 |
Click Order Form to Order Interested in Homesteading? Then you may be interested in generating your own electric power. Click here to review "More Power To You" by the same author. |
Go beyond the dream...Be a successful homesteader!
The Modern Homestead Manual builds hope and confidence, dispels myths, and tells it like it is! The focus of is on what it really takes to make it beyond the power lines and sidewalks. Rather than going into a lot of detail in topics that are already well covered in other publications, The Modern Homestead Manual takes over where they leave off. It covers the questions that the others leave you with! The goal of The Modern Homestead Manual is to enable a positive homesteading experience for those folks seeking a new life away from the city, as well as to offer enhancement to those already living beyond the sidewalks and power lines. To some, self-sufficiency is nothing less than raising all of one's food; creating buildings, clothes and furniture from salvaged materials; and living without electricity. To others, the meaning is far less strict, but no less meaningful. The Modern Homestead Manual speaks to those at every level of self-sufficient living, as well as to those who are still contemplating this exciting and rewarding, yet sometimes demanding life. If you're at the contemplating phase, you will appreciate that no punches are pulled here; you will discover if you have what it takes before your take the plunge. Homesteaders are the antithesis of "consumers." Homesteaders by their nature, create, nourish, and nurture. Homesteaders are worthy stewards of the Earth. The modern homesteader strives for autonomy, self-confidence and self-sufficiency. The Modern Homestead Manual also contains a bibliography that covers carefully-selected further reading, plus a resource guide that tells where to find just about anything discussed in the book.
Topics covered include:
A Review
Excerpts from a review in Backwoods Magazine, by Dave duffy, publisher:
"It's seldom I get excited about a book, but I'm excited about this one. Skip Thomsen and his wife, Cat Freshwater, have produced what I believe to be the best homesteading manual in years. It's not pie-in-the-sky stuff, but straight talk about the difficulties, as well as the rewards, of moving to the country and becoming self-reliant. "Too many people who have sought to go back to the land have been bushwhacked by the things many back-to-the-land books never talk about, such as how to make a living so you can stay in the country. This book talks about them and tells you how to deal with them. "The Modern Homestead Manual does not just provide good information, but also gives you the philosophy you'll need to succeed in the country. Thomsen and Freshwater have lived what they write. The book is the result of 15 years of actually doing it, solving the problems as they presented themselves, and in the end, succeeding and loving it. "If you want to significantly increase your chances of success when you move to the country, or if you want to take a fresh look at what you are currently doing in the country, this book will be a sound investment in your future."
About the authors
As a kid, Skip often asked his father why he chose to work 49 weeks of the year at a job he didn't like so that he could go up to the mountains he dearly loved for the other three weeks. He said that was how life was: a lot of sacrifice for a little pleasure. The kid didn't buy it. But he struggled with this dismal philosophy for years. He was somewhere in his thirties before he figured out just how wrong his father was. And in 1974, he and wife Sande moved out of the San Francisco Bay Area to the hills of Oregon. They got their feet wet in their quest for self-sufficiency by buying a rustic owner-built A-frame on four acres of woods. They heated with wood, raised almost all of their own food, and earned their keep in the shop they built on the property. But they wanted to get farther out and really start from scratch. So in 1978, they put a down payment on 108 acres of forest on the northeast slope of Mt. Hood. The land was at 2600 feet elevation, sixteen miles from the nearest town, and there wasn't so much as a shed on it. In the following year, they accumulated all of the materials they would need to build their cabin, mostly from old city houses that had been carefully disassembled to make room for yet another freeway. Every time they made the trip over the mountain to their new homesite, they took as much stuff as their stout old pickup truck, with a rack to match, could hold. They made quite a few trips carrying up to 24-foot long lumber to their new homesite. They found a great 40 year-old Case tractor with a loader, grader, and plow. Skip built a heavy-duty six-foot-wide snow plow to mount onto the loader mechanism. (This turned out to be a good move as they had five feet of snow their first winter!) Their first few years were busy and exciting. They built their cabin, shop, greenhouse, poultry house, water and electrical systems, put in a great garden, raised chickens and turkeys, and again, earned their keep right on the place. They were also successfully home-schooling their son, Jake, who was by then about six years old. Then in June 1984, Sande was killed in an auto accident. Jake and his dad made do for a little over a year, and then late in 1985, Skip ran a "personals" ad in a Portland art paper looking for some possible female companionship. He wasn't looking for a wife; just a compatible lady with whom he could share some time and maybe develop a friendship. One didn't meet a lot of people living out where they did. One of the respondents was Cathleen Freshwater, who later did become Skip's wife, friend and partner, not necessarily in that order. Cathleen had had experience in almost all of the areas of life that interested him the most, and proved to be an enthusiastic homesteading partner. Her editing expertise and their common interest in computers would later be the inspiration that started their first home-based publishing company, Oregon Wordworks. During the next few years on the mountain, they totally debugged their electrical system. Visiting friends had a difficult time believing that they made their own electricity; they had all the electrical gadgets found in most city homes, and then some. They ran their home, shop and office with that system, never had a blackout, and the cost of operation was next to nothing. After listening to repeated requests that they write a manual on how to duplicate their electrical system, they finally did. They self-published their first book, More Power to You!. Skip, Cathleen, and Jake have always loved the ocean. They made countless trips to the beach from their mountain. During 1988 and '89, they started going to the beach at least once a month. Soon they were going every two weeks. When their trips became even more frequent, they decided that they were ready for a change, and they put the homestead up for sale. With the proceeds from the sale of their place on the mountain, they paid off what they still owed on the land, and made a down-payment on a modest house at the beach on the Oregon coast, where their little publishing company was born. Another four years later, an old dream was brought to reality when they moved once again, this time to rural Hawaii. The Modern Homestead Manuall was the first project in their new environs. Since then, Cathleen has moved back to the mainland pursuing her own dreams, Jake is now 21 and out on his own, and Skip is once again looking for that perfect spot to start all over again, only this time under the warm Hawaiian sun.
