Backwoods Home Magazine - Practical Self-Reliance

Plant Your Irish Potatoes This Fall or Winter

Teach your kids math with the banking game

Install rafters alone the easy way

Practical Ideas for Self-Reliant Living

Grow some winter squash this year

By Lisa Nourse I love summertime — I love the green of the trees, the warm weather, and growing my own food. I especially love...

Vitamins D and K — way more important than you thought

Boost your immune system with fast and easy fish dishes

Use Plastic to Get a Head Start on Corn in the...

By Mark and Lynn Klammer Issue #41 • September/October, 1996 As spring approaches each year, we can hardly wait for the feel of warm earth between...

Gleaning — An Old Tradition Made New

Garden Seeds — A Great Winter Pastime

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

Getting logs

Making Apple Cider with a Homemade Press

Build a cold smoker so you can make delicious squaw candy

Build a stone wall

Self-Reliance

Garden injuries

Tale of a country family

By Rachel Baxter Issue #66 • November/December, 2000 Dave and Dianna Saleh (pronounced "Sally") always knew they wanted to live a rural lifestyle. They both came...

Gee-Whiz: From Paper to Canning

By John Silveira (aka O.E. MacDougal) May/June 2017 Backwoods Home The greatest inventions in history are the ones we now take for granted. Fire and the...

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

Subduction zone tsunami — What the residents of the Pacific Northwest have to fear

Zombie Apocalypse

Gee-Whiz: Sleep

Gee-Whiz: Bad Fish, Big Fish

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

Fly it proudly and properly

Declaration of Independence: The unanimous Declaration of the thirteen united States of America

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

President George Washington’s Farewell Address

Firearms

Firearms — Tools of rural living

Firearms handling refresher Part II: Shotguns

By Massad Ayoob Website Exclusive • December, 2003 In Part I, we began a series of refreshers on safety and proper handling of firearms. This time,...

The Appleseed Project

By Massad Ayoob Issue #123 • May/June, 2010 There is nothing else in the shooting world quite like the Appleseed Project, which combines American Revolutionary War...

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...

Preparedness

Emergency treatment for fire-related injuries

The 7 core areas of preparedness

Hypothermia — A real winter danger

10 day survival pack for your vehicle for just $25

Bugging out in place

Caring for wounds in the field

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...