To Everything There Is A Season

Resources

I've been asked a couple times if I know how to do what I write about or if it is a lot of research. The answer is a bit of both. I am a farm kid. I grew up in the garden and around chickens. I helped can everything every summer and lived on fresh cows milk, to this day my favourite summer memory is picking wild strawberries with my aunt and eating them with still warm cream. I have sewn my own clothes(I'm bad with a machine and okay with a needle). I can't knit to save my life but enjoy crocheting. I have made cheese in my kitchen and it was delicious. I'm listing my resources for those who want to know. I will be adding to them as we go.

Where I had my cheese questions answered: curd-nerd.com

I used a few different sites for my farming information: Mother Earth News (motherearthnews.com) was fantastic for all things back to nature. I used it for learning soap making, oil extraction, farming, chicken raising, cotton processing . Another site I use a lot is permies.com practical permiculture site with forums that seem to have the answer for everything up to and including what to do with chicken blood. Backyardchickens.com is another great place to look for chicken raising answers.

I used a few homesteading sites for various things including what can I get syrup from if sugar maples don't grow that far south practicalselfreliance.com listed 27 trees that can be tapped to provide syrup maples are included but they list other trees with a link to a friend who taps Black Walnuts homestead-honey.com has a step-by-step guide.

My farming knowledge begins and ends with wheat, canola, soybeans and flax (they grow in the fields around my house) I used a few farming books from 1900 to get approximate field yields and how to grow cotton. The full text of "Growing three bales of cotton per acre and how it is done" was useful for figuring out how much cotton can be reasonably expected from a six acre plot (answer a lot) the pamphlet was written in 1903 and has racist stereotypes and language. The other book that I used to estimate what a reasonable yield would be for the farm and garden were "Three Acres and Liberty". Written in 1907 it was a really solid resource on what can be grown with minimal technology.

thespruceeats.com and ehow.com were great resources for South Carolina plants both cultivated and wild. Though the ehow page mislabeled the horse chestnut as edible...it isn't so don't eat it.

A really informative video on the steps to processing cotton before spinning, she has others on spinning that are informative and soothing. 

Fun to watch and a great resource for seeing the steps involved in making clothing from scratch. There is also a soap making video that made me grouchy but does go into the science of soap. properly made soap looks nothing like the grey sludge that is first made.

I went looking for what would plausibly survive an emp or solar flare and my spouse found this website: askaprepper.com/7-things-that-will-survive-an-emp/. I'm using most of this as a guide for what works and what doesn't. I'm hand waving the solar panels/batteries issue, just go with the assumption that the solar power converter was shielded in some way.