Homesteading is not an inexpensive venture. It can take some individuals years to save enough money for land. Because farming equipment and livestock are also costly, many homesteaders spread out their purchases and work toward their homesteading goals over several years.
However, part of homesteading is learning to live frugally. There are many projects you can DIY to save money and achieve your homesteading goals more quickly. By completing projects yourself, you’ll also build confidence and develop much-needed skills for running your homestead once it’s complete.
DIY homesteading projects range from building compost bins to chicken houses to DIY solar heaters. If you haven’t been able to invest in land yet, you can start developing skills and building equipment for your future lifestyle right where you are – even if you live in the middle of a major urban center.
One of the most valuable assets for a homesteader is experience. Although running a small worm farm in your city apartment may not feel like progress, it’s building your knowledge base so you can achieve a better and bigger result next time. Here are 15 DIY projects you can tackle for your homestead.
1. Graph Your Property
Before you start working on your homestead, take the time to create a detailed plan for your property. If you already have land, use Google maps to copy a realistic outline and insert important features like trees, water, and buildings. Homesteaders still living in the city can use this exercise to draw out their dream property.
Now that you have a rough outline, think about the layout of your property. What do you want to build or cultivate, and where should it be? Remember to take shade, elevation, and soil quality into account. For example, you shouldn’t plan a garden for a shady hill.
Examples of homestead features to include are a garden, beehives, grazing fields, sheds, fruit groves, and off-grid electric features.
2. Grow an Herb Garden
Growing herbs is an easy way to get into gardening, regardless of where you currently live. Many people grow herbs in pots on their kitchen windowsills. However, herbs also thrive outside and are a staple for any kitchen garden. They add fragrance, variety, and healthy phytonutrients to your food and have many uses for a homestead.
In addition to adding flavor to your food, herbs can also be dried or used fresh for homemade tea. If you don’t have enough space to grow herbs yet, consider foraging for wild herbs in your local area. Avoid places that may have been chemically treated, as plants soak pesticides up. Learning about the complexities of herbs now will equip you to grow and use them later.
3. Build a Compost Bin
Another essential for a homestead, composting bins allow you to recycle food scraps and outdoor waste into rich fertilizer for your garden. You can construct an easy compost bin with inexpensive wooden pallets and some hardware. The bin doesn’t need to have a bottom, but a lid holds in heat and helps the material turn into compost more quickly.
Although opinions vary on the best composting recipe, many people recommend using three parts brown matter to one part green matter. Brown matter includes carbon-based items like dead leaves, newspaper, and cardboard. Green matter is nitrogen-based materials like grass clippings and kitchen waste. You shouldn’t include any meat or dairy products in your compost, as they’ll spoil.
4. Start a Worm Farm
Healthy soil means a thriving garden, and that’s why starting a worm farm is so important. In your garden, earthworms create tunnels in the soil that make it easy for plants to access oxygen, stay hydrated, and develop strong root systems. Earthworm castings are also rich in nutrients and microorganisms that improve the quality of soil and homegrown food.
You can build a DIY worm farm with two plastic bins, a drill, and a few other materials. Worms reproduce quickly, so you’ll only need a small number to start. You can collect food scraps from your kitchen and feed the worms weekly to create compost and a multitude of worms for your garden. Worms are a great source of protein and can also be fed to chickens.
5. Install a Garden Fence
If you’re planning to grow your own food, you’ll need a sturdy fence to keep deer and other critters out. While some animals tend to jump a fence, others dig under it. The most secure garden fence is a combination of tall planking, wire mesh, and electric shock. For berries, you may also want to install overhead nets.
To decide on the best materials for your garden, think about what animals live near you. Deer tend to jump short fences, while groundhogs will dig under them. To prevent this, you may want to dig a ditch and sink the fence 12 inches into the ground. Once you’ve created a sturdy frame, you can add closer mesh or electric wires as needed to protect your harvest.
6. Plant for Pollinators
Pollinators are animals and insects like birds, bats, bees, and butterflies. By eating and landing on plants, these creatures spread pollen. This fertilizes bushes and trees to create an abundant harvest. Attracting pollinators to your garden can increase its health and help ensure you have a healthy crop.
There are many plants you can incorporate onto your property that attract pollinators. Usually, these plants have bright flowers and a sweet fragrance. Favorite pollinator plants include butterfly bush, borage, snapdragons, marigolds, and goldenrod. Place these flowers near or inside your food garden for the best results.
7. Collect a Tool Kit
Maintaining a large property can be expensive, but you can cut costs by learning basic handyman skills and assembling your own tool kit for repairs. Good skills to learn include how to install a lock, how to fix leaky pipes, and the best way to maintain a septic tank. You can also learn how to keep vehicles and farm equipment running.
To build your tool kit, start with the basics – like a hammer, screwdriver, tape measure, level, pliers, a wrench, safety glasses, drill, straightedge, and duct tape. Sharp pocket knives are also an essential. For stone or concrete cutting, you should invest in tools with a high-quality diamond blade. After you build your kit, learn how to care for each item so they last as long as possible.
8. Construct a Chicken House
Many homesteaders start their livestock journey with chickens. They’re cheap, easy to raise, and produce both eggs and meat. During times of overproduction, you can sell excess eggs to neighbors to help cover the cost of their feed. A great beginner DIY project is to build a nesting place for your chickens that’s secure from predators.
Chicken coop plans range from very simple box structures to enclosed triangles to painted houses fenced into a small foraging area. The plan you choose is up to you, but it’s essential that the finished project is secure from raccoons, foxes, and other animals who might try to steal and eat your chickens.
9. Forge an Outdoor Oven
Having an outdoor oven gives you a place to stoke a wood or coal fire without filling your home with dust and smoke. Once they’re warmed up, brick and concrete outdoor ovens will hold heat for hours. This means you can bake bread, pizza, and stew in large batches over the course of a whole day and save on electricity. During the summer, cooking outside will keep your homestead comfortable.
Outdoor ovens can be expensive to build, but you can cut the cost by using reclaimed materials and doing the labor yourself. Since these ovens are incredibly heavy, you’ll need to choose a permanent location in your yard that’s fire-safe. There are many free resources online to help you construct an outdoor oven and use it to make delicious, home-baked food.
10. Build a Resource Library
The internet makes it easy to learn new skills and answer any questions you may have. However, in a SHTF situation, your access to the internet may be limited or nonexistent. To ensure you’re prepared, you can start building a physical library that has all the information you’ll need to develop your homestead and survive without access to outside information.
Good topics to cover include herbal medicine, raising livestock, pregnancy and childbirth, gardening, nutrition, cooking recipes, and how-to instructions for special skill sets like blacksmithing and woodworking. Consider what skills you’ll need to live successfully on your homestead and start collecting authoritative texts to reference later.
11. Learn to Make Candles
Candle-making is an easy DIY project that will give you the skills to create your own light source. To make candles, all you need is beeswax, a linen or hemp wick, a long stick, and a double boiler. You should never heat beeswax directly over a fire because it can burn. Instead, melt it in the double boiler and then tie lengths of the wick to the stick. You’ll dip them into the melted wax repeatedly to build tapering candles.
If you want to get even more hardcore, consider becoming a beekeeper so you can source your own beeswax. It will take several years to get enough beeswax to make your own candles, so it’s better to start sooner rather than later. Raw beeswax has to be filtered before you can use it and some parts of a hive are better for candles than others.
12. Try DIY Cleaners
Many cleaning products can be made at home with natural ingredients. In most cases, homemade cleaners are cheaper and better for the environment than store-bought products. To keep yourself and your homestead bright and shining, learn to make soap and other DIY cleaning products from the comfort of your home.
Soap is made by combining lye and fat. Lye can be extracted naturally from leaching wood ashes, but you can also buy it commercially for an easier process. Tallow fat is a good option for soap because it has many health benefits for your skin. Making your own soap is easy and you can use herbs and flowers from your garden to scent it.
13. Set Up a Solar Water Heater
Heating water can be expensive and typically accounts for 20% of Americans’ home energy use. If you’re planning to go off-grid, it might be tempting to scrap water heating altogether. However, you can solve this problem with an inexpensive DIY solar water heater. To get started, you’ll need a long length of irrigation hose, wood, a large acrylic sheet, and a few other materials.
To construct your solar water heater, build a large shallow box with the wood. You’ll then coil the irrigation hose inside the box, ensuring that it has two exit points – one for input and one for output. You can tie the coils in place with zip ties or brackets. After the coil is complete, screw the acrylic sheet over the coils to enclose the space inside the box. Put the solar heater in a sunny location and attach the input and output hoses to your water system.
14. Assemble DIY Solar Panels
Homesteaders who are serious about getting off the grid may want to consider making their own solar panels. Installing enough solar panels to power an average home usually takes an initial investment of $10,000–$20,000 or more. By building solar panels yourself, you can save on labor costs and still reap the energy benefits of solar.
To build your own panels, you’ll need aluminum framing, plexiglass, solar cells, and soldering equipment. Use wire to solder the solar cells together and combine their energy. You can use resin to seal the cells into place inside a plexiglass and aluminum frame. Finally, solder wires to the cells and connect the panel to a solar charge controller.
15. Start a Fruit Grove
If you’re serious about homesteading, you should consider planting a fruit grove. Many trees take years to mature, so starting this early is important. For example, cherry trees typically grow for four years before they start bearing fruit. Blueberry bushes take a minimum of two years and apple trees can take up to eight years.
Fruit trees like a lot of sunlight and need to be spaced so each one has room to grow. While the trees are young, you may need to protect them from deer and other pesky animals like beavers. You’ll also want to keep these trees away from your garden so they don’t create shade as they grow. You should also try to plant varieties that grow well in your hardiness zone.
Homesteading the DIY Way
DIYing your homestead can help you cut costs and build the property you’ve been dreaming of. Whether you’re already living on land or you’re saving for a future move, you can use this list of DIY ideas to gain valuable skills and bolster your homestead.
DIY projects often take longer than you think and they all have a learning curve. Try to do one project at a time and don’t get frustrated if some skills come harder than others. Everything you learn along the way will equip you to become more confident and knowledgeable for the future. Once you conquer a few of these projects, you’ll be amazed at how many more you’re excited to take on.
Author Bio:
Jane is the editor-in-chief of Environment.co. She is passionate about sustainability, gardening and homesteading.
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