If you are considering homesteading, or are simply interested in growing your own food, you’ll want to know what kind of soil you have, and if it’s suitable for agriculture. Should you not already own land that you can farm on, you’ll want to know where to look for suitable land.
For Canadians, there is an excellent online map tool for determining exactly how suitable soil is for agriculture. There are additional map tools for forestry, land use, recreation, ungulates, and waterfowl. A good tool for determining where you may or may not want to homestead.
Mother Earth News is an excellent publication for those who wish to live sustainably, want to learn methods to further improve their environmental responsibility, or to live in a manner that is more simple than our current cities-and-suburbs Western society. Their topics range across homesteading, hobby farming, gardening, power equipment, building your own home, raising animals, home power generation, and many other topics.
If, like myself, you haven’t been subscribing since their inception in 1970, you can now access their entire article archive online, with full access to all their articles back to 1970. It’s an excellent resource packed full of great information, and freely available.
If you live in an urbanized area (like much of SW Ontario) you likely don’t have acres of land to raise your own cattle or pigs for food. However raising chickens requires very little land, and only as much investment as you want to put into it.
You can raise your chickens either for meat, for eggs, or both. It sounds like it’s much more cost-efficient to raise chickens for eggs for personal consumption. That will obviously change if the world ends tomorrow, but either way, the feathery little dolls are a good source of protein. Eggs would be an excellent barter as well.
It is interesting to note that chickens also feed on bugs, so allowing your chickens to range free in your yard (see the precautions about animals, especially dogs) may be an excellent natural way of protecting your vegetation and yourself from pests. They don’t stop at eating bugs, either… they will apparently consume just about anything, from kitchen scraps to weeds. This provides an even richer diet for your flock, producing richer eggs to boot.
One further aspect that shouldn’t be ignored is their manure. Although very hot, meaning it will burn plants if applied directly, their manure is an excellent fertilizer. Apply it to a future garden to prepare it for next year, or let it mellow in your composter. Either way, there seems to be no end to the good stuff that comes out of these fowl.
GatewayToVermont.com is packed with great information about raising chickens, including raising the chicks, the infrastructure you’ll need, care for your birds, and even their take on how to process the birds destined for your stomach.
CLUNK. The power just went out. Regardless of why, your electric lights may not be working for a long time now. But you don’t mind, because you’re prepared. What have you prepared with? I’ve thought of three sources of light that may provide illumination without any civil infrastructure in place, all quite different. They are:
Obviously, all of these rely on different sources of power to provide light. My questions are:
Tealights can be had for less than $5/100. Each is supposed to give about 10 hours of burn, so if your aim is to simply give you enough light to ensure you don’t bump into things, tealights give you a big bang for your buck.
Unfortunately, as lovely as they are, you’ll need at least two to be minimally functional in a moderately-sized room. One will allow you to see objects and avoid them, but that’s it. If you want to see more, you’ll need two or three. Distinguishing colours will be difficult without a whole bunch. Reading by them is extremely tricky, as by their placement their light tends to radiate up from a surface, instead of down like you’d need to read.
Worst-case scenario, then: you need to light 5 per night, for 3 hours. That means your bag of 100 tealights will last you about 60 days, or roughly two months. One bag of 100 (like the kind you get at Ikea) isn’t all that big, but when you need 6 bags per year, they start to take up room. Obviously, you could toss $100 worth in the corner of your garage and it will last you for three years, but if society’s crumbling you may want to store things other than tealights. And $100 in tealights is not portable.
The other issue with any sort of candle is that you need a source of flame, at least intense heat to light them. Lighters are small and last a long time, so you could horde a fistful of lighters along with your pile of tealights, and that would last you a long time.
My gut feeling is that tealights may be a good medium-term solution. Sure, have a few bags on hand and stock a couple of lighters, but if something happens that permanently disrupts the availability of electricity, you’ll at least have some time to figure out what else you can do.
A lamp could conceivably last forever, but uses two consumables: the fuel (alcohol or oil), and wicks. The fuel could be stocked, but it is also one material that you could make yourself.
Through the marvels of fermentation and distilling, it’s possible that with a bit of ingenuity you could supply yourself with enough alcohol to keep yourself in light, and maybe even have a little snort before bed. However, alcohol is derived from sugar or starch through fermentation, so you’d need a supply of fruit or vegetables (apples, corn, potatoes) to ferment.
Oil could be derived from animal fats, and I’ve used enough olive, corn, sunflower, and canola oil in my time to know that it’s available from beans, nuts, and vegetables. The process of actually extracting the oil from said sources ranges from the fairly easy to the mechanically intensive. You may also want to consider whether using edible sources for lighting oil isn’t just a waste of what could be food.
Wicks, on the other hand, should be pretty easy to make. Old cotton clothing that is worn through would make many wicks. One pair of old jeans could probably last you into the next decade. So, as long as you think you can get or make lamp fuel, or the raw materials with which to make it, a lamp or two might not be a bad choice.
LED lamps, once you have them, require nothing but sunlight. There are two ways of implementing LED lamps. One, you could buy a solar photovoltaic (PV) array, a battery storage system, and run the LEDs off of the battery, using the PV array to charge the battery. Of course, you’d have to run wires, maintain the battery, and install the array somewhere with lots of sunlight. The battery, however, could get you through a couple sunless days should the need arise.
The second method would be to buy those solar moonlights that are so popular in gardens and along walkways. They provide a decent amount of light, have their charging and storage system built-in, and are portable.
In either case, LEDs have a large initial cost, but are pretty much free, for a while. The solar moonlights use a pair of AA NiMH batteries to store their charge, but are only useful for about 600 cycles, or two years. After that you need new batteries, which are not inexpensive. A hardwired system in your house could use a much larger automotive battery that has a much longer cycle life, thereby giving you a longer life. By charging only on alternating days you would double its life by cycling it half as much, with only a slight reduction in life due to a deeper discharge. Using an array of such batteries would give you the most robust system, but that has other issues beyond the scope of this article.
I don’t see a cut-and-dry winner. Assuming one can afford, and knows how to build, the infrastructure needed within your home for solar LEDs, that might be a real winner. Tealights I would award with being the most immediate solution, as it would be super easy to have a bunch on-hand that would last you a while. Lamps, while they seem like the best idea of all, may take away valuable food sources in the quest of making more fuel once your fuel stock runs dry.
I guess there’s a good reason that people went to bed when it got dark before the advent of electric light. We may simply find that keeping our up-past-nightfall habits are too energy-intensive to keep without the benefit of electricity.
Earthquake? Meteor strike? The Rapture? Joined a deep-woods militia? No matter what the situation, you still can’t shake that sugar craving you’ve been having? Fear not fellow sugar addict, I’m going to tell you how to get your fix from our friend the Maple tree.
Maple syrup is but one goodie that can be made from maple sap. By pouring a ladle of hot syrup onto some fresh snow, you’ll get maple toffee. If you continue to boil the syrup down, it will eventually crystallize into maple sugar, also known as maple candy. In theory, candy should be easier to store, keep indefinitely, and could be remade into syrup again simply by reconstituting it. But enough chitchat, let’s get down to how to make it.
Collecting maple sap for boiling is done in the early spring, generally between late April to late March. The exact date isn’t as important as the daily temperature fluctuations. Sap will flow best when the overnight temperature is slightly below freezing, and the daytime high is slightly above. So long as you have these conditions, you’ll be getting good sap. If you collect too long, the sap will start tasting funny.
The first thing you need is a hole in the tree. Generally, the hole should be about waist-height, but keep in mind that there may be a lot of snow around the trees at that time of year. Don’t put the bucket too high, and suddenly realize weeks later that you were standing on a meter of snow! Make sure the hole isn’t right on top of a previous year’s hole.
Once the hole is in, there are two methods for collecting maple sap:
If you take a taste of the raw sap, you’ll detect that it’s sweet. All you have to do to make syrup is get rid of the excess water. The key is to boil slowly and carefully, otherwise you’ll simply burn the sugar and have nothing but a bitter black tar to show for your efforts.
Purpose-made maple boiling pans can be purchased that allow continuous flow, but again, unless you’re a high-volume operation you won’t need this. Boil small amounts to start off with to get the hang of it, so if something does go awry you won’t spoil your entire batch.
(This might be a good time to tell you to think strategically, and collect the water that is boiling out of your sap. It is essentially distilled water once boiled, and thereby worth saving. You may as well make the most out of your fire.)
If you’re planning on making maple sugar, be extremely careful in the last stages of boiling. The less water that remains in your syrup/sugar, the easier it is to burn the whole batch. Instead of boiling right down to sugar, it may be a good idea to stop at the thick syrup stage, and allow evaporation and crystallization to complete the process. Maple rock candy would be quite yummy too.
No matter which way you do it, be prepared for a messy clean up. Syrup is sticky, so you can imagine how hard it is to get maple sugar off of something. Get what you can out, and then perhaps add water to re-dissolve the sugar and add it into the next batch for boiling off.
Alternatively, you can just a very small amount of hot water and reconstitute the sugar into syrup, and give the whole family a treat. Of course, you could just start licking the pot furiously if you still need that sugar fix.
You require some form of shelter. Be it snow, wind, rain, or sun that you need to escape, you need shelter. Unless you’re nomadic, you will probably want something semi-permanent.
One solution for Do-It-Yourselfers is to build using adobe bricks. Adobe structures extremely varied in their construction, but I’m going to concentrate on adobe bricks specifically. As long as you have access to water, sand, and clay-rich soil, you can make adobe bricks. Optional materials that would give your bricks further strength would be straw, dried grass, or other similar materials.
There are many online resources explaining how to make adobe bricks so I’ll paraphrase:
It would be wise to make a small test batch to ensure you have your mixture correct before making hundreds of cracked or brittle bricks.
One word of caution - adobe bricks are simply clay, sand, and water. Don’t expect them to be waterproof, or to last very long unprotected from the rain. Use an exterior cover and/or a wide roof overhang to shield your adobe from undue moisture, and keep an eye on drainage around your shelter.
You’re preparing for an emergency. Of the three basic necessities, food and water are likely the two you’re worried about the most (the other being shelter). Stockpiling is an easy, relatively inexpensive method of getting through an emergency. The questions are, How much food should I stockpile? and How long is it practical to rely on a stockpile?
Let’s look at basic caloric requirements. According to the US Adult Recommended Dietary Allowances (RDAs), the average female requires 2200 kcal per day and the average male 2900 kcal. If you’re over 50 you need less (1900 female, 2300 male), and children are a whole different ballgame. Note that these are average values, and your requirements may vary. If you want to check out your specific requirements use this calculator.
For our purposes here we’ll ignore children and simply examine the needs of an average couple. Their nutritional requirements total 5100 kcal per day. Protein and carbohydrates provide 4 kcal per gram, and fat provides 9 kcal/g. For a 30-10-60 dietary ratio of fat-protein-carbs, our average couple will need 170g of fat, 130g of protein and 760g of carbohydrates daily. Based on the approximate nutritional content of typical foods, that total of 1060g (or 1.06kg) will translate into roughly 2.5kg of actual food.
The Canadian Red Cross recommends that you stock 2L of water per person per day (pdf). That seems like a lot, as I’ve previously seen them recommend 1L/person/day, so we’ll go with that. That’s 2L/couple/day, another 2kg.
At 2.5kg of food and 2kg of water per couple per day, one week’s worth of food and water will be 32kg of food and water. One month, and you’re stocking 135kg. Obviously, your stockpile is not mobile. If you aren’t sure where you’ll end up in an emergency, keep a small stock at home or in your vehicle, enough for one day or to get you to where you main stockpile is.
You can reduce your stockpile by storing only small amounts of water, and relying on your [own /rhahn/hpl/food/water/water_from_soil.html] [means /rhahn/hpl/food/water/DIY_filtration.html] of producing safe drinking water. An easy alternative for short-term emergencies is drinking water tablets. This can cut out the necessity of storing 2kg/day of water, but you’ll still have 2.5kg/day of food to store.
How much food should I stockpile?
As long as you realize that you won’t be able to move your stockpile, as much as you have room for. In other words, if you don’t want to wait out an emergency in your downtown apartment, don’t stockpile there. Stockpile at your cottage, or a trusted friend’s place instead.
How long is it practical to rely on a stockpile?
The only limitation I can forsee is whether the contents of your stock will start to go bad on you, so check expiry dates. You should also realize that you will become mighty sick of eating brown beans after a week or two, so you may want to get some variety of foods. It would be a good idea to eat from and replenish your stock frequently.
Life without the FEW (fuel, electricity, and water) is difficult to imagine; some of us reading this may be a part of a family that has enjoyed those things for 3 generations or more. So if all that infrastructure dried up, and stayed dried up, what could we reasonably expect to happen? I’m going to paint in broad brush strokes what I expect to see. As supporting evidence, I’m going to cite two observations that most people wouldn’t have problems with, and that I’m using to create this story.
The link to the people’s reaction is interesting because it discusses the difference between people’s reactions to other massive blackouts that have happened. For the sake of my discussion, I’m going to use the 2003 blackout as a template for my projections. Truly, the end result will be the same no matter how it starts.
The problem with the city is that there’s no room to live once the FEW runs out. It sounds funny to read that, but consider: city dwellers are so densely packed, that there’s no room to farm, or keep animals we consider to be a source of food. All of the food-generating industries have been moved out to the low density areas - farms.
There will be a lot of smart people who will flee to the country when they realize what’s about to happen. If they’re really smart, then they’ll have left early and travelled far. Why? The slightly less smart, starving, diseased, prone to violence people who reach the same conclusions can’t travel as far.
Hopefully there will be a lot of smart farmers willing to receive them. Without FEW, they’ve got some pretty serious problems of their own. For example, chickens these days are grown in an incredibly high-density self-contained environment. Without electricity (ergo, without air-conditioning) those birds will cook themselves to death in short order. Without fuel, many farmers can’t maintain the size of lots that they enjoy now with the tools they have (unless they’re of the Amish, Old Order Mennonites or similar cultures).
So what should a smart farmer do? They should plan to and welcome a good number of smart squatters. They should portion off their lands in expectation of these people. They should plan to build a community where everyone will do their part to grow food, and take care of each other. And they should plan to assume responsibility to ensure the well-being of those people. Our culture and lifestyle will take on a feudal quality.
The Handbook for Primitive Living is not even a month old, so nobody’s asked the question yet, but I’m sure they will. What question is that? “Why’d you start this handbook?”
It’s not like either of us are exactly outdoorsy survivalist types, so what possessed us to get the HPL going?
Well, my answer is, “Take your pick:”
“Boston”to that.)
“Titor”is for real, some scary things may be happening. They may not be, but we’d rather be prepared, right?
In other words, the Handbook is a mental first-aid kit. You may never need it, but if you do you’ll be glad you have it.
I really do need to look into the magic that is activated carbon filtration, but I do know it has something to do with the incredible amount of surface area that activated carbon has. Regardless of whether I actually know the science behind it, there is a great link (in not-so-great English) on how to build your own charcoal water filter from just about nothing.
I’ll paraphrase here:
There is a picture at the site that further explains what proportions to use.
The key is that the charcoal you’ll use will come straight from your very own campfire. That’s right, just go through the remnants of your fire (watch out for hot coals!) and pick out the black nuggets that are the charcoal. For such a potentially life-saving device, it’s incredibly easy to make.
I saw demonstrated on television a method of extracting water from the ground using nothing more than a container and a sheet of clear plastic. It does not produce a large quantity of water, but some is better than none. What this method does is essentially distill water out of the soil.
Solar energy will turn this setup into a miniature greenhouse and solar distillery. Water in the soil will evaporate and condense on the inner surface of the plastic sheet. When enough condensate accumulates, drops will form, which will then run down the slight slope produced by the weight on top of the sheet, and then drop into your open-top container.
To get the water collected, you’ll need to take the plastic up, which will let all the hot, moist air out of your makeshift solar still. So it is best to leave it as long as possible to collect the most water you can. Perhaps building it early in the morning and collecting at twilight or late evening would be best. If you are in a desperate state of thirst, you can always use a small-diameter tube as a straw, placing one end in your container and routing it out of the hole under the plastic sheet.
The amount of water collected will depend on soil conditions. However, it may be possible to use this method to distill murky or contaminated water by pouring the unpotable water into the hole before covering it with the plastic.
Larger holes, and multiple holes, may be dug, limited only by the amout of clear plastic sheeting you have. Translucent sheeting should also work. Opaque sheeting may work, but likely not as quickly as most of the solar energy will be turned into heat in the sheet, instead of passing through into the soil.
If you wanted to get extreme in your water conservation, you could dig a hole big enough to live in, cover it with plastic, and live in the hole with your open container. The moisture in your breath would eventually be collected, as would water expelled in your urine and feces. Of course, you’d be living in a warm, humid hole with urine, feces, a cup of water, and no ventillation, so I wouldn’t recommend this. {wink}
Throughout this site there will be numerous articles that give dimensions and quantities. Where possible, dual metric and Imperial units will be provided. However, for your reference (and our own) here are some basic conversions between metric and Imperial units and vice versa:
This site is a thesis. What we want to explore is how to make adjustments to your life so that you’re not dependant upon so much of the infrastructure we take for granted these days.
How would you need to live life if your country didn’t have
From those three things, look at what falls out: Any factory or business that needs electricity in order to be in business won’t produce any goods or services. Phones (of any kind) won’t work. Water purification will become an issue. Taking showers, or flushing a toilet becomes impossible fairly quickly. Medical care is compromised. Batteries will become scarce, then nonexistent.
It sounds like the end of the world as we know it… but not for all of us. Many peoples across the globe already live under those conditions. Perhaps they have a thing or two to teach us. This web site aims to collect that knowledge.
But we also want to aim for more than outlining primitive living skills, because we still have more than they did. We get to play with 21st century inventions or refinements to older inventions. For example, we have the bicycle. We also have (although not as ubiquitous) solar cells. Can we do useful stuff with this?
The content in this site have been brought to you by Andrew Netherton and Robert Hahn. At the time of this post, neither of us have any experience with primitive living. We’ll be doing research, some thinking out loud, and maybe take a course or two. This site is as much for our benefit as we hope it will be for yours.
If you know more about a topic than we do, please contact us. We’ll be happy to accept submissions and consider them for placement here.
Should you see any reference to any company, product, or service on these pages, please understand that these names may officially have trademarks, registered trademarks, or service marks after their name. If the particulars are important to you, please Google for this information. It is freely available, after all.
If you should happen to catch any factual errors, or feel it necessary to point out that I should refer to a product with a slightly different sequence of words[1], then a polite letter would endear me to honour your request a lot better than a barked command. Please remember that I’m maintaining this site for the love of it, not for profit, and I think we’ll get along just fine.
[1] for example, I once worked for a company who had Microsoft Canada as a client, and learned that if I had to refer to a product, I wouldn’t say “Windows”
, but “the Microsoft® Windows® Operating System”
for a first reference, followed by “the Windows Operating System”
in later references on the same page. Many companies have a trademark policy document that describe the appropriate and inappropriate references to their products, so that any corporate communications is standardized. This is simply good business sense. And to the point that prompted this long footnote, this is the kind of change I’d be willing to make on request if it mattered.