Amateur Ham Radio – The Ultimate Tool for Survival Communications
By Jeffrey R. Yago, P.E.
N4LPE
During any major disaster or grid-down event, communications will not only be critical for coordinating rescue efforts, but could actually save your life by receiving alerts and evacuation instructions. Unfortunately,...
Advice from second-time homesteaders
By Don and Patrice Lewis
In 1993, shortly after we got married, my husband and I took a leap into the unknown. We left urban California, left our jobs, left our families, and settled in...
Turning to turmeric
By Habeeb Salloum
On our farm in southwest Saskatchewan, of all the spices Mother used, there were a few with long histories that she never had in her kitchen. One of these was turmeric, a...
My View: Learn to Do One Thing Well
By Dave Duffy
Learn to do one thing well and you’ll never work another day in your life
A fundamental problem for many young people entering the work force is figuring out not only how to...
Keeping tools sharp
By Dana Benner
There are some things on the homestead that we take great care of, like firearms, knives and machinery. Then there are those things that don’t get the attention that they should, such...
Habeeb Salloum — Poet, Traveler, Recipe Writer
Habeeb Salloum, 95, a poet, world traveler, linguist, and author of recipe books on Middle Eastern cuisine, has written recipe articles for Backwoods Home Magazine for 19 years. The son of Syrian immigrant farmers,...
Gee-Whiz: Presidents
By O.E. MacDougal
November/December 2016, Backwoods Home
I could spend all day coming up with interesting trivia about the Presidents and those who surround them — wives, children, assassins, etc. I could literally fill this magazine...
Gee-Whiz: Time
By O.E. MacDougal
July/August 2016, Backwoods Home
Time. We can’t see, feel, hear, smell, or taste it, but we can measure it and we break it up into smaller and smaller increments. We’ll probably never know...
Gee-Whiz: Ice Ages, Past and Future
By O. E. MacDougal
January/February 2016, Backwoods Home
Most people don’t know that we’re currently in an ice age and have been for the last 2.58 million years. It’s called the Quaternary Ice Age. Again and...
Gee-Whiz: Insects
By O. E. MacDougal
November/December 2015, Backwoods Home
Some 400 million years ago, in the Devonian Period, insects evolved from crustaceans. Since that time, they have been one of the most successful life forms on the...
Gee-Whiz: Trees
By O. E. Macdougal
September/October 2015, Backwoods Home
We’re told they include some of the oldest and largest living organisms on the planet. But do they? The fact is, only about one percent of a...
Gee-Whiz: Bad Fish, Big Fish
By O.E. MacDougal
January/February 2015, Backwoods Home
Fish were the very first vertebrates. That is, they were the first animals with backbones, the purpose of which is to sheathe and protect the nerves in the spinal...
Breg Brace vs Total Knee Replacement for Backwoodsmen
By Dave Duffy
January/February/March, 2019
Now and then you have to make a daring move in your life, or you’ll run the risk of losing your dreams. Some people do that by changing their job to...
Gee-Whiz: Dinosaurs
By O.E. MacDougal
July/August 2014 Backwoods Home
Biologists and paleontologists are now pretty certain that birds are part of the dinosaur lineage. Their extinct relatives include the T-Rex and velociraptors. So, dinosaurs are not really extinct,...
Gee-Whiz: Sleep
By O.E. MacDougal
November/December 2017, Backwoods Home
For thousands of years, sleep has been one of life’s great mysteries. As humans, we spend about one-third of our lives sleeping, though as babies we spent about 16...
Gee-Whiz: Coffee
By O.E. MacDougal
May/June 2018, Backwoods Home
Every second of every day about 26,000 cups of coffee are drunk around the world. That’s about 2¼ billion cups a day. But it’s still not the most widely...
