The Prairie Homestead

Homesteading | Self Sufficient Living | Living off the Land

Jill Winger

1 Comment | |    Last Updated: June 6, 2025

Easy Ways to Start Living a More Sustainable Zero-Waste Lifestyle

Homesteading has always been about self-sufficiency, about being free from modern systems, and providing more than we consume. And I truly believe that this homesteading way of life goes hand-in-hand with finding ways to live a more sustainable lifestyle. As humans, we have basic needs for survival like food, water, and shelter; these needs are met by using some form of our earth's resources. When you choose to live sustainably, you ...Continue Reading

5 Comments | |    Last Updated: April 22, 2025

How to Save Tomato Seeds

Confession: Until very recently, I've never really had any interest in saving seeds from my garden.  A homesteading lifestyle is about being self-sufficient and having independence, so you would think that saving seeds would be a common activity by all of us. The truth is, however, that until recent years when seeds were scarce (aka the 2020 Seed Shortage), it hasn’t really been taken very seriously by many gardeners and ...Continue Reading

50 Comments | |    Last Updated: October 21, 2024

Torch Carriers

“What’s wrong with us?”  My friends and I looked at each other and laughed, but the question lingered in the air. No one had an adequate response.  It was 10:22 p.m. on a Friday night in July.  It was the kind of summer evening when people are at the lake, or camping, or sitting on the front porch listening to the crickets. But not us. Instead, we sat shoulder to shoulder around a round plastic table in our ...Continue Reading

7 Comments | |    Last Updated: January 5, 2023

Ways to Heat Your Greenhouse in the Winter

Here in Wyoming, winters can be brutally cold and crazy windy, so choosing the right greenhouse was pretty important. When we started our search, we discovered that there are so many options, and it was easy to feel overwhelmed. Even though we have cold, snowy, windy Wyoming winters, we still chose to go with an unheated greenhouse. It wasn’t an easy decision, and all the choices did overwhelm us at first. In the end, we found The ...Continue Reading

2 Comments | |    Last Updated: January 5, 2023

Ways to Cool Your Greenhouse in the Summer

  Adding a greenhouse to our homestead was a dream come true. When we first decided it was in our budget, I was ready to just start building. It didn't take long for us to realize it isn't that simple. What we discovered is that when researching greenhouses, there is a flood of information, a lot of different options, and many extra things to consider. And on top of that, there's also a learning curve to starting to use one (I ...Continue Reading

21 Comments | |    Last Updated: December 27, 2023

Blogging Like It’s 1999

Twelve years. That's how long my current blog has been running. Of course, there have been a few hiatuses during that time. Like the months when morning sickness was so severe I couldn't write. Or seasons when all my energies went into writing books or buying soda fountains... But my blog has remained a constant in my life since the October day in 2010 when I sat at my tiny kitchen island while my baby slept and opened an account on ...Continue Reading

Nice to Meet You

I’m Jill. I’ve never been very good at following prescribed paths.

For the last 15 years, that instinct has led me through homesteading, entrepreneurship, and creating a life my younger self could have only dreamed of.

These days, I’m less interested in living the perfect "old-fashioned life" and more interested in knowing which ideas are worth carrying forward. The first half of this story was about building a homestead. The next part is about building a life that actually fits.
Read My Story