Backwoods Home Magazine - Practical Self-Reliance

Doesn’t anyone remember Tom Paine

Start a Self-Sufficiency Garden Even in a Cramped Apartment

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...

Grow some winter squash this year

Boost your immune system with fast and easy fish dishes

Vitamins D and K — way more important than you thought

Hügelkultur for the Homestead

By Rose Shelton Issue #176 • April/May/June, 2019 Last spring, I finally completed a long-planned homestead project of constructing two hügelkultur beds. What is hügelkultur? It’s...

Solar-Powered Electric Fencing

Plant Your Irish Potatoes This Fall or Winter

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

Building your chicken coop

Build a Trail

Tools and hardware for the backwoods home

Dorothy Ainsworth update: Out of the ashes

Self-Reliance

Call me plumber

Roger Clark: Cane syrup maker

By Massad Ayoob Issue #117 • May/June, 2009 In the syrup house on Roger Clark's farm in Suwannee County, Florida, three generations of his family gather...

Oregon Trail preparedness: What supplies did the settlers carry?

By Don Lewis Issue #176 • April/May/June, 2019 The year was 1834, a year that didn’t really stand out as all that particularly important in American...

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: Presidents

Zombie Apocalypse

A brief history of health and medicine

Three more ways the world can end … and I’m not kidding

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

Habeeb Salloum — Poet, Traveler, Recipe Writer

George Washington Carver — He wrote the book on self-reliance

The barnyard scramble

The vanishing outhouse

Firearms

Affordable firearms

BHM hosts Appleseed marksmanship event

By Massad Ayoob Issue #139 • January/February, 2013 Long a supporter of the Appleseed concept, Backwoods Home Magazine hosted one in Gold Beach, Oregon, in second...

Hunting, processing, and serving black bear

By Linda Gabris Issue #162 • November/December, 2016 Bear was a popular meat in our house when I was growing up in the rural woods. Black...

Of guns and snakes

By Massad Ayoob Issue #151 • January/February, 2015 Mas safely kills a rattlesnake in a populated area. (Note angle of gun and trajectory.) Pistol is a...

Preparedness

Bartering for bad times

Food security 101

Frostbite — Don’t flirt with this sneaky danger

Your survival depends on water

Changing the odds in home fire protection

Emergency planning beyond the bug-out bag

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...