.

If you do keep goats and want to use some for meat, you’ll need to know the most humane and the safest ways to kill and butcher the animals. Following this detailed visual guide, you could produce about many pounds of meat from each goat, including loins, roasts, stew meat, and burgers.

In this lesson, you’ll learn how to choose the variety of chickens that best meet your specific needs. With detailed guidance, you’ll discover how to build the appropriate housing for chicks and older chickens, as well as nest boxes and perches. And should you decide to eat your chickens, this lesson will also teach you how to kill and butcher them.