Recommended

Recommended: City Prepping

/ Re-Farmer / 8 Comments

Welcome to my second “Recommended” series. Here, you’ll find various sites and channels that I’ve been enjoying and wanted to share with you. With so many people currently looking to find ways to be more self sufficient or prepared for emergencies, that will be the focus for most of these, but I’ll also be adding a few that are just plain fun. Please feel free to leave a comment or make your own recommendation. I hope you enjoy these!

I hemmed and hawed over including this on on my Recommended list. Not because it isn’t a fantastic resource, but because “prepper” sites tend to include a lot of stuff that is well beyond what the average person can, or even should, do.

This one is a bit of an exception, though. City Prepping is, as you can probably guess by the name, geared more towards those living in urban environments. I’ll just quote a portion from their About page.

This channel’s goal is to help everyday people learn the basics of survival in times of crisis. With over 80% of Americans living in an Urban/Suburban environment, many lack the basics to ensure they have the necessary food, water, medical skills, and security in the event of a catastrophe. City Prepping’s chief aim is to help provide survival basics for everyday people that are practical and easy to implement to be prepared should calamity strike.

The YouTube channel has been going since 2015. If you visit the About page, you’ll find links to their other social media and Odysee pages. They have a website, where you can read articles on their blog and shop for supplies.

Their focus is geared towards emergency preparedness, without the sort of “doomsday, the world is about to end” cloud over it that others have. Oh, they do address “doomsday” scenarios. I just find the entire attitude is far more realistic. In fact, that’s one of the first things they address in this older video of theirs.

A lot of the videos are very practical; how to store water properly and safely, how to make a family bug out bag, and …

… how to cook after a disaster.

That’s one we’re working to keep on top of, based on what situations we are most likely end up in, such as losing power.

They also look at and compare various equipment, from freeze driers to solar generators, and much more. You’ll even find videos on gardening, bee keeping and easy meals to cook, should you find yourself in an emergency situation.

They even cover growing vegetables, if you live in an apartment.

Part two

Other topics include medical and health considerations, financial concerns and the spectre of economic collapse, and how to form mutually beneficial communities. Many videos deal with current events and situations, and discuss what to look out for, in an uncertain future. They even cover the importance of things beyond the physical.

One of the major differences with this resource is that it comes from a place of experience. This is someone who has lived through some pretty extreme SHTF experiences.

Part two.

They are also very response to comments and their online community. Shortly after I discovered the channel, they put out a survey that I took part in, asking about what areas we felt were important to address. They also realized that, with so many videos scattered over so many years, it would be difficult for anyone to find the information they need. Especially for people just starting out. To address that, they created a course: The Prepper’s Roadmap.

From the website:

With 18+ hours of video trainings housed inside a private members area, teaching you step by step how to prepare for ANY disaster.

Holding your hand every step of the way, as we move from creating your 3 day “bugout bag”, to storing 3 weeks of supplies – Enough to survive 95% of potential disasters…

To bringing it all together into a 3 month SHTF survival plan that builds your prepping foundation and helps you become self-sufficient for longer and longer time horizons.

And what sets this course apart from every other course out there, is it isn’t just some data dump about how much water, food, and supplies you need…

Instead, it’s customized to your specific situation, with checklists, exercises, and guides for you to follow along with me as we help you reach 3 months of preparation.

Which I think is really fantastic, and would go a long way to keep from becoming so overwhelmed with all the things we “should” be doing, or getting, should some disaster take place.

After the past couple of years, a lot of people are realizing that it really is a good idea to be prepared for emergency situations, whether is it a natural disaster, a job loss, or even the quintessential doomsday event. Even if it’s just to put a few things away for a rainy day, City Prepping is a good resource to get started, and just good a recourse for those who’ve already been working on their preps for years. I highly recommend them.

The Re-Farmer

Recommended: Our Half Acre Homestead

/ Re-Farmer / 2 Comments

Welcome to my second “Recommended” series. Here, you’ll find various sites and channels that I’ve been enjoying and wanted to share with you. With so many people currently looking to find ways to be more self sufficient or prepared for emergencies, that will be the focus for most of these, but I’ll also be adding a few that are just plain fun. Please feel free to leave a comment or make your own recommendation. I hope you enjoy these!

As I found myself delving further into recourses for the “homesteading” community – a term I still find strange, since it’s how I grew up, and no one called it “homesteading” back then – I saw a lot of really great information. It was very encouraging to see so many young families in particular, diving into lives of self sufficiency and self reliance, while also being part of a larger community that was more than happy to share information and help each other out.

Many happily share their experiences online. Some of the interesting and helpful articles and videos I found where those sharing about the mistakes they made, or what they wish they’d know before they started, and so on. These often included lists of things that they really didn’t think about at all, until after they started homesteading, like unexpected costs of living (home insurance is a big one!).

I also saw a number of sites that had lists of things to help people prepare for homestead living, before they got to actually doing it. One item that I saw cropping up more than a few times was just how much physical labour was involved, and stressing how important it was to be fit and healthy.

Except, in this day and age, when people say “fit” or “healthy”, what they’re really saying is “be skinny.” Also, able bodied and young.

Which is amusing to me, because I’m old, broken and fat, I have a disabled husband, and even my daughters have their own health issues they have to work around. Yet, here we are.

Today’s recommendation is someone who is also breaking all the “rules”, and doing it anyhow: Our Half Acre Homestead.

Don’t have a lot of land? They have only half an acre.

Don’t have a lot of money? They are a single income family that when through a bankruptcy and still managed to buy the property only a couple of years later.

Feel like you’re too old? In one of the earliest of their earlier videos, she mentions that she was 50. That video, at the time of this writing, was 11 years old.

That’s right. This couple has been on their half acre homestead and making videos for more than 10 years! Their oldest video was done in 2009.

As you can imagine, they have a LOT of videos!

The above video was done in 2010. You can see they’re still just setting up their garden, the house is being worked on, they’ve got chickens and talk about the plans they are working towards. Talk about starting from the ground up!

This next video was uploaded in 2011, and shows how things had grown and expanded over the previous years, from the building of a chicken coop and incubating eggs, to building a small barn and getting a calf and goats.

In that half acre, they are able to have chickens, cows, goats, pigs and rabbits – that I’ve seen so far! – supplemented by hunting. Mrs. V is an excellent shot. They’ve got their garden, bee hives, and even tap their own sap and make their own maple syrup.

All of this accomplished by a couple that is older, rounder and kinda broken. Like me! :-D They’ve also been at it for a long time, and have much to share. Along with the many cooking videos and gardening videos, you’ll also find videos like this one.

Peameal bacon is also sometimes known as Canadian bacon or back bacon.

Now that I’ve seen the video, I want to make some of my own! That looks amazing!

You’ll also find “grocery haul” videos, like this more recent one, showing what they add to their food supply.

You’ll find videos sharing frugal ideas, like this one…

… using bits and pieces to make and can stock.

There are also live stream videos, and shorter Tea Break videos.

Many of the videos are sorted into playlists, too.

Like us, they’ve been itching to get out in the garden, too!

They’re in Eastern Canada, which has a longer growing season than we’ve got. While this video was being made, we were getting more snow, and still dealing with the new snow from our recent storm.

You’ll find videos on butchering and how to dress a deer, baking, cooking with a slow cooker or an Instant Pot, YouTube tax problems for Canadians, and even live streams from the Freedom Convoy 2022. There’s videos on how to knit, and make Christmas ornaments. There are videos on freezing, canning, dehydrating, growing, seed saving, product reviews…

There is just so much that’s covered, as one might expect from someone who’s been making videos for more than a decade! New videos are added very frequently, too.

There’s just a vast wealth of information available, and I highly recommend checking out Our Half Acre Homestead.

The Re-Farmer

Recommended: Gardening in Canada

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Welcome to my second “Recommended” series. Here, you’ll find various sites and channels that I’ve been enjoying and wanted to share with you. With so many people currently looking to find ways to be more self sufficient or prepared for emergencies, that will be the focus for most of these, but I’ll also be adding a few that are just plain fun. Please feel free to leave a comment or make your own recommendation. I hope you enjoy these!

Here’s one for the Canadians, and other cold climate gardeners!

In the last few years, I’ve been spending a lot of time researching what sorts of food producing perennials we can grow in our climate zone. One of the things I soon noticed was that a lot of the hardiest varieties of fruits and berries that I was looking at were developed by the University of Saskatchewan. There are a lot of good things coming out of the University of Saskatchewan!

Well, it turns out that the UofS also has good scientists coming out of it, too!

Gardening in Canada started out as only a YouTube channel by a soil scientist. The channel was started in 2016, with just a few videos put out in the first three years, and then a break of no videos at all until the spring of 2020. From then on, videos started getting posted a lot more often, and the channel really took off. Clearly, there were a lot of people out there who were eager to learn more about gardening from the perspective of a soil scientist! Before long, a website was also started, with all sorts of resources available. If you visit the channel’s About page, you’ll also find links to her Facebook, Instagram and Pinterest sites. You’ll also find her on Rumble and Odysee.

With so many people suddenly feeling the need to get into gardening, but not having a lot of funds, I figured I’d start with this video.

Start a productive garden for next to nothing? Yup. It can be done! Pretty much the only thing actual cash spent would be going for is the seeds, and she even has ways to get those for free, too.

Want more information on how to start a cold climate garden? Here ya go.

One of the things I appreciate about this resource is that, being in Saskatchewan, she’s in zone 3, just as I am. But are zones all that important? Here, she explains why they are – and why they aren’t!

Interesting to learn that being in a Canadian zone 3, we’d be considered zone 4 in the US.

There are a HUGE number of topics covering, talking about things like beneficial soil fungus and microbes, starting seeds indoors, the safety of using cardboard as a mulch, and so much more. This next video is why we scarified our gourd seeds when starting them indoors this year, and I think it made a huge difference compared to last year, when we had such troubles with germination.

She even goes into some Canadian gardening history.

How the government handled Victory Gardens in Canada was very different than in the US or the UK! I have to admit to being thrown over the fact that people needed government permission just to teach others how to garden!

Another thing I love about her videos is that, when she talks about the science of things, she is straight up about it, even when it might not be particularly popular. Like this video about glyphosate.

I’m hanging on to this one for the next time I find myself in a debate with someone who has been badly misinformed about the substance.

She even dares tackle GMOs.

Another topic that a lot of people are misinformed about.

She also challenges some of the more common “hacks” out there.

In fact, she has an entire playlist debunking garden hacks with science.

Even if you’re not in a cold climate, I have no doubt you’ll find something useful and informative you can use. Gardening in Canada is just overflowing with excellent, science based information and I highly, highly recommend it!

The Re-Farmer

Recommended: RoseRed Homestead – That “Woman with a gadget”

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Welcome to my second “Recommended” series. Here, you’ll find various sites and channels that I’ve been enjoying and wanted to share with you. With so many people currently looking to find ways to be more self sufficient or prepared for emergencies, that will be the focus for most of these, but I’ll also be adding a few that are just plain fun. Please feel free to leave a comment or make your own recommendation. I hope you enjoy these!

Over the past few years, I’ve seen quite a rise in people interested in leading more self sufficient lives, and especially a rise in the “homesteading” area. Which kind of threw me when I first stumbled on the community, since that was how I grew up, and no one called it “homesteading” back then.

There are now many, many websites, video channels, Pinterest boards, social media groups and even streaming services, dedicated to the them. On many of these, you’ll see references to “going back to how Grandma used to live”. Many extol the virtues of living a “simpler” life, going “off grid” and low tech. They’re learning how to grow gardens, raise animals, and preserve the bounty, moving away from certain materials, whether it’s plastics or hydrocarbon based fuels, or away from certain types of companies, like big box stores or massive online shopping services, like Amazon. The goal is to be more “green”, “sustainable”, etc. Just like “Grandma” used to live.

Now, these are laudable goals. I share many of them. But here’s the thing.

That’s not how “Grandma” used to live.

I mean, yes, most of those things were true, but they are true only from today’s perspective. In reality, whenever possible, “Grandma” embraced new technology, new materials, and resources. Canning wasn’t possible until it became cheap and easy to get standard sized jars, lids and rings. Techniques such as fermenting, brining, drying, smoking – these all were continually improved as new equipment and materials came available. Anything that made life easier, made it faster and safer to preserve food, or acquire material goods, was embraced.

Grandma was as high tech as she could afford to be.

When I stumbled on the RoseRed Homestead YouTube channel, one of my first thoughts was, THIS is Grandma. Our previous generations would have absolutely embraced all of the gadgets, if they could, and if they couldn’t, they found workarounds.

I’ll quote this from their About page.

We focus on three simple themes: Emergency Preparedness, Food Security, and Self Reliance. If difficult times are coming, we want to help our channel community be as ready as possible to sustain themselves for an extended period of time and to assist others when possible. You will find videos on safe canning, dehydrating, freeze drying, gardening, and preparedness projects from safe water storage to cooking off grid. We have even done scientific testing of new electric canners with a special “gadget!”

This channel has only been around since the spring of 2019, but is well filled with some really amazing and useful videos – and now they have a new website, too.

It’s really, really hard to pick just a few videos as examples, there are so many fantastic ones.

One of the things I love about this channel is their thorough experiments and comparisons. So surprise that Rose works in Science Education! This is one excellent example.

Here she preserves potatoes by various methods, including freeze drying – yes, she has a freeze dryer! Those things are expensive! – then reconstituting, tasting and comparing the final product.

Interested in pressure canning? Confused with all the information out there? Check this out.

Great information, but I’m also blown away by the gadgets sitting on her counter. :-D

Want to learn about dehydrating? She’s got you covered.

As someone who is interesting in grinding our own flour, I found this one quite useful.

Gotta love that 40 yr old mill she’s got!

In this next one, she tests out a “survival soup” recipe.

There is some great information on that one. In the “emergency preparedness” and “survival” areas, there are a lot of claims made, so it’s great to see some of them being tested out in such a methodical way.

Like this other one.

Here, she shows her off-grid kitchen gadgets – and how her back ups have backups!

It’s not all high tech, though. Here, she makes and demonstrates a home made solar cooker.

Then, when people commented about her many, expensive gadgets and asked if she could talk about some low tech options, she responded with this.

I look forward to her follow up videos on this!

This is just a sampling of videos covering a broad range, and I didn’t even touch all of the topics she covers.

This channel is an absolute gold mind, and I highly recommend checking out their videos, and learn how “Grandma” does things to live a self-sufficient, prepared lifestyle!

The Re-Farmer

Recommended Reboot

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It occurred to me that it’s been about 2 years since I added to my Recommended series of posts. I’ve found many more great resources to add to the list, so for the next while, I’ll be making a new series of posts to add to the list. Given the circumstances, most of them will be in some way related to self sufficiency, homesteading, etc., but I’ll also include a few that are just fun.

Last year, I posted these once a week, but even paring things down quite a bit, there’s still quite a few I’d like to share with you, so I’ll probably be making them twice a week, this time.

Feel free to recommend a few of your favourite resources in the comments, too.

I hope you enjoy them and look forward to hearing your thoughts about them.

The Re-Farmer

Recommended: Kris Harbour Natural Building

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Welcome to my “Recommended” series of posts. These will be weekly – for now – posts about resources and sites I have found over the past while that I found so excellent, I want to share them with you, my dear readers. 🙂 Whether or not I continue to post these, and how often they are posted, will depend on feedback. Please feel free to comment below, and if you have a favorite resource of your own, do share, and I will review them for possible future posts.

I hope you find these recommendations as useful and enjoyable as I have!

Okay, so I totally forgot to make a Recommended post last week! I also forgot yesterday was Wednesday. :-D My apologies!

Today’s post, however, is the last one I’ve got in my queue! If you have a resource site or video channel you would like to see a Recommended post for, please let me know in the comments with a link, and I’ll check it out.

In today’s post, I present to you a guy who is going all out with off grid self sufficiency! Kris Harbour Natural Building.

This channel has been around since 2015, and wow! He’s got so much going on here! This is someone who left behind life in London to live off a plot of the land in Wales, and has accomplished some pretty amazing things in the process!

I first found the YouTube channel while doing searches for ideas on what to do with the wood from the trees we had cut away from the roof and power lines. With the sizes of some of the pieces, I had started to think of carving wooden bowls. I was specifically looking for videos on how to do it without power tools. I found this.

At about 2 minutes in, you can see him start to mark out an oval shape using a string. That’s actually where I got the idea on how to mark out the curved, overlapping rows we planted the sunflowers in. I thought it was an ingenious way to mark out a smooth curve.

Then I discovered he lives in a cordwood round house. You can see a tour of it, here, as well as some typical morning chores!

Yes, he’s got running hot and cold water, electricity (wind, hydro and solar!) and internet.

He’s also got a playlist of 41 videos, showing how it was built.

Literally from the ground up.

He’s also built an earth bag workshop.

There are 52 videos in total, spanning 2 years, documenting the build for that!

Want to know how to build a hydroelectric system? He’s got you covered.

Solar shower?

You bet.

How about musical instruments?

Wanna see how to build a harp?

Maybe you’re more into the fibre arts. How about a battery powered carding machine?

Do you live near the ocean? Feeling hungry? How about some coastal foraging?

How about making cider and apple juice?

Build a primitive lime kiln?

Refurbish antique chisels?

Hatching chicks?

Gardening?

It’s all there.

Granted, most of the videos are about the big stuff; the building projects, water, electricity, and infrastructure. As those get done and he works towards increased self sufficiency, the scope of the videos will naturally change. I really appreciate that he’s making all these videos, so anyone can follow along with what he is doing, and perhaps adapt things for their own uses.

I highly recommend checking out his videos, and subscribing to the channel. It’s awesome!

Thank you for checking out my Recommended series of posts. I hope you enjoyed these resources as much as I have! While I will no longer be posting weekly, I will still be keeping an eye out for great resources to recommend in the future, and do feel free to pass on your own favorites in the comments!

The Re-Farmer

Recommended: Self Sufficient Me

/ Re-Farmer / 2 Comments

Welcome to my “Recommended” series of posts. These will be weekly – for now – posts about resources and sites I have found over the past while that I found so excellent, I want to share them with you, my dear readers. 🙂 Whether or not I continue to post these, and how often they are posted, will depend on feedback. Please feel free to comment below, and if you have a favorite resource of your own, do share, and I will review them for possible future posts.

I hope you find these recommendations as useful and enjoyable as I have!

As we continue to clean up, repair and improve things here on the family farm, we do have an ultimate goal to be as self sufficient as we can. Our health and mobility requirements mean we’ll probably never be completely “off the grid”, but there is still a lot we can do.

Growing up here, we were basically subsistence farmers. We grew, raised, preserved, butchered much of our own food, and for our animals, grew most of their feed, too. When it came to gardening, there was a time when the garden was close to an acre in size. This was your typical garden of everything planted in long rows, far enough apart to run a tiller in between. In my mind, gardening meant growing food. Flower gardening was just an aside, and not something I understood as “real” gardening, for may years. Even now, when I think “gardening”, my mind always goes to growing food.

As productive as my mother’s garden was, however, it is not how I want to garden, for many reasons. Everything from the rocky soil where the garden used to be, to mobility and accessibility, leads me to wanting to do raised bed gardening.

The following resource is very much the sort of thing I have in mind. Self Sufficient Me (Website YouTube) is an Australian site, so obviously, there is a lot that won’t apply to us in central Canada! We’re not going to be growing papayas anytime soon. :-D However, this resource has lots of information that can be used pretty much anywhere. Along with their website and YouTube channel, they are on other social media, which you can find linked here. They also have a second YouTube channel here.

It was through the videos that I discovered this resource. I haven’t been able to go back through all 8 years of them, but I’m slowly working on it. ;-)

The videos include some very basic stuff, perfect for beginning gardeners.

This next video really caught my attention, as hugelkultur is sort of the method we will be using when we build our raised beds. We might not use such large stumps and logs, but will likely have lots of big branches!

I especially appreciate that he talks about what didn’t work about the raised bed, as well as showing how the soil looks after 4 years.

Also, I love his tools!!!

Of course, he covers building raised beds as well.

He’s got all my prerequisites: height, strength, easy and cheap! :-D

Don’t have the space to do raised beds? He’s got you covered there, too.

He also goes beyond growing vegetables, and has videos on raising animals, too.

He readily admits that he is no carpenter, and that’s one of the things I love about it. He’s big on going ahead and building things, without worrying about being perfect.

We don’t have to worry about snakes where we are – the snakes we have would be more in danger from the chickens than the other way around – but definitely predators are an issue.

Chickens are not the only critters he raises, and you will find videos about raising quails and ducks, as well as videos reviewing products – the good and the bad! – about pest control, composting, watering, and so much more. I definitely recommend going through the many videos available. I’m sure you will find plenty to inspire you!

The Re-Farmer

Recommended: How to Cook That

/ Re-Farmer / 2 Comments

Welcome to my “Recommended” series of posts. These will be weekly – for now – posts about resources and sites I have found over the past while that I found so excellent, I want to share them with you, my dear readers. 🙂 Whether or not I continue to post these, and how often they are posted, will depend on feedback. Please feel free to comment below, and if you have a favorite resource of your own, do share, and I will review them for possible future posts.

I hope you find these recommendations as useful and enjoyable as I have!

This week, I would like to recommend a really excellent and interesting YouTube channel. How to Cook That, with Anne Reardon. Along with the YouTube channel, there is a website, and various other social media, Patreon, etc. sites, linked on the About page.

This channel has been putting up videos for 9 years, and the videos cover a LOT of ground! The primary focus is on dessert how-to’s, like this one from 2012.

Reardon – with the assistance of her incredibly brave husband! – also recreates some historical recipes.

That one is rather terrifying! :-D

They also put out “Clever or Never” videos, where they test out various kitchen gadgets.

We used to have the French Fry cutter they tested out here! Ours worked a lot more easily. I think the one they tested may have started to get pretty dull. :-D

Then there are her mind boggling Teeny Weeny Challenge videos.

I just can’t imagine working in that scale! Talk about going all the way, with that miniature kitchen, too!

The thing that first brought me to this channel, however is on a very serious note. Anne Reardon is a food scientist, and she has put out some very important videos. If you’re on Facebook at all, you’ve probably seen the cooking “hack” videos go by, which show several quick clips of “how to” make or do various things food related. Some of them simply don’t work. Others are actually dangerous.

With so much current pandemic misinformation around, she also did a video on some of that, too.

There is just so much great stuff here, in such a variety of food related topics. I highly recommend subscribing to the channel and spending some quality time checking out the videos!

The Re-Farmer

Recommended: The Prairie Homestead

/ Re-Farmer / 3 Comments

Welcome to my “Recommended” series of posts. These will be weekly – for now – posts about resources and sites I have found over the past while that I found so excellent, I want to share them with you, my dear readers. 🙂 Whether or not I continue to post these, and how often they are posted, will depend on feedback. Please feel free to comment below, and if you have a favorite resource of your own, do share, and I will review them for possible future posts.

I hope you find these recommendations as useful and enjoyable as I have!

You would think that, having grown up on the farm, I wouldn’t need to be looking up all these resources on how to live on a farm! :-D Our situation is very different from how I grew up here, though, since most of the land is rented out, and our focus is on a relatively small portion of 1 quarter, around the house. We aren’t to be the sort of farmers my parents were, so homesteading resources have been more in line with what we are looking to be doing over the next few years.

Unfortunately, I’m not finding a lot of Canadian ones, so there’s quite a lot that just doesn’t apply to us. We don’t have the climate for soil conditions. Which is fine. There is still lots to learn! And a lot of “homesteader” skills can be applied anywhere you live.

Like cooking from scratch. That’s a big one, for me, and these skills kept food on the table during some pretty lean years! It was just what we did, when I was growing up, but I definitely learned to appreciate those skills over the years!

The Prairie Homestead is one of those resources that are quite useful, even for those who live in urban areas. The channel started quite a few years ago, with the first videos going back 8 years, and there were a few time gaps before things got into the groove, to where videos are being posted weekly. The focus now is largely on from scratch cooking, and the site owner has a cook book out as well.

Here, you will find videos on how to make things like butter, broth, pasta and sourdough starter, and even how to render lard.

You’ll find videos on how to start seeds indoors, planting, and preserving food, as well as starting a new garden.

Some of the earliest videos include how to milk goats and cows, and others about livestock care. More recent videos include one on their home schooling routine.

I like the really wide range of topics included in their videos.

They also have Facebook, Instagram and podcasts, as well as web pages.

The Prairie Homestead has sections for from-scratch cooking, starting a home stead, growing food and DIY.

The Prairie Homestead Cookbook.

Heritage Cooking Crash Course

Learn How to Can Food

No surprise, then, that one of their videos is about how to support a homestead through online business!


Lots of great information, and I’m really glad to have found them.

I hope you find it useful, too!

The Re-Farmer

Recommended: Townsends

/ Re-Farmer / 2 Comments

Welcome to my “Recommended” series of posts. These will be weekly – for now – posts about resources and sites I have found over the past while that I found so excellent, I want to share them with you, my dear readers. 🙂 Whether or not I continue to post these, and how often they are posted, will depend on feedback. Please feel free to comment below, and if you have a favorite resource of your own, do share, and I will review them for possible future posts.

I hope you find these recommendations as useful and enjoyable as I have!

One of my favourite topics is history. Not the names and dates, conquerors and conquered type of history, but how ordinary people lived. Over the years, I found that the best way to learn about a people and their culture was to learn about their food, their clothing and their everyday items. It’s remarkable how tangential those areas are.

So this next recommendation is for something right up my alley – Townsends, with their focus on 18th century living in the US.

Jas Townsend and Son has been posting videos for 11 years! You’ll find period topics on everything related to everyday life of people in a variety of circumstances, including how men and women dressed in the period, everyday skills, such as weaving and cooking over an open fire, to building a log cabin!

Of course, food plays a big part of these, and this site is where I found out about the mushroom ketchup that we made ourselves.

We’ve used ours all up and need to make another batch! The ground is no longer frozen, so this time we won’t have to skip the horseradish. :-D

The videos also include a lot of interesting historical information, as well.

While their videos cover an amazing diversity of topics on 18th century life – even advice for reenactors! – their website is well worth visiting, too. Pretty much all of the items you see used in the videos are available on their website. Clothing, accessories, camping equipment, kits, books and more are all available, and all historically accurate to every detail available. It’s really amazing to see the variety of items they have!

One of the reasons I like historical recipes like the many that are recreated in these videos, as well as the cooking methods and tools, is that they tend to be really basic. People made these with the materials that were available, and learned to modify accordingly. A lot of modern recipes and cooking videos tend to involve things I either can’t get, can’t afford, or don’t want to use. I like to keep things simple – and cheap! We’ve gone through some very lean times over the years, and old-timey, cooking from scratch food preparation was pretty much the only option we had. Which doesn’t mean we have to sacrifice taste!

Townsends videos are really interesting, for their historical information and insights. Jas Townsend’s calm enthusiasm is infectious, and he is truly dedicated to authenticity and attention to detail. Recreating historical food is always a challenge, whether from recreating recipes that give little to no information on things like quantities, or even ingredients, to recreating foods where no recipes exist at all; just vague descriptions.

Since moving back to the farm, among the things we’ve had to consider is what do when – not if – we find ourselves without electricity, or unable to get to town to buy things we need, etc. It’s part of why we have been slowly working our way to being as self-sufficient as possible. Historical resources like this go a long way to help in planning what we want to work on, like having an earthen oven, etc.

Plus, it’s just really, really enjoyable to watch and learn from them!

The Re-Farmer