Action4Canada - A4C Prepper Dan： Homesteading Tips and Resources. Vlog 10

00:00:00.000 You

00:00:30.000 Hi, and welcome to another edition of Prepper Dan.

00:00:50.640 In this particular episode, I'm going to be showing you some of the resources that I've had for a couple of decades.

00:00:56.920 Some good, hard copies of resources.

00:01:00.000 The reason why I want to share those with you is because there has been whisperings in the last little while

00:01:04.560 that the internet may need to go through a period of cleansing from all of the misinformation and disinformation.

00:01:11.240 I began acquiring these resources a number of years ago when I purchased my first home in southern Ontario back in 1988.

00:01:20.720 That home needed some repairs.

00:01:22.960 And not having a father since my dad died when I was just a year and a half old,

00:01:26.740 the only real tool I had was a library card.

00:01:29.040 So armed with that, I went to the library and got myself some books.

00:01:33.460 Back in those days, it was VHS tapes.

00:01:36.900 Fast forward a few years later when I moved to Nova Scotia, my second home was also fixer-upper.

00:01:42.260 Then in 1998, I purchased myself my first farm.

00:01:47.300 Having children then, we went ahead and put in large gardens, and then we got into some chickens and goats.

00:01:52.140 My oldest daughter got into making different types of cheese with goat milk, and our world just started to expand from there.

00:02:01.280 Eventually, we got ourselves a 200-acre farm and then a 56-acre farm.

00:02:05.760 At one time, you know, we had 450 animals on our farm.

00:02:08.580 We did our own butchering.

00:02:10.220 Our canning ventures expanded to where we would put in about 1,000 jars of preserves and bottled meat.

00:02:19.720 Every year, we would become pretty much self-sufficient.

00:02:23.820 All of my children learned survival skills.

00:02:26.840 And actually, that farmhouse, you know, needed a new foundation, so we picked up the house, moved it down the road and into the woods about half a kilometer.

00:02:35.140 I taught all of our children how to do plumbing, electrical, concrete work, roofing, and drywall, which, by the way, to this day is not one of my preferable things to do.

00:02:45.580 Eventually, even working full-time as a pastor and missionary and paramedic, I purchased an agricultural farm feed store.

00:02:55.920 Then we got into a bakery and then an outfitters and gun shop.

00:03:01.700 I didn't know anything about owning businesses.

00:03:04.360 But I tell you all this, not to brag, but to tell you that with good resources, I was able to expand my skill set and my businesses.

00:03:12.640 And you are able to do that as well.

00:03:15.660 So today, I want to share with you about a dozen or so resources that I've acquired over the last couple of decades.

00:03:21.420 Most of them will be about our farming and agricultural and gardening.

00:03:25.580 But I want to share these with you for a couple of reasons.

00:03:27.940 Number one, there has been whisperings that the Internet may need to go through a period of this cleansing.

00:03:33.540 And if that happens, you will need some good paper resources in which for you to rely on.

00:03:38.600 But the second reason is because, as you know, a lot of things can be censored and changed on the Internet.

00:03:44.780 These books have been tried and true and been found to be accurate over the last couple of decades.

00:03:50.700 I have literally dozens and dozens of these resources, but this is just a sampling to whet your appetite.

00:03:57.620 I want to encourage you that if you have good resources to go ahead and list them in the comments section down below so we can all enjoy those while we can and have access to this Internet.

00:04:07.120 So I hope that this is encouraging for you.

00:04:10.120 So let's get into it.

00:04:12.500 All right.

00:04:13.100 It's kind of hard to put these in any kind of order at all, but I'm just going to start with one of the ones that is kind of known to be the Bible of any homesteading at all.

00:04:23.700 And I went ahead and put a hardcover on this one here.

00:04:28.380 And if you can still get it, this is one that I would definitely recommend.

00:04:33.620 And this one is called The Encyclopedia of Country Living by Carla Emery.

00:04:39.340 And it's been around for quite a while.

00:04:41.440 I happen to have the ninth edition.

00:04:44.040 And this book really covers everything at all about, well, it's called The Encyclopedia of Country Living for a Reason.

00:04:55.300 Introduction to plants, grasses, grains, canes, garden vegetables, herbs, flavorings, tree, vine, bush, bramble, food preservation, introduction to animals, poultry, goats, cows, home dairying, bee, rabbits, sheep, and pigs, and then on and on.

00:05:11.200 And, well, it's got close to 900 pages, actually.

00:05:16.140 Let me just check here.

00:05:17.320 Yeah, it's got about 900 pages.

00:05:19.880 So it's definitely a worthwhile investment to put in your library.

00:05:26.120 I believe, well, I've had this for a while.

00:05:28.840 And I went ahead and went to a university and had a hardback binding put on this one because we have used this so much.

00:05:36.640 It's very easy to follow.

00:05:38.560 It's got recipes in here.

00:05:39.960 It's got how-tos.

00:05:41.180 It's got, for example, if you're going to have a cow, what kind of cows to have and for what.

00:05:46.920 Different questions to ask when buying a family milk cow.

00:05:50.600 We have had Jersey cows.

00:05:52.460 We have had mixed breed cows.

00:05:55.200 We have had, you know, beef cows.

00:05:58.760 We have bought cows that were like day olds.

00:06:01.700 You know, we have a lot of experience with cattle.

00:06:03.620 We have had, you know, our cows for making butter and different types of cheeses and all that.

00:06:10.600 And so this is a book that we had initially when we started our little homestead farming.

00:06:15.660 I said little homestead farming.

00:06:17.060 You know, a 54-acre farm is not really that small.

00:06:19.840 A 200-acre farm is not really that small.

00:06:21.880 But this is one of the resources that we've had that has really been helpful to us.

00:06:26.940 If you're just going to have a little farmstead backyard kind of thing, here's another excellent book that you may want to get.

00:06:35.120 It's called Barnyard in Your Backyard, and literally it covers a lot of the same kind of things, but it also covers more like in housing.

00:06:44.500 If you're going to have a little chicken coop, if you're going to have a little building for your pigs or for your goats, it covers everything from sheep shearing and what to feed them, the gestation period of different things and all that kind of neat things.

00:06:59.580 How to build rabbit cages, choosing different breeds of rabbits and ducks and geese and all that things, you know.

00:07:07.380 And ducks and geese is something else we used to have.

00:07:09.600 We used to raise pheasants and all that.

00:07:12.160 So now some of you may be thinking at this point, wait a minute, now I live in a city.

00:07:15.440 You know, I may not be able to do that.

00:07:17.020 If you have friends that live in the country and you may want to go in on them for some of these things, these are all things to consider in this day and age.

00:07:24.680 You know, the powers that be want everybody to move into these 15-minute cities in that, but there are still some people that live out in the country, and so you may want to go in on them.

00:07:35.100 And so you may not know anything about them, but get some of these resources and start reading up on it, and this will help you kind of decide.

00:07:42.820 You may want to just get one or two or three of these types of animals and that kind of thing.

00:07:48.280 A classic that you can still get today is Reader's Digest put out some really good books a number of years ago.

00:07:56.260 Back to Basics is one that covers a lot of information as well.

00:08:01.660 It covers a lot of the old studying type of tools as well as some of the things that they used to do around the farmstead, how to repair old things.

00:08:11.720 You know, sometimes you go to yard sales and you find some old hand tools.

00:08:14.440 Well, if the power goes out, your power tools are not going to work.

00:08:18.320 You know, I've got a ton of power tools, and they're great to have, but if the electricity goes out, they're useless to me.

00:08:24.280 So I have a collection of hand tools that I use, you know, axes and some hand drills and different things.

00:08:32.980 So don't pass those by yard sales.

00:08:35.320 But this Back to Basics one here tells you all about, you know, the natural things you can do with plants and different things, homemade ice cream, horses, and like livestock, different kinds of livestock.

00:08:50.460 Anyhow, it's got a lot of wealth of information in here.

00:08:56.740 And at the end of this presentation, I'm going to give you a couple of hints as to where you may be able to find some of these books.

00:09:02.500 Like you may watch this video and leave your house and go right away to a couple places that I'm going to suggest to you.

00:09:08.420 But if not, there may be some places online that I'll suggest to you as well.

00:09:11.880 Also by Reader's Digest is this illustrated guide to gardening.

00:09:15.660 And some of the principles in here never go out of style, okay?

00:09:20.320 And so you may have a patch in your yard or in your property that's 10 feet by 10 feet.

00:09:26.820 It's amazing what you can grow in a patch of land like that.

00:09:30.520 And you may say, well, I don't, you know, I don't have a rototiller.

00:09:33.380 I don't, I don't, my soil is rocky or whatever.

00:09:36.660 Where we live here in Cape Breton Island in Nova Scotia, our house is up on a hill here and we're on a river.

00:09:42.720 But we're basically in a gravel patch and on a, you know, in a gravel yard.

00:09:47.980 And so all of my gardening is done besides the greenhouse.

00:09:50.900 It's done in raised beds.

00:09:52.420 And what we've used in the past and I've done successfully is lasagna gardening.

00:09:57.060 Now we don't actually grow lasagnas, but it's called lasagna gardening.

00:10:00.540 And basically what you do, you start with a patch of soil or a patch of grass even.

00:10:06.740 And you, you just layer it, you know, with a little bit of dirt, grass clippings, leaves, compost and peat moss.

00:10:14.540 And you just keep layering it.

00:10:16.420 The grass eventually dies.

00:10:18.080 And within about a month to six weeks, you can put your hand all the way through and you'll have worms in there.

00:10:23.240 And you can just plant your seed right there and you'll be amazed at what you can grow.

00:10:28.160 You can even put some boards around it and make a raised bed.

00:10:31.600 And so this lasagna gardening book, I have had probably for close to 20 years.

00:10:37.020 And it's another book that I would really highly recommend.

00:10:40.400 Okay.

00:10:40.980 Lasagna gardening by Patricia Lanza.

00:10:43.260 A very good book as well.

00:10:46.500 Let me just skip over to another book here that I've referenced to before.

00:10:52.160 It's called Five Acres and Independence by M.G.

00:10:55.140 Canes.

00:10:55.800 Just a side note on this.

00:10:57.180 If you only have one or two acres available to you, you can use a lot of the principles from this book into the little patch of land that you may have.

00:11:06.340 Okay.

00:11:06.880 Because it talks about how to set up your land, how to put your, where to put your garden, where the sun is facing, where the prevailing winds are.

00:11:17.460 If you have a sloped piece of land.

00:11:19.300 So it gives you all of the do's and don'ts about like the shape of your land and how to set up your land.

00:11:25.440 If you're going to plant some fruit trees, you know, plant dwarf fruit trees as opposed to the ones that, that grow full size and take like five to 10 years to produce fruit.

00:11:34.360 So it's got a lot of good principles in here.

00:11:36.880 How to deal with weeds, soil surface and management, fertilizers, saws in their care, greenhouses.

00:11:43.140 You know, we have a small greenhouse here that's 10, I think 10 by 16, and we grow all kinds of food in here.

00:11:50.200 And we actually grow food in there year round without any heat, frost damage and prevention, poultry, irrigation, functions of water, water supply, windbreaks, pros and cons.

00:12:00.360 So there's all kinds of information in here, five acres and independence.

00:12:04.520 Here's another little book that it's not a must, but it's a fun one.

00:12:09.120 Shelter, Shacks and Shanties. 1.00

00:12:10.580 There's actually a few books in this series.

00:12:13.180 This was originally published in 1914 by D.C. Beard.

00:12:17.220 There's lots of photos in this particular book here.

00:12:20.820 And, you know, sometimes we go in the woods here.

00:12:22.720 Now we have a few acres in our property, but, you know, you can cut down a few trees and make yourself a little shelter in case the weather gets bad or you just need to find shelter somewhere.

00:12:33.020 And it's good practice just with an axe or a hatchet just to build yourself an emergency shelter because you never know what may happen.

00:12:39.860 But again, it's a fun book.

00:12:41.520 You can put this book on your coffee table and there's tons of pictures in here, like literally like hundreds of little photos on how you can build yourself a little shack, a shanty, a shelter.

00:12:51.660 And you can even incorporate some of these ideas into like a little animal shelter in that.

00:12:57.880 Another absolute must.

00:12:59.660 If you're going to garden, if you're going to put some crops in your house and that, you need to be able to store them.

00:13:07.380 Root Cellaring by Mike and Nancy Bubel is an absolute must, a book that you must have in your library.

00:13:13.580 And again, you know, some of this information may be available online, on YouTube or whatever.

00:13:18.860 But again, that may disappear.

00:13:20.500 This book is an absolute must.

00:13:22.380 What to can, what to preserve, how to do it and, you know, where to do it and how to build a root cellar.

00:13:30.080 You don't, it doesn't have to be in your house.

00:13:32.360 You can actually build a root cellar outdoors and the best way to do it, most efficient way to do it.

00:13:38.100 So that's an absolute must as well.

00:13:40.720 Another book that I have, but again, there are many of these out on the market, Growing and Using the Healing Herbs.

00:13:49.260 Now we, I did a video recently on the Tower Garden and we grow some herbs in our Tower Garden.

00:13:54.380 But it's so easy to grow some herbs in your home, in your garden, in a little greenhouse.

00:13:59.700 And there are some herbs that are beneficial to you and your health.

00:14:02.540 So this book here is just Growing and Using the Healing Herbs by Gay and Shandor Weiss.

00:14:09.340 But again, there's a lot of these types of books out there.

00:14:12.380 The benefits of having herbs in your house, you can dry them, you can dehydrate them and put them to use in your cooking,

00:14:20.380 in, you know, some of the things that you bake, like, you know, your meats and flavors and different things like that.

00:14:27.240 So another good book to have is that.

00:14:29.440 Seed Starting Primer and Almanac, the Gardener to Gardener.

00:14:35.140 This is a Rodale organic gardening book that you can get.

00:14:38.780 And, you know, it's getting harder and harder to find good organic seed.

00:14:42.300 But if you have friends that save their seeds or heirloom seeds, this is a guide on how to preserve your seeds.

00:14:50.400 And it's also a guide on how to start your seeds successfully indoors each and every year.

00:14:55.900 And I've had seeds that I've used, you know, seed packets that I've, you know, maybe 10 years old.

00:15:02.900 And I do a lot of my seeds starting in February and some in March and some in April.

00:15:07.880 But about a month before that, I will try some of those seeds to see if they'll actually work.

00:15:13.180 And sometimes, you know, they've gone bad or they just won't germinate.

00:15:16.140 So there's a trial.

00:15:17.260 But this book explains exactly how to do all that because you don't want to miss out a growing season by having bad seed or GMO-laden seed that you have to buy from the store.

00:15:27.120 So this is another good book, again, by Rodale.

00:15:32.140 So, again, this will be in the description.

00:15:34.960 Just a couple more.

00:15:36.040 So this book here is by Nikki Jabbour.

00:15:40.360 I've actually met Nikki and attended some of her speaking sessions here.

00:15:44.300 She's from Nova Scotia here, just outside of Halifax, The Year-Round Vegetable Gardener.

00:15:49.440 She has a couple more books here now.

00:15:51.320 And this book will show you how you can actually grow food year-round in polytunnels, in greenhouses, and how you can harvest in summer and how you can harvest in the winter.

00:16:06.740 So, again, it's a very good book to have and I would highly recommend it.

00:16:10.940 And Nikki is very knowledgeable in everything that she talks about.

00:16:14.280 She used to have a radio show here in the Maritimes.

00:16:17.140 This last one I'm going to share with you here is by the Creative Homeowner Series, Backyard Homesteading, A Back-to-Basics Guide to Self-Sufficiency.

00:16:26.420 And it covers a lot of different topics, how to set up your land, how to set up your water systems, how to grow, raising vegetables and herbs, fruit trees, plant-by-plant, shrubs, grapevines, brambles, and how to set up your yard.

00:16:42.060 If you have chickens, if you have different small animals, ideas for coops, and how to set up all your structures so that they make sense in your yard.

00:16:52.260 And one of the things we did when we had that old farmhouse there up on the mountain that we had to move is because we moved it so far from its original location, the well that we had, the water was so good.

00:17:05.260 Rather than drill a new well, we kept the old well.

00:17:08.380 We had to run quite a bit of water line.

00:17:11.400 But the old barn that we had, it was a huge barn that was built in 1881.

00:17:15.880 We ended up actually having, we kept the water line, but we piped water into the barn.

00:17:21.660 And we hit some bedrock, but we drilled through the bedrock and piped water into the barn, which made having the animals in the barn so much easier.

00:17:29.860 You know, we had pigs in there, we had horses, we had chickens, we had cows, and we had goats.

00:17:35.200 And so rather than get water from the stream that ran next to the barn or get it from the house and run a hose in the wintertime, now we had water in the barn.

00:17:44.140 We had heat tape around it.

00:17:46.140 And so a book like this will show you exactly how you can do something like that and make life so much easier.

00:17:51.840 If you have a shallow well, you know, it shows you how to put one of those pumps, a shallow well pump that the water will go down and not freeze in the wintertime.

00:18:02.300 So anyhow, so this is just about, I don't know, 10 or 12 resources that I have used faithfully.

00:18:09.340 I've got a couple of shelf loaves really of books that I have used, and I don't want to take time to show you all of them.

00:18:16.540 But this kind of gives you an idea that, you know, you have power.

00:18:19.840 Power, you know, you've heard it said, Tanya Gar, the founder of Action for Canada, often says knowledge is power.

00:18:27.120 And that's true.

00:18:28.120 But you have to use that power and transform it into something usable.

00:18:32.460 One of my favorite verses in scripture is in 1 Thessalonians 4, where it says,

00:18:37.560 Make it your life's ambition to lead a quiet life and to work with your hands so that you will have need of nothing.

00:18:43.880 And I've always been a productive person.

00:18:46.020 And I didn't always know everything, but using some of these resources, you can learn how to do things.

00:18:53.860 And I want to encourage you.

00:18:55.340 You may be sitting here thinking, oh, my goodness, this is overwhelming, but it doesn't have to be.

00:19:00.020 I learned to do one thing at a time.

00:19:01.640 And as a matter of fact, at one point, besides working full time as a paramedic, I had been a pastor and missionary for 17 years.

00:19:10.380 I purchased a farm feed store and then ran, also purchased or ran, started a bakery.

00:19:17.640 And then we had an outfitters and gun shop.

00:19:20.640 I didn't know anything about running a business, but we learned.

00:19:23.480 And so if you have a little bit of ambition and you can learn to do something, I want to encourage you, get some resources and get some books.

00:19:33.340 And while you can, maybe learn some things off the Internet.

00:19:37.100 OK, so where do you get some of these resources?

00:19:39.800 Well, I have a few spots.

00:19:41.320 You can go to Value Village and there should be a section or two in the book section there.

00:19:48.940 One of them should be like gardening or outdoors or whatever and look through that and visit that section often because sometimes I'll find some of these books.

00:19:58.920 Now, their prices kind of vary, but, you know, you'll find a book like this and it'll go for like two or three or four dollars, which is this one here was $19 Canadian.

00:20:09.240 Right.

00:20:09.640 So you may only pay four or five dollars for it, but it's still a bargain and still a deal.

00:20:14.220 So you can also go to your library.

00:20:16.280 Now, our library here in Sydney has an entire section of books that they're selling out or discounting, and they're like two or three or four dollars.

00:20:25.120 So go to your your public library and see what they're selling off.

00:20:29.500 There's a couple of websites that you can go to.

00:20:32.120 One of my favorite is thriftbooks.com.

00:20:35.300 And I often order books there.

00:20:36.880 They have a points reward system.

00:20:39.180 And so they'll ship to Canada and the shipping is usually fairly reasonable.

00:20:42.600 So, you know, for a book like Root Cellaring on Amazon, this one here was $21.50 Canadian.

00:20:52.160 And that's quite a few years ago.

00:20:54.540 You may get free shipping in that.

00:20:56.240 But on thriftbooks.com, you know, this book may be, let's say, $6.99.

00:21:00.740 And, you know, there's shipping maybe five dollars.

00:21:02.760 So you'll still get a deal.

00:21:03.940 So, okay, so check Amazon, check thriftbooks.com, and then there may be some other sites in Canada that you use.

00:21:11.540 So please put those in the description.

00:21:13.180 I hope you take some of these colder months to go ahead and acquire yourself some of these good hard copies of these resources that I've been sharing with you.

00:21:22.240 It's a good time to curl up by the fire or the warmth of your home to go ahead and read and acquire yourself some knowledge, some wisdom, and some understanding with what's going on, not only in our world,

00:21:32.580 but how to get better prepared for your gardening season in the spring and in the summertime.

00:21:36.540 And just in case the Internet happens to get cleansed of all of our good dis and misinformation, you'll be well prepared.

00:21:45.300 So I'm just going to sit here by the fire for a little while, enjoy my chaga, and I hope you found this video resourceful and helpful to you.

00:21:53.340 So until I see you again, God bless you, and God bless Canada.

Action4Canada - January 18, 2024

A4C Prepper Dan： Homesteading Tips and Resources. Vlog 10

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