There are two kinds of emergencies: short-term emergencies and long-term emergencies. More and more people are starting to think about preparing for long-term emergencies and creating a life-style Plan B that would allow them to carry on in a ‘new normal.’ Dehydrated food plays a big role in short-term emergencies and bridging the gap for

We’re starting to think about how to safely preserve the summer harvest to sustain us in the long winter months – or in a food shortage. It takes about two days of power outage for everything in your spare freezer to go bad. Root cellars, a normal feature of old homesteads, keep root vegetables and

As people become more interested in self-reliance and preservation, the urban farming movement continues to gain momentum. We’ve written about urban gardening and urban bee keeping as great ways to sustain your family and even generate some trade. Now that the weather is nice and you’ve got your tomatoes in and your hives out –

For a growing number of people, backyard beekeeping is the next logical step in their long-term self-reliance plan. The benefits are numerous and beekeepers say that if you can keep a garden or a pet, you can keep bees. Backyard beekeepers not only enjoy dramatic improvements in garden yields, there is, of course, the honey

From Detroit’s famous Urban Gardening projects to New York’s “green roofs”, city and suburban dwellers are using every conceivable sunny spot, no matter how small, to grow edible plants in what seems to be the new national past time, becoming more self-sufficient. Extreme but admirable examples, like the Dervaes family (founders of Urban Homestead) manage