10 Common Chicken Keeping Mistakes To Avoid At All Costs
Keeping chickens is a lot of fun, but when you first start off, it can be so nerve-wracking. If you’re a nervous beginner, one of the best things you can …
Meredith Skyer
Meredith Skyer is a writer, artist, and homesteader residing in Western New York with her husband and menagerie of farm critters.
She has spent the last 12 years learning and implementing a myriad of homesteading skills, specializing in growing food and animal husbandry. Her biggest passion is working in conjunction with the natural world to harvest healthy, organic food from her own backyard.
Meredith is a freelance writer and founder of Backyard Chicken Project, a place for crazy chicken people to gather, learn, and share in their love of chickens. She also contributes articles to Mother Earth News Online, From Scratch Magazine, and Grit.
Meredith works from her woodland homestead where she spends her days writing, creating animal-inspired art, and chasing after her flock of chickens.
You can visit her at www.backyardchickenproject.com
The Three Sisters Planting Technique – The Most Efficient Way To Grow Food
Companion planting is all the rage these days, but did you know this practice goes back thousands of years? The three sisters garden is one of the oldest and most …
5 Reasons To Grow A Chicken Garden & What To Plant
If you’re a fellow homesteader, you probably already grow a garden, but have you considered growing one just for your chickens? Why grow a chicken garden? There are plenty of …
7 Ways To Preserve Fresh Eggs & 13 Ideas For Using Extra Eggs
It’s that time of year when backyard chickens everywhere awaken from their winter slumber and go into egg production overdrive. If you’re anything like us, you’ve gone from getting no …
How to Make an Easy to Water Strawberry Pot
Have you ever freshly planted a beautiful batch of strawberries in your strawberry pot, only to find that they’re practically impossible to water? Watering through the opening on the top …
7 Plants That Naturally Repel Pests and How To Use Them
We all could certainly do with less pests in our lives, especially the type that bite, sting, and raid your pantry. Getting rid of household pests is an age old …
10 Most Productive Egg Laying Chickens – 300+ Eggs Per Year
Raising chickens is such a delight, because they’re pets with benefits. Not only do they provide affection, entertainment, and fun, but they provide you with breakfast too! We’re often asked …
23 Seed Catalogs You Can Request For Free (& Our 4 Favorite!)
Are you getting tired of the dreary, long, cold, snowy winter? Then it’s time to break out the seed and plant catalogs and start planning your spring garden. Nothing helps …
7 Gadgets Every Backyard Chicken Owner Needs
Once you realize how fun and beneficial raising chickens can be, you make every effort to make the experience better for the chickens, and yourself! Related Reading: 10 Things Nobody …
How To Grow Mushrooms From Plugs On Logs
Mushroom growing is fun and satisfying, and can be done almost anywhere. Growing mushrooms from plugs on logs tends to take more time than growing them from sawdust, but has …
7 Steps to Winterize the Chicken Coop
Winter can be tough on chickens, and it’s coming soon. If you take the proper steps to winterize the chicken coop right now, it will mean a much more comfortable …
Raising Chickens On a Dime: 14 Ways To Save Money On Your Flock
Did you buy a flock of chickens hoping to save money on eggs, and then find that they cost more to care for than eggs do? We did too. We …
How to Make 5 Minute Fridge Pickles
It’s that time of year when home gardens are producing epic amounts of vegetables, especially cucumbers! While it may be tough to eat an abundance of cucumbers fresh, it’s super …
How To Make a DIY Cold Frame From a Dollar Store Bin
Colder weather may be on its way, but that doesn’t mean you need to say goodbye to your garden! The use of cold frames allow you to extend the gardening …
5 Uses for Fall Leaves In The Garden & On The Homestead
Fall is finally here with it’s cool, crisp weather and pumpkin spice everything. The changing fall foliage is beautiful too, until it starts coating your lawn and needs to be …
The Secret To Successfully Saving Tomato Seeds For Next Year
Saving seeds from most fruits and vegetables is pretty straightforward. You wait until the crop has reached harvest time, harvest it, pull out the seeds, let them dry, and store …
How to Hand Pollinate Squash in 30 Seconds (With Photos!)
If you’ve ever tried to grow squash in your home garden and ended up with huge rambling plants but no fruit, this tutorial is for you! How exactly do you …
7 Ways To Get More Eggs From Your Chickens
It’s that time of year when chickens suddenly go from producing an egg every day to one or two a week, or if you’re really unlucky, no eggs at all. …
How To Plant Garlic In The Fall
Fall is sneaking up on us quickly, which means it’s time to get digging in the garden to plant your garlic! Garlic is one of the few crops that you …
Homemade Quick Pickled Hot Peppers – No Canning Required!
It’s that time of year where summer gardens are producing hot peppers in enormous quantities! The thing about hot peppers though, is you can only eat so many before they …
How To Prune A Jade To Get A Big Bushy Plant (With Photos!)
Jade are one of the quintessential succulent house plants that almost everyone can recognize and most plant lovers to keep in their home. Not yet got your own Jade plant? …
10 Things Nobody Tells You About Raising Chickens
Backyard chicken keeping is all the rage these days. If you’re thinking about raising a flock of chickens, you’ll need all the facts, and there are plenty of things no …
How to Make a Chicken Dust Bath In Just Two Minutes
Chickens are simple creatures, but they still have basic needs, and a dust bath is one of them! Why do chickens need a dust bath? All chickens get clean by …
How to Dry Fresh Herbs at Home – Two Ways!
Drying fresh herbs at home has many benefits, and it’s so easy there’s really no reason not to! Drying your own herbs is certainly more cost effective than buying them …