Expanding production
Phase 2 food is the bridge between growing for fun and feeding a family year-round, and that is a much wider skill set than most people expect. Production has to scale up: bio-intensive beds, succession planting, season extension with low tunnels and cold frames, and saving your own seed. Preservation has to cover the whole calendar: water-bath canning for high-acid foods like tomatoes, jams, and pickles; pressure canning for everything else (green beans, broth, meat, soups); dehydration; salt-curing; cold and hot smoking; lacto-fermentation; root cellaring (potatoes in damp sawdust, carrots in damp sand, apples on slat racks); and old reliable techniques like water-glassing fresh eggs in pickling lime for twelve-plus months of shelf-stable storage. Then there's protein, and small livestock fills that gap at home scale: chickens for eggs, rabbits for the best meat-to-feed conversion at small scale, coturnix quail where space or local code rules out larger poultry, ducks if you have ponds or slugs, sometimes dairy goats. Phase 2 is where you build practical competence in all of this before the community-scale design work in phase 3.
Start here
John Jeavons · ~15 min — First session of Jeavons' self-teaching series: double-digging, close spacing, and compost as one system. Dense, and worth it.
Seed Savers Exchange — Open-pollinated vs. hybrid, isolation distances, harvesting, drying, storage. The foundation before you tackle specific crops.
RoseRed Homestead · Series — Pam Cantrell's episode-length canning library. Acidity, headspace, processing time, and the safety rules that matter. Linked as a playlist because the channel has no single canonical fundamentals episode.
Self Sufficient Me · ~10 min — Practical no-root-cellar storage in damp sand and sawdust at apartment or garage scale. Hits the same conceptual notes as proper root cellaring.
Living Traditions Homestead · ~17 min — Kevin and Sarah make the case that rabbits and quail (not chickens) are the right starter livestock for new homesteaders. Feed conversion, space, legal status, and butchering reality.
First project
Market garden bed system
Lay out and plant 4–8 bio-intensive beds using succession planting and intercropping. Track yields by bed. Save seed from at least two crops. Preserve at least 30% of what you harvest using more than one method (canning, dehydration, root cellar, fermentation). Preserving is the half of food production most beginners skip. If your situation allows, integrate one small-livestock system alongside the garden for protein and manure.
Other ways in
A year of preservation
Pick one summer-fall season and commit to preserving everything you grow or buy in bulk. Practice every major modality at least once so you know what you actually prefer and where the equipment gaps are. Water-bath canning (jams, tomatoes, pickles). Pressure canning (green beans, broth, soup, meat). Dehydration (apples, mushrooms, herbs, jerky). Salt-curing and smoking (a cured pork belly into bacon; cold-smoked salmon; hot-smoked chicken). Lacto-fermentation (sauerkraut, kimchi, hot sauce, kvass). Root cellaring in whatever cool space you have (potatoes in damp sawdust, carrots in damp sand, apples on slat racks). Water-glassed eggs in pickling-lime solution. Fresh unwashed eggs keep 12–18 months shelf-stable at room temperature. At the end of the season you will have eaten through several months of the previous one and know exactly which methods earn shelf space in your life.
Meat rabbits
Build a three-hutch or colony setup and start with a trio: one buck and two does. New Zealand White, Californian, or a heritage line like Silver Fox or American Chinchilla. A trio produces roughly 80–120 lb of dressed meat per year on hay, greens, and pellets, at a feed conversion close to 3:1, the best of any meat animal at small scale. Quiet, no rooster issue, legal in most suburbs where larger livestock is prohibited. Manure is cold (no composting required before garden use). Includes processing: you will learn humane dispatch, skinning, and butchering. Skip this alternative if you are unwilling to do those things; the gap between "I want meat" and "I can kill an animal cleanly" is the single biggest filter on this skill.
Coturnix quail flock
The smallest practical livestock. Ten coturnix hens in a 4×4 ft hutch produce six to eight eggs per day and live their entire life cycle in roughly 1 sq ft per bird. Sexual maturity at 6–8 weeks, around 300 eggs per hen per year at peak, generation short enough that you breed your own replacements continuously with a small incubator. Eggs are smaller than chicken (three to four quail eggs equals one chicken egg) but richer. Often legal where chickens are not. Many municipal codes that prohibit "poultry" do not classify quail as poultry, or carve out gamebirds explicitly. The best entry point if space, noise, or local code rules out chickens, and a faster path to "I raised this animal from hatch to harvest" than any other livestock.
Phase 3 food is design work: complete food systems for 20–50 families, with caloric math, crop selection, animals, and preservation infrastructure. See food in phase 3 →
Go deeper
Storey's Guide to Raising Rabbits
The standard reference for meat and breeding rabbits. Housing, feeding, breeding management, health, and processing. Storey's small-livestock guides are the homesteading equivalent of textbooks; the quail, chicken, duck, and dairy goat volumes are all worth owning.
Community Experiences
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