Homesteading

Isaac

Self-hosted farm and homestead management on a Raspberry Pi 4 or 5 with 4 GB or more of RAM. One dashboard tracks plants, animals, equipment, vehicles, finances, and production. Weather data pulls from your own Ambient Weather station with NOAA as a fallback. Automated frost alerts email you before temperatures drop. The garden planner tracks planting dates, growth stages, watering schedules, and companion planting. Animal profiles carry health records, feeding schedules, and expense tracking. CalDAV syncs your farm calendar to your phone. Budget tools import bank statements and track income against spending. The entire system runs on your local network with SQLite on disk.

Garden planner with frost date awareness, succession planting, and a bed designer for raised beds, containers, and greenhouses. Animal tracking with health records, feeding schedules, cold weather alerts, and livestock production records with cost-per-pound. Automated frost and cold protection alerts via your Ambient Weather station or NOAA fallback. Built-in AI assistant powered by Claude, ChatGPT, or Ollama for local inference without API keys. Zero-port-forwarding remote access via Tailscale or Cloudflare Tunnel with edge authentication.

git clone https://github.com/n0mad1k/isaac.git /opt/isaac
cd /opt/isaac

# Backend
cd backend && python3 -m venv venv && source venv/bin/activate
pip install -r requirements.txt && deactivate

# Frontend
cd ../frontend && npm install && npm run build

# Start
sudo systemctl start isaac-backend nginx

Isaac applies technical independence to homesteading, one of LFHI's six training areas. The author is a security researcher at Coalfire. The system encrypts sensitive data at rest, enforces role-based permissions across five built-in roles with a granular permission matrix, and logs every change. It runs on the same Raspberry Pi hardware this community already uses. Licensed under Commons Clause (free for personal, non-commercial use).

Start Seeds Indoors

Spring equinox is March 20. For most zones, March is the right time to start warm-season crops indoors so they are transplant-ready after your last frost date passes. Check your seed packets for days to germination and weeks to transplant, then work backward from your area's average last frost date to figure out when to plant each variety.

1. Pick 3 to 5 warm-season seed varieties suited to your growing zone. Tomatoes, peppers, and basil are reliable indoor starts. Check the seed packet for weeks to transplant and count backward from your last frost date.
2. Fill seed trays or recycled containers (egg cartons, yogurt cups) with sterile seed-starting mix. Moisten the mix before planting.
3. Plant seeds at the depth listed on the packet. Label each container with the variety and the date planted.
4. Place near a south-facing window or under a shop light (T5 fluorescent or LED, 12 to 16 hours per day). If using a humidity dome, remove it once seedlings emerge. Keep soil consistently moist but not waterlogged.
5. One to two weeks before your last frost date, begin hardening off: move seedlings outside for a few hours each afternoon in a sheltered spot, increasing exposure over 7 to 10 days before transplanting.

LFM switched to Monero and uses it as our day-to-day currency. April covers how and why. If you have a repo that aligns with decentralization, encryption, or operational security, submit it below.

We feature repos that align with LFHI's six training areas or LFM's core principles: decentralization, technical independence, self-hosted infrastructure, privacy, and community resilience. The project must be open source, actively maintained, and solve a real problem.