Home - Backwoods Home Magazine

the gee-whiz! page: Animals, humans, extraterrestrials, and tools

Water development for the homestead: Ponds, cisterns, and tanks

Build A Hybrid Go-Kart For Kids For $150

Practical Ideas for Self-Reliant Living

Boost your immune system with fast and easy fish dishes

By Linda Gabris When I was growing up in the rural woods, Grandpa and I did a lot of fishing from spring through fall so...

Vitamins D and K — way more important than you thought

Grow some winter squash this year

Tea for the garden

By Lisa Nourse We have poor soil and do our best to amend it with compost and manure every year. However, we feel our plants...

Leafy Green Vegetables — The Underrated Heroes of the Garden

Follow Jackie Clay-Atkinson and her husband, Will, as they homestead a 120-acre piece of northern Minnesotan woods entirely off-grid. Sharing their homestead are horses, beef cattle, a milk cow, dairy goats, chickens and turkeys.

Massad Ayoob on Guns

This blog, from a retired police captain and self-defense instructor, covers the use of different firearms, political musings, and self-defense tactics.

Building

Build your own home in two years — Get a PhD in homebuilding

Shelves and benches

A house a tornado helped build

Build Your Own Hoop House

Self-Reliance

The joys of making soap

You could furnish an entire homestead at Lehman’s ‘Non-electric’ Hardware Store

By Don Fallick Issue #47 • September/October, 1997 Let me state my bias right at the beginning: Lehmans Hardware has been advertising in Backwoods Home Magazine...

Foraging for wild berries

By Kristina Seleshanko Issue #176 • April/May/June, 2019 I had just posted a photo online of some wild berries I was going to preserve, when suddenly...

Animals

The homestead cat

By Jackie Clay-Atkinson We have had at least one cat in our home ever since I was a young child. So it’s no wonder we...

Cheaper than Store-Bought Eggs

Raising your own beef

Fermenting Chicken Feed

Keeping homestead animals healthy

Science and Education

Gee-Whiz: Insects

A brief history of health and medicine

The gee-whiz! page — Cats: Why they rule our world

Zombie Apocalypse

Energy

Solar power for farm and ranch

By Jeffrey R. Yago, P.E. It may be surprising to learn that there are now all kinds of do-it-yourself solar powered devices specifically designed to...

Power-up bag

Amateur Ham Radio – The Ultimate Tool for Survival Communications

Keep the Ice On

Power Up

Americana and History

Doesn’t anyone remember Tom Paine

Biological and chemical weapons through history

Who were the best…and worst U.S. Presidents?

Habeeb Salloum — Poet, Traveler, Recipe Writer

Firearms

Choose your ammo… police style

Frontier style handguns for the modern backwoods home

By Massad Ayoob Issue #101 • September/October, 2006 The year was 1873. Samuel Colt had invented the revolveror at least introduced it to Americain 1836. The...

The light at the end of the gun

By Massad Ayoob Issue #128 • March/April, 2011 Dave writes, "A few weeks ago I had to shoot a skunk in the chicken house, but the...

Savage Model 110 — A proven economical backwoods rifle

By Massad Ayoob Website Exclusive • July, 2008 Fifty years ago, Savage Arms introduced a new bolt-action sporting rifle. In the gun world, this was news....

Preparedness

Disaster preparation!

Why you need to addsolar to your emergencypower backup plans

Hypothermia — A real winter danger

The Five “P”s: A fire evacuation grab ‘n’ go kit

Changing the odds in home fire protection

Wildfires: Before, During, After

Articles By Dave Duffy

My View: Call Me Miracle Man!

By Dave Duffy Issue #177 • July/August/September, 2019 Superheroes are the rage these days at movie theaters. Even I am fascinated by them. Old style heroes...