Doctor Prepper‘s show guest today is Laurie Neverman, creator of Common Sense Home, one of the most popular homesteading sites on the Internet.

Laurie Neverman is a professional engineer, author, preparedness expert, and an accomplished ex-urban homesteader. Laurie mixes her skills and talents on subjects from green building to wildcrafting, with the best of traditional and modern tech with a twist of humor to present self-reliance information in a way that makes sense to everyone.

 Common Sense Home with Laurie Neverman [ 1:15:26 ] Play Now | Play in Popup | Download

I asked her these questions during the show:

1. Why did you choose a more self-reliant lifestyle?

• Safer food
• Healthier lifestyle – more active, natural health alternatives for self-care
• Be better prepared for emergencies
• Save money
• Reconnect with traditional skills and pass them on to our children
• Create community by working together with neighbors
• Lower environmental impact

1. What were/are your homesteading priorities?

• Building site with good soil and water within driving distance to cities of likely employment
• Build Energy Efficient, Environmentally Friendly Home with a focus on durability and functionality, including handicap accessibility. Home includes root cellar, attached greenhouse and extensive pantry areas for home food production and storage.
• Plant a windbreak tree line to start creating a microclimate for our home and yard
• Start growing our own food and sourcing as much food locally as possible
• Switch management of the balance of our land to an organic farm instead of the conventional farm that we started. (We have 35 acres in the country. The house sits in ten that was old pasture, and the balance is farmland.)
• Build permaculture guilds with perennial crops; add greenhouse and chicken coop to expand our food production resources.
• Long-term: homestead pond, solar electric power, extended emergency preps such as hand pump well and more fuel storage.

1. What are some of the things you’ve accomplished?

Actually, we’ve done most of the things we planned, as well as the following:

1. Built our current home in 2004-2005––an Energy Star, certified Green-Built home, with passive solar heating and active solar water and space heating.
2. The tree line is established and doing well.  Many of the oldest trees are taller than I am.
3. The annual food production gardens cover close to an acre with nine different beds for veggies, fruits, herbs and flowers.
4. We remodeled the shelving in the root cellar last year to include more canning storage and wine racks.
5. The perennial plantings are growing, and will increase even more this season.  We have apples, cherries, apricots, plums, blueberries, raspberries, juneberries, elderberries, hazelnuts, chestnuts and a butternut, along with various wild edibles for foraging.
6. We’ve developed a great network of local sources (and friends) for much of the foods we don’t produce ourselves.
7. Our kids have grown from little boys to productive young men.

CommonSense Home is about using sound judgment to be more self-reliant.  It means doing:

• what you can
• where you are
• with what you have.

The CommonSense Home website features topics such as:

• Gardening
• Food storage
• Preparedness
• Natural health
• Herbalism
• Wildcrafting (Using wild plants for food and medicine)
• Home remedies
• “Getting Started” with homesteading basics, such as raising chickens
• Green home building and remodeling
• Book and product reviews
• Recipes and much more