The Best Homesteading Planners: Guide and Review for 2020

According to Wikipedia, it’s a lifestyle of self-sufficiency. A place where you can grow food, preserve food, and some places a small scale production plant as well. All this is Homesteading. Now, this is how Wikipedia defines homesteading as they use simple English, but for others well, there are 1,000 different ways to define homesteading.

Generally, homesteading is being able to raise self-sufficient food for your family. Try to utilize the resources available in the space, even if it’s little space, to your benefit. Still, if you don’t know how or where to begin, then this article is for you as we give you The best homesteading planners guide and Review 2019.

Fact, homesteading is living in a self-sufficient atmosphere where you do everything yourself. Right from growing to preserving food, to raising your own animals, welcome to the life of Homesteaders. Yes, many believe you need many acres of lands, but the truth is homesteading can be done anywhere.

See Also:

• 40 Practical Skills Every Successful Homesteader Must Have To Survive
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• Farm Store Near Me: Find The Best Farm Supply Store Near You

Buying Your First Homestead- Are You Ready?

Now that you have decided to buy your first homestead, you probably are wondering what to consider while purchasing. Well, before you get into what to do, let’s see what not to do.

Make a Realistic Budget

All of us who live on rented property or lived on rented property, know how horrible it is. Barely you pay the rent for one month as the next month’s rent comes due. For those paying rent for more than a year feel their hard-earned income is going down the drain.

Moreover, if you look at the annual rental amount, you’ll be amazed to see the vast amount and the things you could do with that money, you give to someone else to live in their home. However, when you buy your own home, that’s when you realize, maybe that was better as all you had to pay was the rent.

Now, in your OWN home you have to pay not just utility bills, but property taxes, home maintenance bills, repair bills and home heating bills.

Ask for Professional View

Another problem mostly we do is to buy the homestead without taking guidance from the professional consultation. Always insist on a certified home inspection. A professional will take a thorough look at the land and house and let you know if the property is worth buying. Moreover, what repairs you will have to do before entering the house or later on. This way you plan your expenses wisely, and in the beginning, your new world will not hit you with unexpected costs.

Save Cash More than the Home Price

Another mistake made by most is to arrange money only for the home purchase. Moreover, when you enter the home, you notice there are many repairs required. Therefore, always keep your budget above the home/land price, so you don’t have any problem later on.

Make a Homestead Plan

If you think beginning a homestead is easy, think again. It takes much work. You need to follow steps with a very thoughtful mind. How to invest, which fruit or food to grow, how to preserve and can. How to be self-sufficient and also be able to make a profit by selling extra food or other products manufactured or produced on the homestead.

What is Your Motivation?

A homestead is a piece of land where you grow food, take care of animals like cows, sheep, and chickens. At a homesteaded home economy plans are also encouraged like preserving and canning of food. Now, if we say what motivates one to begin a homestead, well, the most important motivation is the desire to have a self-sustainable life.

The feel to be doing something useful that can be beneficial not only for you but for someone else as well. To feel enriched and complete. If you still are not motivated, the suggestion is to meet someone who has a homestead so you can get to know how much patience, hard manual work is required to reap sweet fruits.

What are Your Goals?

It is essential to plan your homestead before you begin. Making a list of goals is a must, as this will help you pursue the goal, so you manage to complete them. For example:

• Build a chicken coop and run
• Build a tool shed
• Build a potting area for animals
• Install adequate irrigation
• Build pig pen
• Purchase tractor with brush tag
• Clean woods from sides of the home
• Start log pile to sell in 2019
• Take down stray trees

Operating Your First Homestead- What Else to Consider

Now that you have decided to purchase a homestead land/home, the next thing is what else do you need to consider before you operate your homestead. Well, there are many factors like:

• Plan well on how to build coops, grow crops, take care of livestock, etc.
• A budget that is not tight that you end-up taking loans to fulfill the needed work later on but   that you end up giving all your profits to clear the loan
• The location is critical. Even a half acre land is sufficient for homesteading. Crops and animal will have adequate space. If location is a bit away from the grid, make sure you have two water sources like a well and a river
• Consider a small home as a small home will require less maintenance and less cost will be used to keep the house warm in winters. A small house gets cleaned quickly, and unlike big homes, you won’t have extra rooms to pile unwanted or unused items
• Once you complete the building of your home, you can think of building outdoor buildings and barns for the animals. Plan your outdoor buildings, coops, and barns before you build them. Anything made in haste will only cause you discomfort when in winters your animals will shiver or get wet when raining and fall ill causing you trouble both mentally and financially. Make a blueprint first, get professional help in making them. Don’t try making these on your own unless you are trained and know how to build.
• Always begin by planting perennials. Though annual plantation always shows good results, still perennials help you reap harvests sooner as they get established faster than annual crops. Forex, asparagus, fruit trees or berry bushes take some years before they are capable of putting food for you to eat or preserve and sell.
• Alternatively, trees that can become windbreakers when they grow up or even become a fence for your land you should plant as soon as you begin plantation. Planting such trees and perennials allow you to save a good amount and give you a head-on start
• We’ve all heard the rabbit and tortoise story. So be slow and steady if you want to win and reap sweet fruits. Don’t jump or push into anything without understanding what it is. Calculate each amount carefully and invest wisely. Likewise, do not add things hastily like a new barn or a coop. Whatever you do, do with a plan.

To get you through your homestead organization, below are the best planner books that will help you in deciding what to do and how.

The Best Homesteading Planner Books:

The Homesteading Handbook: A Back to Basics Guide to Growing Your Own Food, Canning, Keeping Chickens, Generating Your Own Energy, Crafting, Herbal Medicine, and More (The Handbook Series)

The Earth’s natural resources are shrinking to alarming levels. Most of the resources are almost scarcely available. That makes it even more critical for us to live self-sufficient. However, at the same time, we also are going through an economic crisis, making it all the important to save finances as much as possible.

Gehring has done a great job by writing this guidebook, The Homesteading Handbook that shows how you can be kind to Mother Nature so that she rewards you with fruits and you can fill your bank accounts. If you follow this guide, you can set up your homestead anywhere- suburb, city or a farm. How you may ask, well, the guide lets you know how to:

• Can, freeze and keep fruits and vegetables dry so you will have food year around
• Harvest your own organic garden
• How to build energy devices like geothermal heat pumps and solar panels to save electricity and fuel expenses
• Be able to identify poisonous amanita from edible mushrooms
• Make your own rain barrel to conserve water or even your very own irrigation system
• Prepare squashes from fruits fresh from your own garden
• How to handcraft daily items like paper and soap.

After going through the guide, you actually can experience how it feels to be self-sufficient as you are helping in keeping your Mother Earth green. In short-The Homesteading Handbook is your roadmap to living in harmony with the land.

I always loved going to my grandparent’s farm for the summer vacations. I would run behind the chickens and would water the small plants. I loved it, but when I inherited the farm after their death, I really didn’t know what to do. It was their memory and to see it perish was unbearable.

Thankfully, I found this book and today am close to my grandparents on their farm.

The Backyard Homestead: Produce all the food you need on just a quarter acre!

This planner book is a comprehensive guide to all the homesteading information you will ever require. Right from preserving sustainable grains/ vegetables to raising livestock for eggs, dairy use and even meat (for those who want to).

You will also learn how to manage a honey bee farm and most important drying, preserving and canning food to last throughout the winter’s and even sell to make some extra bucks on the way. Even if you are not ready to plunge into homesteading, you can still read the guide to know how to produce and preserve your own food.

The chapters detail are understandable and written in simple English, so it’s easy for everyone to understand. The ideas and illustrations are full of enthusiasm, and the diagrams and plans are crystal clear. Barely through the book, and you’ll be growing your own fruits and vegetables.

The book has 368 pages of information on everything you need to know to make your homestead a profit project. Your property will not only provide food but finance (by selling the food, dairy products, wood and other produce like textile you produce) as well.

The Encyclopedia of Country Living, 40th Anniversary Edition: The Original Manual for Living off the Land & Doing It Yourself

This book is the best for people who are homesteaders, preppers, urban farmers, and survivalists. In simple language, anyone who wants to live a self-sustainable healthy life. How to survive on your own with this Encyclopedia of Country Living in your hand, you could not ask for more.

This planner is the 40th-anniversary edition, and it stands to its level as it covers all essential topics like raising livestock, how to grow your own food, how to preserve food, foraging; mail-order supply sourcing and even how to deliver a baby for those who live in remote locations.

This encyclopedia is perfect for those who want to get back to their roots. This book is a bundle of information that is equal to gold, after all, once you go through the book, the money you accumulate in your bank will be no less by selling the products you sell from your homestead.

5 Acres & A Dream The Book: The Challenges of Establishing a Self-Sufficient Homestead

This book stems from Leigh Tate’s popular homesteading blog in which she shares the obstacles that she and her husband faced during their homestead establishment days. She has elaborately penned down all points here in her book, 5 Acres & A Dream.

The planner includes details right from having a dream of finding the perfect land, setting the priorities, tackling each obstacle face-on and learning to work smarter.

Her experience on how they became self-sufficient not only for themselves but for their livestock as well, is definitely motivation for to-be homesteaders. There will be many challenges you face along the way, but with this planner book, your knight in shining armor is always with you.

The Backyard Homestead Seasonal Planner: What to Do & When to Do It in the Garden, Orchard, Barn, Pasture & Equipment Shed

So you have finally gotten your very own homestead. Now, you must be thinking about what to do. Well, after going through this planner book, you won’t. This best selling Backyard Homestead series offers you the best advice on what tasks you should do on your farm, when and how to do them.

Author Ann Larkin Hansen has clarified the priorities that you need to set in each field of the farm, woodlot, barn, field, pasture, orchard and garden. The in-depth discussions are quite helpful and each (total 12 years) critical annual turnout lets you know what to expect. You also get checklists, record keeping sections and charts that are quite helpful.

You get to learn how to tune your tractor as well as prun your apple trees. Ann Larkin has wisely divided the seasons into early, mid, late sections with detail information on how to maintain your field, garden, beeyard, coop, pasture, woodlot, equipment shed and livestock as well.

You also get seasonal priority topics like how to manage your honey bees, how to cover crops, how to make hay for those sub-seasons.

More Forgotten Skills of Self-Sufficiency

On reading this book, you really will feel it’s unfortunate on how many of us neglect such easy skills in our daily life. How we live on canned food and think it is tedious to go and buy fresh fruits and vegetables.

Most of us might remember going to our grandparents who lived on farms. At that time seeing them baking in the sun as they were sorting rotting vegetables from the goods ones sure seemed like hard work. Alternately, watering the plantations or giving feed to the livestock might have looked interesting to many and waste of time to most.

However, in today’s high rising economy, they were the most sensible self-sufficient people possible. Moreover, as said to always learn from your elders, it’s high time we do learn from this homestead planner book More Forgotten Skills of Self-Sufficiency will remind us all of our good fortunes on how to become self-sufficient.

The Weekend Homesteader: A Twelve-Month Guide to Self-Sufficiency

The Weekend Homesteader is a monthly planner book. Be it January or June; there are interesting short projects that will give you sweet fruits at the end of the project. Even if you don’t want to become a full-time homesteader, you can be a weekender homesteader and enjoy the projects right from your home.

In this planner book, you get to know everything you need to know about backyard chicken care, how to differentiate edible berries and mushrooms, how to plant a no-till garden to heal the soil, so it provides nutritional food.

You also learn permaculture techniques so you can convert your homesteading land into a beautiful ecosystem that attracts the native pollinators as well as convert society waste into mulch and compost.

Also, learn to cook food as per seasons and also how to dry, can and preserve food so you won’t run out of food during the winters. Once you become a full-time self-sufficient family, you will begin to save the seeds, be ready for power outages and want to become a full-time homesteader.

You will notice changes like instead of picking the canned food you will be picking fresh food from your own garden.

FAQs:

Q: What is Homesteading?

A: In simple terms- it’s living a self-sufficient life. Homesteading is to grow your own food, to produce your own dairy products by keeping livestock. Finding your roots and living the life your grandparents did.

Q: What is a modern homestead?

A: Modern homestead is not just growing your own food, but being financially secure as well. Nowadays, homesteaders have begun producing clothing, textile, craftwork and selling canned and preserved food to make their financial strength increase.

Q:  What is homestead land?

A: A homestead land is a dwelling that has the buildings on land occupied by a single owner who has exempted the land under the Homestead Act.

Q: What is Homestead Act

A: The Homestead Act was signed back in May 1862, under which an American or a freed slave can put in a claim for 160 acres of Federal land.

Conclusion

You have to learn how to homestead to become a homesteader and this art once mastered, will take you on a journey of your lifetime. The freedom and knowledge that you will accumulate on the way will amaze you to no ends.

Being able to can and preserve your food will bring you much pleasure. No more trips to the supermarket, instead you can sell to your neighbors or in your nearby market. The best homesteading planner guide and review 2019 will give you an experience of a lifetime!

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