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TL;DR: The Tiny Powerhouse in Your Backyard If you’re looking for a suburban-friendly superfood, look no further than the quail egg. While small, these speckled gems are nutritionally denser than chicken eggs when compared weight-for-weight. The Highlights: Hey everyone, and welcome back to the homestead! If you’ve been following our journey, you know we’re big…
Like most of us out here, trying to be more self-sufficient, I’m re-learning what real scratch cooking actually looks like. That includes remembering that condiments are recipes, not ingredients. Making mayonnaise is one of those recipes we’ve somehow become convinced is too complicated. It’s not, and it’s quick. I live less than a half mile…
Part V – The Myth of Self-Reliance Eventually I had to burst the bubble, right? While a person can do a lot of things for themselves,, true self-reliance isn’t real … or, at least, it is very, very rare. Individually, we are amazing creatures capable of so much. But it is when we connect with…
Part IV – What to do with all that food Along with growing all this food comes the question of what to do with it. Harvests normally last a few weeks with all that glorious fruit ripening at once. Even if you share, sell and eat fresh, there will likely be too much at once,…
Part III – For the Birds! Deciding to keep chickens is a decision akin to getting married. One must never make the decision lightly. All of those vows you take … they’ll come back to haunt you! I didn’t want them. I was adamant. I had been responsible for chickens as a kid, and was…
Part II – What we’re Planting Planting isn’t a new thing for us. We have always had gardens of some kind or other. Even when we were dirt poor, that dirt was put to use growing tomatoes, broccoli, and eggplants. When our daughter was young, we thought we had failed spectacularly at growing cherry tomatoes…
Things are always growing at Off The Rails Homestead. This week we’ve eliminated massive amounts of Japanese Privet and random viny things to make room for new fruit trees. This place already has mature pecan, oak, and pine trees that we don’t want to get get rid of. They provide a beautiful high canopy for…
You wouldn’t think a lot could be done with a suburban 1/2 acre homestead. You’d be wrong. Here, we fully embrace the philosophy of “do what you can with what you’ve got”. Six years ago, we landed in Sumter, SC and bought a little place beside the railroad tracks. We cleared out overgrowth and removed…