129 Homestead
How-To Chapters
A working guide for fire, water, wood, garden, kitchen, and putting food by
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If the power goes out, or the trucks stop, how many days of food are actually in your house?
Most houses have about three days. The grocery store has about three more. After that you are on what you already have at home — the dry shed, the stove, the jars, the woodpile you stacked when the ground was still soft.
People used to get through a short growing season because they knew how to do the work. How to keep a shed dry. How to run a wood stove. How to grow food in ninety days. How to can it before the frost. The tools were never the missing part. A written how-to was.
636 pages. 129 chapters. Fire, water, wood, tools, garden, kitchen, and putting food by.
Each chapter is a how-to: what the job is, how to do it, and where the old way was wrong.
This is a full working manual, not a story you read once. The book is split into twelve sections. You can open any chapter and do the job.
A few of the how-tos, with the page numbers:
- How to start a fire when the wood is wet — fatwood, birch bark, kindling that is actually dry, and a stove that draws · p. 71
- How to get drinking water in camp — boil, filter, or drops. Why melting snow is extra work, not a free well · p. 116
- How to keep a cold pantry without a fridge — a north-side corner, shade, and what spoils if you skip the drain · p. 61
- How to cut, split, and stack next winter’s wood — a cord you can measure, a stack that dries, birch and cedar · p. 186
- How to grow and store potatoes — the crop that pays a short season, and the one that rots in the bin · p. 246
- How to plant garlic in September — fall planting, not a grocery bag in March · p. 256
- How to use a compass when the rock pulls the needle — declination this year, and why a still needle is not always north · p. 355
- How to build a root cellar that does not flood — cold storage that fails as water if you skip the drain · p. 422
- How to make sauerkraut with salt by weight — a number, not a pinch · p. 442
- How to use a pressure canner with tested times — USDA / NCHFP tables named on the page. If the table is not there, the minutes are not either · p. 467
- How to tap maple and finish syrup — this shore, the pan, and the finish · p. 512
- What this book will not tell you to eat — no folklore that gets someone hurt · p. 522
- How to get a wheel through a wet stretch of road — the length of corduroy that actually works in April · p. 537
- Why this book will not give you an ice-thickness chart — wait, local knowledge, tell someone who will notice if you do not come back · p. 547
- A one-page calendar of the year’s jobs — the round, in order, for a ninety-day growing year · p. 616
That is a sample. There are 129 chapters, plus a sources page, and a last chapter on what these pages still will not do.
The how-tos are built from family pages kept on the north woods of Lake Superior, then checked against what we know now. Where the old way was right, the chapter says so. Where it was wrong — invented canning minutes, a compass you cannot trust next to iron rock, ice treated like a road — the chapter says that too, and gives the number either way.
Henri Hartwell, we called him Hen, wrote the stove, the garden, the shed, and the canner as ordinary work. Those pages almost left in a box. This book is the how-to finished from them. It is not a biography. It is a guide you can open to a job and do it.
The Northwoods Ledger
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- The full 636-page guide — 129 how-to chapters you can open to a job
- PDF and EPUB — print it, or keep it on your phone
- A year of jobs on one page — the round for a short growing season
- Canning with tested times — USDA / NCHFP tables, named, not invented
- Every future edition free — you own every correction that follows
Launch price — ends Sunday night
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Instant download, both formats. PDF and EPUB hit your inbox within a minute of checkout. Every future edition is included at no extra cost. This is a digital file you keep — sales are final, no refunds. If the mail does not land, write. It will be sent again.
I'm Boyd. I live in the north woods on Lake Superior. I put this guide together so you do not have to guess at the stove, the garden, the shed, or the canner. The methods come from family pages, then they were checked against what we know now.
Where the old way was right, the chapter says so. Where it was wrong, the chapter says that too. Homesteading and camp how-to. Not medical, legal, or financial advice.