I'd like to recommend a site for those interested in gardening, cooking, canning, hunting, and do-it-yourself stuff. Backwoods Home published a monthly print magazine for a long time, although it has recently gone Kindle-only, and I have a hard time getting into Kindle magazines. Nevertheless, it still has some good articles. Some of the articles from the magazine can be viewed from the site, there are blogs on homesteading topics and on guns, and its shopping area offers back issues of the magazine, anthologies of past issues, CDs, and a bunch of worthwhile books, many of which I have purchased, There is also a forum, but it's not nearly as busy as it once was.
I am checking it out, and I think it might be a forum that would interest me as well. thank you for the link, Ken.
Backwoods Home is the only magazine that I read from cover to cover and save when I am done, rather than shredding for compost. It is for people who are living in rural areas, with articles about growing and preparing foods, maintaining a family farm, and so on, but although I am not doing most of the stuff that the magazine is about, I enjoy reading the articles, and hope to do something with some of the information at some point in the future. If I were living in a city, I think I'd still enjoy Backwoods Home, but maybe not if I grew up in a city and couldn't relate to any of it. The other thing I like is that, while so many of the other once-great publications, like Mother Earth News and Grit, have either taken on a far-left environmental agenda, in the case of Mother Earth News, or are targeting wealthy urban hobby farmers (both Mother Earth News and Grit), Backwoods Home is not particularly political, and where it is political (Ayoob on Firearms), it takes more of a Libertarian stance, and its target audience seems to be regular people, not necessarily those who can afford to buy only the best of everything. If it weren't so expensive, I'd probably subscribe to Grit. Although it's nothing like the rural newspaper it used to be when I delivered it as a child, I don't hate it.
Backwoods Home is in print again, but it’s only being published four times a year now, whereas it used to be monthly, then every two months. As I summarized an issue of Grit the other day, I’ll do the same for the latest issue of Backwoods Home, which I prefer to Grit. The latest issue is the October/November/December 2020 issue. Publisher’s Note This section just announces new columns or other changes that are being made to the magazine, as well as new books that might be available, as the publication also sells a lot of books on various topics relating to country living. My View This is generally a political statement by the editor, and often the only political content found in the magazine. In this issue, it discusses the BLM/Antifa riots. Ayoob on Firearms This is a regular column in Backwoods Home. In this issue, Massad Ayoob discusses the usefulness of a .22 caliber handgun in backwoods homes, and he compares various models, as well as historical insights, in a 6.5-page article. Ask Jackie Jackie, the author of many of the books sold by Backwoods Home, answers questions from readers on a variety of topics. Book Review A regular column, this is a half-page review of a book whose topic fits the theme of the magazine. In this case, it is a review of The Half-Acre Homestead, by Lloyd Kahn and Lesley Creed. The gee-whiz! page This is an ocassional column, not in every issue. I don’t normally read it so I don’t know if it has a specific theme. In this issue, the column is about the cost of things. The Irreverent Joke Page There is nothing particularly irreverent about the jokes in this column. Submitted by readers, the jokes are usually on the order of something that a ten-year-old might have told back when ten-year-olds were more wholesome than they are today. Being a ten-year-old at heart, some of them are funny, while others are just stupid. For example: “I was kidnapped by a gang of mimes. They threatened to do unspeakable things.” Letters As you might expect, these are letters to the editor. Sometimes the editors respond, and sometimes they don’t. Classified Ads I generally like agricultural magazine classified ads, and there used to be a lot of them in Backwoods Home. However, due to a smaller subscription base, given that people don’t often subscribe to magazines anymore, and perhaps to the fact that it’s published only four times a year, there aren’t very many classified ads in this issue. BHM bookstore This is a section where Backwoods Home Anthologies and other books published by Backwoods Home, most of which I have bought, are sold, as well as ads for its sister publication, published by the adult children of the Backwoods Home publishers, for the most part), known as Self-Reliance. I subscribed to it for a year when Backwoods Home was offering only Kindle editions, but I prefer Backwoods Home but couldn’t get into its Kindle edition. A beginner’s guide to butchering lamb The 11-page article is on butchering lambs, complete with pictures. Since I don’t plan on butchering lambs anytime soon, particularly since I don’t even like eating lamb, I haven’t read it. Sheep for the homestead This 5-page article on raising sheep covers some of the benefits and costs involved in raising sheep, and focuses mostly on a variety of sheep known as Soay sheep. A year in the life of an amateur rotational grazer Although I don’t actually try 95% of what I read in these magazines, it bores me to read about things that I can’t even imagine being in an position to do. This one of them. As you might expect from the title, it seems to be about a method of rotating grazing fields for horses, cows, sheep, or whatever. It’s five pages long, and it’s probably a perfectly good article. It just isn’t anything that interests me. Caring for your chickens in winter Despite the fact that I don’t have chickens, and will probably never get chickens, raising a few chickens is something that we once considered doing, so it’s a topic that interests me enough that I have, I think, at least four books on the subject, and have read most of all of them. Authors seldom agree on what chickens need in order to be healthy in a cold-weather climate. One book that I have, which makes some sense, argues that chickens will be healthier if they are raised in a three-side building, and that the semi-exposure to the elements afforded by such a building will result in healthier chickens. This article is more of a standard chicken coop article, dealing with ventilation, bedding, food, water, and so on. It’s okay but if you’ve read four books on raising chickens, it won’t give you anything new to consider. How to make the most of your climate The reasonably interesting article discusses raising and growing food on a hundred acres in the Colorado Rockies, and doesn’t speak much about anyone else’s climate. While I can’t say that my life is any better for having done so, I liked it. Canning meat My mother used to can meat and vegetables, and I can see that having a large supply of home-canned foods would be a good idea, and a preparation for potential hard times. I have a couple of books on canning foods, but have never actually tried it. As a child, one of things I hated about the winter was the dirth of fresh foods and the reliance on canned foods, some of which was okay, some of which I hated, and little of which I really liked, except for some of the canned fruits. Anyhow, this article is on canning meat or soups containing meat. Written by Jackie Clay-Atkinson, it can be relied upon, although I have her book on the subject. It includes several recipes on things to can. It’s easy to can food at home - safely Also by Jackie, this 3-page article discusses ways to avoid some of the pitfalls of canning foods. Smoke your own venison pepper sticks and summer sausage Another of those articles on a topic that interests me but which I doubt I’ll ever get around to trying, although I love summer sausage, although some of the ones that I buy in the store aren’t very good. The 4-page article lists the equpment necessay and discusses the ways to go about it. Canning dried beans According to the article. if kept in an air-tight container, dried beans will last for several years. To make them last even longer, one can store them in a Mylar bag with an oxygen absorber, seal the bag and place it in a plastic, lidded bucket for safekeeping. But even then, there will come a point where even beans kept under these conditions will no longer be able to be rehydrated. This article discusses canning dried beans as a long-term emergency food staple. Outdoor kids The chances are very high that my child-raising days are over, but the subject still interests me as I am seeing what seems, to me, to be the negative effects of raising children to have no real appreciation for the outdoors. This article is written by someone who raised a family in the Blue Ridge Mountains, and brings home the advantage of that experience versus that of raising children in a city. The accidental homesteader This account is of someone who became a homesteader not because she was seeking a country life, but because her husband left her, she lost her job, and she was seeking a way of providing for herself and her daughter, and continues through a new husband, additional children, etc. Solar power for farm and ranch Another topic that interests me, although I have never been able to get my feeble brain around the idea. Eventually, I may have to buy a plug-and-play solar system, whatever its capacity, if only so that I will have a visual aid to understanding how to go about it. This article is about building your own systems for electric fences, lighting, water pumping, and so on. Chickens, eggs, and dinosaurs Intended as a children’s column, this 8-page articles looks pretty good, although I have merely skimmed it so far. It discusses the relationships of chickens and dinosaurs, but goes on to cover the nutritional value of chicken, the reasons there are both white and dark meat, how eggs are formed, the phenomenon of double-yolked eggs, egg colors, and nutritive value of eggs, as well as a lot of other informational details about chickens and eggs. Don Childers turns 90 This is a happy birthday article for the guy who has been designing the covers for Backwoods Home since its founding thirty years ago. Claw Hammers Covering everything that most of us might want to know about claw hammers.
The Oct/Nov/Dec 2022 issue is of Backwoods Home a potato issue, in which the bulk of its content is about growing, storing, and preparing potatoes, including seed potatoes, growth patterns, planting methods and techniques, watering, and harvesting, as well as known pests, diseases, and so on. Various types of potatoes are discussed, along with storage and replanting. Another article discusses the history of potatoes as a crop and the varieties that were once common in the Americas. There are articles on other topics, as well, such as butchering beef and milling your own lumber, neither of which are things that I'm likely to do but I still read the articles. This magazine is the only one that I generally read from cover to cover. I have never cared for e-versions of magazines, and there aren't many that I subscribe to anymore. I read Journey Magazine, which is a Maine-published addiction recovery magazine that I page through each month, and Anabaptist Magazine usually has at least one article worth reading. Still, I don't even come close to reading these other magazines from cover to cover. Backwoods Home is a little like Mother Earth Magazine used to be, minus the hippies, and also reminiscent of Grit.