The Self-Sufficient Backyard PDF by Ron and Joanna Melchiore.

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I'm one of the back-to-the-land people from the late 1970s, a city kid from Philadelphia, who somehow ended up in the woods of northern Maine, where I built my first homestead without knowing anything about it.

I went from the hustle and bustle of suburbia, where I was surrounded by humanity, to the slower pace of country living.

My two-amp off-grid electrical system was maxed out trying to run a car, radio, and a tiny TV.

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Kerosene lamps provided light at night. I lived smart in the beginning, and I had to get creative.

For example, I modified an old refrigerator by installing a pipe that extended through the house roof into the freezer, which drew in cold air in the winter to help me save the little electricity that I was producing.

I made an ice house in winter to chill my food in the summer. I did laundry in dual tubs using a washboard as my agitator, and I heated water on a wood stove for bathing in an old cast-iron tub.

Things changed a little years later when Joanna arrived on the scene. Eventually, we had kitchen cabinets, vinyl, and carpet for flooring, and a small RV propane refrigerator.

We moved up in the off-grid world. Our 20 years in Maine were a confidence booster and a nice change of pace.

But eventually there came a time when we were ready for a new adventure. So the obvious next step was to go where no one has gone before. Northern Saskatchewan beckoned.

Can you imagine living on a remote lake surrounded by virgin forest and accessible only by a float plane?

Just try to picture the plane taking off. and becoming a speck in the sky. We did that, Living 64 miles from the closest human being with no roads in sight sure gives new meaning to relying on oneself.

We became modern pioneers, much like those who traveled by wagon trains heading to the Western United States and Canada to clear and settle on new land.

What an honor and privilege it was to call the wilderness home for 17 years.

When we lived there, we wouldn't see another human for six months at a time. Every six months, we came out for our mail, supplies, and took care of any appointments.

But I surely did a much better job constructing our home in the bush.

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I improved the self-sustaining greenhouse, built it next to our house, and even installed a window that would open into the greenhouse so that whenever we were ventilating the house in the early spring or late autumn, all the warm air would go into the greenhouse, allowing us to extend the growing season when the temperatures were higher outside.

It was the other way around. We let the warm air from the self-sustaining greenhouse flow and heat our house.

We experimented and adapted various techniques, and we're confident that it would make a year-round self-sustaining greenhouse in less harsh climates.

We had hot and cold running water with a shower, real kitchen with wall and base cabinets and countertop, color TV with satellite, internet, two chest freezers and electric refrigerator freezer, lights like a normal house, and a moderate-sized solar array with a wind turbine.

We had come a long way from the Spartan living of the Maine days, and we did this with very little money.

Our Saskatchewan homestead was great, but it was too big for the two of us growing older. Two years ago, we started our third and final homestead before we hit the checkout counter.

Here in Nova Scotia is where we'll make our last stand, and here is where we want to enjoy our golden years and produce everything we need. Unlike our second home, here we decided to downsize everything.

Took everything we learned during the last couple of decades, and we designed this place with one thing in mind, to make a self-sustaining but low-maintenance homestead that doesn't need much work or expense.

As you can see, I'm in my 60s. So here we build our backyard and our plots in an ingenious way so that we don't have to bend or work a lot. We built this place on a small opening in the forest.

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It doesn't require more than an hour or two of work per day. In fact, chances are that you are living on a bigger plot right now.

In our program, The Self-Sufficient Backyard for the Independent Homesteader, you will find many low-maintenance sources of income you can take advantage of just by putting parts of your property to good use.

Now, this is just a tiny bit of our retirement paradise here in Nova Scotia. And here is where our journey will end.

But I hope this is where your journey begins because we would like to guide you on your path to self-reliance. We would like to share with you all the projects we made here in our small paradise in minute detail so that you can start implementing them on your land or in your house and profit from them for the rest of your life.

We'll also cover subjects in depth, such as water, food preservation, off-grid power, medicinal garden, you name it. We want to put in your hands helpful how-to illustrations, easy-to-follow step-by-step advice, brilliant tips, and ingenious time savers.

From all the projects you'll find in the self-sufficient backyard, I'm pretty sure you'll find some that are suitable for your home property.

We've created what may well be the most comprehensive step-by-step system to transform a regular homeowner or apartment dweller into an independent self-sufficient homesteader, even if you're older, living on a fixed income or have health issues.

So without further ado, let me show you just a glimpse of what you'll find in the self-sufficient backyard for the independent homesteader.

First thing you'll find out is that all you need to be self-sufficient in terms of food are just 1,020 square feet of land per person. If you follow the methods we developed, that's less than 10% of our entire quarter acre parcel you can see in the sketch.

We developed this plan on quarter of an acre for a family of four to be totally self-sufficient and have goods to sell to sustain a healthy profit year-round. But we created it in such a way that it is easy to downsize if you have less land or fewer family members.

Then we go into minute details for each section. I'll also show you how to make the simplest water collection system and how you can easily implement it on your own homestead.

We don't pay for irrigation water as we collect and store every gallon we need in these inexpensive tanks. You'll also find out the only seven plants you really need to have in a medicinal garden, and not only how to care for them, but how to prepare them when you're in need.

For the last 40 years, we've been treating ourselves with herbs. So how would you feel instead of paying for medicines or supplements to just pick them up from your backyard. I'm not talking about folk remedies here.

I'm talking about real powerful plants that we found out over the last four decades that are very effective and not something that you read on the internet.

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When the plane took off from our homestead in northern saskatchewan and became a speck in the sky, the closest pharmacy was 100 miles away with no roads to get there.

We would place our lives in the hands of these seven plants and i think they should be in the backyards of every american concerned about their health.

You will also discover a minute detail how to set up the most reliable, cost-effective hybrid electricity system for your house.

We'll show you what batteries to get for storage, what type of controller, cables, inverter, everything you need and how to set them up for maximum efficiency.

For the last 40 years, a wire from the power grid has never been connected to a home in which we've lived.

Using this inexpensive hybrid system, which we've developed and perfected over the years, you'll have an ultra-reliable source of power with no worries about future price increases, outages from downed wires, or deliberate attacks on the grid.

Alternatively, you can choose to sell the excess power back to the utility company if you opt to remain connected to the grid, earning money from them instead of the other way around.

You will also find out how to make an automated 24-hour bio-insect control system. Instead of using pesticides, you can grow all your produce organically by making a small swallow, bluebird house, and a bat shelter.

They'll take turns getting rid of the pests for you. A bat can eat an astonishing 4,000 insects a night and a bluebird around a thousand bugs a day, including cabbage worms, white flies, aphids, earwigs, grasshoppers, potato beetles, and grubs.

Also, their appetite for mosquitoes makes a backyard much more comfortable.

We will show you how we made different root cellars and how you can easily add whichever you want to your backyard, from full-sized and under-the-house root cellars to small barrel or trash can root cellars.

There's surely something here for you. In the self-sufficient backyard, we cover homestead water in depth because the lifeblood of any homestead is a reliable water source. We've tried a lot of things over the years.

We dug wells. We pumped water from lakes and rivers. We set up hand pumps for water.

We even installed a simple hand pump next to our kitchen sink for convenience if the electric pump would fail us. Whatever project you'll find useful for your property, You'll find it in here with pictures and guidance to set them up.

If your only source of water is the tap water from the public utility company, you are not independent and you're paying for it. I'll also show you a simple and ingenious solution that you can apply in your house to have free pressurized hot water.

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This system heats the water whenever we cook or heat the house. You'll also discover how to set up two beehives that will produce both delicious honey and help pollinate your trees and plants.

An alternative to the traditional hive is to make a beehive in jars. You'll also find out how to make a year-round self-sustaining greenhouse no matter where you live in America.

You can place it on your south side of the house. We'll also show you how to both collect and retain heat through the night, what materials to use, how to insulate it, the best angles for your area, how to get maximum glazing, how to ventilate it, and anything you can think of.

We'll also show you some upgrades you can add, like installing a window or vents that open into the greenhouse so that whenever you ventilate the house in the winter, all the warm air goes into the greenhouse.

In the spring and autumn, it's the other way around, letting the warm air from the greenhouse flow and heat our house.

Using a cold frame in our Saskatchewan self-sustaining greenhouse, we were able to grow lettuce while two feet of snow were still on the ground. Even this is nothing compared to the ultimate upgrade you can bring to the greenhouse.

We're talking geothermal, using Earth's stored heat to our advantage. That's because 10 feet below ground, the temperature is always stable at around 55 degrees, summer or winter, Texas or Maine.

The way you can harness this stable underground temperature is to circulate the air from the greenhouse through underground loop pipes until it warms to almost 55 degrees.

The only energy spent is with a very small fan that circulates the air through the tubes. You'll also discover our secrets to winter gardening. For example, we're growing these highly nutritious microgreens inside the house during the winter.

You can use this method to grow them in the basement if you are low on space and create your own microclimate. What makes them even more valuable is the fact that they only need two weeks to grow to the first cut. There will be many more to follow.

This is one of the highest yields per square foot in a year. Besides having four times higher concentration of nutrients than mature plants, they're high in demand. This is one of the easiest crops to grow and turn into money.

But maybe microgreens aren't your cup of tea. That's okay, because they're just one out of seven cash cow crops you'll discover inside the self-sufficient backyard.

These plants can be your secret weapon in turning a steady profit year after year without much of an effort. And if, just like us, you won't have a big pension or you're living on a fixed income, this can be your ticket to a stress-free retirement. You will find an entire chapter called Easy on the Back Gardening.

And each one of our gardening projects, you'll find inside the self-sufficient backyard PDF, is especially conceived for people with back problems. There's not much bending in these gardens.


You will find around 100 tips and secrets scattered across the whole book to save money on electricity, on food, on home repairs, on water, on tools, on house taxes, and on heating.

You can begin implementing them in your house right now and start saving a big part of the money you're paying each month to big corporations. You'll also find out how to power up a backyard perpetual compost garden using only the daily kitchen scraps you throw away.

When you water the plants or when it rains, both the water and the compost nutrients you place in the tower will flow outwards, feeding the plants and creating living soil.

That's exactly the kind of soil you need for record-breaking harvests. You'll find a lot of backyard projects that may find their way into your future homestead, like hay and straw bale gardens, chicken coop, hoop tunnels, wallopini, trellises, raised beds, container gardening, windowsill gardening, and a lot more.

You'll find out everything you need to know about raising chickens from egg, your dinner table. Chickens done right really are the most cost-effective protein source for any homesteader.

We'll show you simple tricks we discovered to make your chicken lay more than 300 eggs per year from each hen.

For example, one of the tricks we've learned before butchering is the night before to withhold all food from our chickens.

There's no need to waste the feed. and we want to clean out their digestive systems. Allow them plenty of water though.

This will make the whole process a lot easier. You will also discover how to set up a successful orchard that needs almost no maintenance and under the shade of which you can expect to sit sooner than you think.

The orchard will provide you with most of the fruits you need and will probably do so for your kids and family long after we move to a better place.

You'll also learn All the techniques and methods we discovered in the last 40 years about harvesting the best seeds and about the most effective way to preserve them for the next year.

You'll also discover some simple tricks like why fermenting the seeds could be a really good idea. We will also show you everything we do to preserve our food, from eggs to vegetable, roots, fruits, meats, everything we produce we preserve.

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We had no other option in the long winters of Saskatchewan. We had nowhere to go to buy things. If we didn't preserve the things we produce, we wouldn't have been there.

As I mentioned, this is just a glimpse of what you'll find in the self-sufficient backyard for the independent homesteader.

With it, you can transform from any honest homeowner into an independent, self-sufficient homesteader that has an extra income, and doesn't owe anybody a thing.

On top of that, right now, you can still take advantage of two bonuses that i hope will help you decide in case you are on the fence.

So, the first bonus you are going to get is the aquaponic Gardener.

In it, you'll discover how to set up an aquaponic system that you can fit in the backyard, in your basement, or in your greenhouse.

The awesome thing about an aquaponic garden is that every part of the system produces food for another.

The water you use for plants absorbs nutrients from the soil and feeds the fish. The fish droppings then feed good bacteria, which turn ammonia into nitrates that the plants need to grow.

The growth rates are astonishing, and you can always have both juicy vegetables and fresh fish aplenty. 40 do-it-yourself projects from the 1900s that you still need today.

Our forefathers were a lot more self-sufficient than the average American today. They made charcoal to purify water, smokehouses, root cellars, traps for wild game, plant remedies, fireboxes, small barns, tanneries, solar water heaters, wood stoves, fireplaces, you name it.

These projects were the lifeblood of their homesteads. and kept their inhabitants free.

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