Preparing for any long-term global crisis requires that you think beyond your immediate physical safety. Sure, you can stock up on essentials, and probably get a nice stockpile going, which will last you a couple of months. But what are you going to do after your stockpile runs out?

Enter homesteading.

Homesteading is an umbrella-term, which encompasses being self-sufficient to some degree. At its very core, homesteading is the act of not relying on anyone but yourself and nature to meet your basic food and water needs. This is a strange concept in 2020. Unless you grew up on a farm, odds are that you have no experience at all with growing your own food, or finding drinkable water. But don't worry. The DIY Prepper is here to help teach you exactly how to become truly self sufficient.

It may seem like a major, time-consuming, and difficult process, but it really isn’t as hard as you probably think it is. And the absolute best time to get started is right now. We’ll be using a method that combines homesteading and permaculture, to create the easiest and most reliable source of food for you and your family.

The method we’ll be using could be thought of as a way to really just facilitate your homesteading setup in a way that makes nature do what nature has done for millions of years, long before humans came along and started fertilizing, watering, and harvesting crops all the time. It can be done with nothing but a few square feet of outdoor area, and only requires a tiny bit of initial work, after which it’ll run on autopilot literally forever.

There’s tons of reasons why people decide to start homesteading, and not all have to do with preparing for disaster. Some people simply like the idea of only eating what they themselves have grown. Some might dream of a simpler life, where they aren’t so dependent on others. Regardless of the reasons, the basic principle is the same: Self-sufficiency.

So, where to start?

Your road to complete self-reliance, and off-grid living starts with knowledge. After all, despite rumors about the contrary, knowledge is indeed still power. When I started out, I started following various blogs and social media accounts that dealt with either permaculture or homesteading. And whilst a lot of them are really well-done, I only recently found the definite source of actionable material, that actually teaches you how to homestead.

You see, it turns out that the real power in knowledge does not necessarily lie in knowing all about which PH-level the water you use for your tomates should be, if you don’t first know how to actually plant a tomato plant. So far (and please, do get in contact if you know of anything better, I’m always open to suggestions!), this guide has been my bible for all things homesteading.

But before anything else, you really need to get your priorities in order, and most importantly figure out exactly what you want to achieve, and where your current weakest points are. When I started, I was a complete beginner, and I’d never successfully grown anything in my life, so the mere thought of being self-sufficient was more of a fantasy than it was an actionable goal.

Now, don’t get me wrong, setting up a homestead CAN be hard work. But it can also be a lot smoother than a lot of people think. I’m not going to lie, the concept of spending several hours every single day in the garden just wasn’t that appealing to me. Like, I really wanted to become self-sufficient, but preferably without working myself to death at the same time.

So, I did some digging (not literally, yet), and stumbled upon a method that seemed way too good to be true. But then again, the very notion of being a homesteader sounded too good to be true as well, so I gave it a shot, and learned that I was very wrong about homesteading. It was NOWHERE near as difficult as I thought it would be.

This method is known as “The Survival Farm”, and is nothing short of incredible. This thing works all over the world, no matter the climate, and seriously provides an endless supply of food right in your backyard, on your balcony, or wherever you’d like. It doesn’t take more than a few feet of space, and it’s truly miraculous to behold. The best thing is that apart from the initial setup, you will spend almost no time gardening, as the concept revolves around nature taking care of nature - just like it happened for millions of years before humans entered the scene.

The “Survival Farm” method can be used for all types of fruits and vegetables, and even for medicinal herbs as well, if one is so inclined.

Normally, what you’d do is, you’d plant some crops, and keep them fed with nutrients and water throughout their life-cycle. After harvesting the plants, you’d then rinse and repeat year after year. You’d need to supply nutrients (fertilizer), as the soil will quickly deplete of the natural fertilizer that would otherwise keep nature going, as you’d see in the wild.

Enter permaculture.

Permaculture is the idea of replicating the way things would happen naturally, and, as the name suggests, revolves around having a permanent setup, just like it is in nature. Essentially, you’ll want to make a tiny, but perfect, ecosystem, which will keep going on its own throughout the years. And the best thing is, that your little garden won’t care about any kind of global disaster, so no matter what happens, you’ll be good to go, food-wise.

Now, if you combine permaculture with homesteading, you’re in for a treat. You’ll need to dig once, when setting up your garden. But the garden will grow on its own, so you won’t have to dig up the soil season after season. You won’t have to weed it ever, as weeds will become a natural part of your little ecosystem, and actually work in your favor. Your water will be provided by the rain, even if you live in areas prone to droughts; it’s all about strategic time-release of the water. Sound complicated, but it’s really easy to setup.

Now, permaculture is not a new idea, and it’s not some magic bullet. Rather it’s a complete approach to the idea of cultivating plants, combined with actionable instructions that’ll enable anyone to actually make it work in real life.

A really interesting aspect of permaculture is the idea that it both minimizes input and output (but not your yield). This concept revolves around permaculture reusing what would normally be regarded as “garbage” in traditional farming/homesteading. If there’s nothing you’ll need to discard, that’s obviously better for the environment, but it also means a lot less work for you. And it actually extends beyond your garden as well, as all organic waste can be used in permaculture, it’s not required to reap all the benefits though.

With permaculture, you’ll tend to focus on perennial plants (plants that can continue year after year), which also means that your plants will have a much deeper net of roots, in turn making them much more resistant, and much better at drawing up water and nutrients from deep down in the soil.

Plant diversity is essential, as the various different plants are actually chosen to be mutually beneficial, and to work together in order to give you the best yield. So that means that when you’re smart about how and which plants to plants, you’ll be able to create the ultimate tiny ecosystem, while minimizing the amount of human intervention or labor as much as possible. It really is a marvelous thing!

First you’ll need a bit of land. A few square feet will actually do, and this could be your backyard, a tiny area on your balcony, or something similar. You really don’t need a lot of space for this.

Then you’ll dig up the soil a bit, and make the soil super nice for your plants by supplying some organic material like dead leaves, dead plants, branches, and other naturally occurring organic material that you can find in any forest anywhere in the world for free.

After that, you’ll be digging a couple of shallow ditches to enable the slow-release water system I talked about earlier.

And that’s pretty much it. Then you’ll simply need to plant your seeds. But the real secret lies in which plants go together and which don’t. This can be achieved by trial and error, but I’d recommend that you pick up a copy of “The Survival Garden” instead, as it lays out exactly which kind of plants to plant together, how to lay it out, and which common mistakes to avoid. It really sounds like snake-oil, but the results are absolutely amazing; especially when it comes to actual yield, this method just consistently yields far far more than a normal garden would.

The full guide can be found here. The author sometimes provides discounts (during the COVID-19 crisis for instance, the guide was a whooping 60% off, which I think is a really cool thing to do!), so make sure to check the link and see if you can grab the guide during a sale!

So just to summarize, using these techniques, you’ll learn how to start homesteading, using the principles of permaculture, which’ll enable you to actually keep yourself and your family fed for life. There’s a bit of work to do in the beginning, but after that, it’s pure auto-pilot. The guide covers exactly which plants to plant, no matter where you’re located, as it actually also covers choosing the right plants for your specific climate! It also comes with a 60 day 100% money back guarantee, so there’s really no reason why not to check it out, if you have just a fleeting interest in becoming self-sufficient.

Even though your permaculture homestead doesn’t require much water, the same unfortunately can’t be said about you. For some reason, people have the idea that getting drinkable water in a survival situation is extremely difficult. But don’t forget that humans survived for a couple of hundreds of thousands of years before anyone bothered inventing the kitchen sink and bottled water.

Now, don’t get me wrong, you’ll need to learn how to do it, but after having tried it out a few times, you’ll easily be able to find, source, and secure your own water supply no matter which climate or conditions you’re living in. Originally, I myself used a guide to learn all this, and I wanted to link to that guide here as well. But it turns out that this particular guide on how to always have a fresh supply of off-grid drinking water has now been bundled with the same guide I’m recommending for homesteading/permaculture. So you’re actually getting a complete separate guide on how to deal with your water situation, for free. I can’t remember exactly, so don’t hold me to it, but I think I paid at least $50 for this guide when I bought it back in the day. So I’m very happy to see that you can now get it for free when buying the homesteading guide!

So far, we’ve covered how to build your off-grid house, and now we’ve also covered how to keep yourself from going hungry or thirsty. So the only thing we have left, is covering what to do for power. Now, granted, you don’t NEED power, the same way you need shelter, food, and water, but honestly, I wouldn’t do off-grid living without any power at all. I’ve just become too used to it, and I don’t particularly enjoy living without it. There are A LOT of ways you can get power for your off grid home, though, so I’ve written a separate article about it, which you can find here.