Where these projects come from

None of this is new. Most of it was ordinary practice on small farms a century ago, and was written down carefully at the time.

What we read

• Old government farm bulletins. Between the 1890s and the 1950s the US Department of Agriculture published thousands of short, practical guides for small farms — storing roots over winter, building a hen house, glazing a cold frame. They were written for people with no money and no power supply, which is exactly the situation most of these projects assume.
• University extension guides. Land-grant universities still publish free, tested advice on storage temperatures, coop ventilation and garden soil. It is dry reading, and it is reliable.
• Books and accounts by people who live this way — off-grid households, smallholders and market gardeners who write down what failed as well as what worked.
• Comments under the videos. People who have kept hens for thirty years tell us when we have missed something. We fix the page.

What we check before publishing

• That the method is genuinely old and widely used, not one person's lucky result.
• That we can name the conditions under which it fails — wet ground, a nest above the roost, a bucket that held chemicals. Those warnings go on the page.
• That nothing on the page promises a harvest, an income, or a health benefit. We describe a method, not a result.

What we do not do

We do not claim to have built every project in our own yard. The videos are hand-drawn illustrations of the idea, made with AI tools, and every one of them says so. If you want footage of a real backyard, there are excellent channels that film their own — we are not pretending to be one.

We also do not publish engineering drawings. These pages give you the method, the materials and the mistakes to avoid. For anything structural, measure your own space and build to your own conditions.