Creating a Modern Homestead: Traditional Skills for Real, Everyday Life

Learn how to easily bring simple living and self-sufficiency into your life, no matter where you live, in a way that works for you.

As our modern lives demand more and more from us, many people long for a slower pace of life. While picking up and moving to the country may not be an option for everyone, it is possible to embrace simple living and more traditional skills no matter where you live. Learn the lost art of from-scratch cooking, practice food security by keeping a deep pantry, find out how easy it is to raise backyard chickens, experience the joy of growing your own food (even in a small space), and preserve your own harvest through a variety of methods.

For the last ten years, Victoria Pruett of A Modern Homestead has guided her readers through the process of discovering that they truly can incorporate traditional skills into their everyday routines while they also juggle work, children, and social lives. Though the idea of including traditional skills may conjure images of spending eight hours a day in the kitchen, nothing could be further from the truth. Instead, Victoria teaches you how to deepen your skillset and understanding of self-reliance and how to easily fit simple living into your life in a way that works for you. Chapters cover:

• Cooking from scratch: 126 recipes for breads, main dishes, and desserts
• Building a robust food supply for your family
• Food preservation: water bath canning, pressure canning, freezing, dehydrating, and freeze-drying
• Best practices for backyard chickens
• Customizing your backyard garden--including traditional and Back to Eden methods--for your zone and growing season, companion planting, and natural pest control
• How to make sourdough work for you
• And more!

Author: Victoria Pruett
Publisher: Lyons Press
Published: 08/05/2025
Pages: 296
Binding Type: Paperback
Weight: 1.40lbs
Size: 8.90h x 7.00w x 0.60d
ISBN: 9781493090495

About the Author
Victoria Pruett is owner and creator of A Modern Homestead, one of the first homesteading websites. In 2014, she was living in a subdivision house with no yard and dreaming of life on a homestead. She grew up with grandparents on both sides who loved gardening, canning, and scratch-cooking and knew she wanted to stay connected to those roots. Doing everything she could to homestead in the city became her passion project. Soon, her passion grew to the point that she knew she wanted to help others learn how to live a more traditional life, even in the city. So, A Modern Homestead was born and she began sharing her journey online with the world.

Today, her family lives on an 8-acre homestead in Central Texas, and shares their journey with millions of people every year via the site and social media channels. Those visitors turn to her content as they learn traditional skills and generally work to make their homesteading dreams a reality; it's both incredibly humbling and a responsibility that she takes very seriously. Visit her online at AModernHomestead.com.