Home - Backwoods Home Magazine

Help your home survive in the path of a wildfire

Are aliens stealing our honeybees?

Hog butchering — Using everything but the squeal

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

Swiss Chard — The Leaf Vegetable That Keeps on Giving!

By Raymond Nones Issue #92 • March/April, 2005 For years every spring I planted spinach in my garden. For those who have never tasted home grown...

Cheaper than Store-Bought Eggs

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 a log crib

Life-long siding with fiber cement board

Gabion walls for form and function

From triumph to tragedy to triumph again. Dorothy Ainsworth makes her valiant comeback

Self-Reliance

Stashing Junk Silver for Bad Times

Just for Kids: Visit the great prairies

By Lucy Shober Issue #35 • September/October, 1995 Did you ever get an urge to just take off and go someplace exotic? Maybe the North Pole...

Shopping to beat inflation

By Darlene Campbell Issue #85 • January/February, 2004 Most of us who read BHM agree that self sufficient living can be debt free, but we also...

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

Science and truth. Are they related?

Gee-Whiz: Insects

Gee-Whiz: Bad Fish, Big Fish

Gee-Whiz: Ice Ages, Past and Future

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

Fried chicken for breakfast

Habeeb Salloum — Poet, Traveler, Recipe Writer

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

Presidents’ wives of the past Part 3

Firearms

Inexpensive retired Russian military rifles can be the ideal backwoods meat guns

Tailoring guns to females

By Massad Ayoob Issue #131 • September/October, 2011 So, I'm sitting here in a hotel writing this, less than three hours after getting off the witness...

Building the coyote rifle

By Rev. J.D. Hooker Issue #107 • September/October, 2007 Feral dogs, coyotes, and those odd-looking "coy dogs" like to feed on my neighbors' livestock on occasion...

Just because

By Massad Ayoob Issue #144 • November/December, 2013 I generally recommend that people buy guns the way they'd buy power tools, or automobiles, or homes. Assess...

Preparedness

Avoiding heat illness

Bugging out in place

Oregon Trail preparedness: What supplies did the settlers carry?

Storm survivors

Gee-Whiz: From Paper to Canning

Preparing for a Temporary Catastrophe

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...