The Homestead Year - Silas Mercer's Frontier Planner (Printable, 134 pages): is it worth buying?
The Homestead Year: a 134-page printable planner for people who need to track the whole homestead, not just the garden
You’ve probably tried a standard bullet journal or a generic Notion dashboard for your homestead, and it fell apart by the second week. You were tracking chicken eggs in one tab, soil amendments in another, and completely forgot to log the cost of that 50-pound bag of feed. The problem isn’t your discipline; it’s that most planners don’t understand the specific, interconnected chaos of running a small-scale farm.
The Homestead Year from Silas Mercer is a $22 printable system designed specifically for this kind of operational complexity. It’s a 134-page, letter-landscape PDF that acts as the operational twin to Mercer’s The Forgotten Frontier Journal. While the Journal tells the story of a character named Eli, this planner is where you write down what you actually did. It’s built for home printers, designed to be punch-bound, and packed with ledgers, tick-lists, and seasonal grids that force you to look at your homestead as a single, functioning unit. If you’re ready to stop guessing what your homestead costs and start tracking it with a system that actually makes sense, The Homestead Year planner is a serious tool to keep in your back pocket.
Quick answer
| Best for | Homesteaders, small-scale farmers, and preppers who want a single, cohesive paper system to track crops, livestock, pantry, and finances. |
| Skip if | You prefer fully digital apps with auto-syncing, or if you don’t have a home printer that handles 4.75 MB PDFs cleanly. |
| Price | $22 |
| Format | 134-page printable PDF (Letter, landscape) |
| One-line take | A deeply specific, print-friendly operational planner that turns homestead chaos into a 134-page ledger of your own doing. |
What you’re actually buying
At $22, you aren’t just buying a calendar; you are buying a complete operational framework for a year of homesteading. The core of the system is the “Twelve Months” section, which gives you five dedicated pages for every single month of the year. Each month starts with a calendar grid and a tick-list of seasonal jobs, but it goes much deeper than that. You get a second, entirely blank work list for your own specific tasks, a ledger to track everything that goes into your pantry (and what it would have cost to buy at the store), and a ruled page for the overflow. It’s a tight, five-page loop that keeps you focused on the month while still capturing the long-term data.
What makes this stand out from a standard farm journal is the depth of the specialized sections. You get a full “Pantry” module that includes a canning batch log, a cure and smoke tracker, and a process-time reference. The “Kitchen Garden” section isn’t just a planting chart; it includes a seed-saving register, a soil and compost log, and a frost log. For those keeping small stock, there is a dedicated section for rabbits, chickens, and goats that tracks breeding, births, and a shared feed log. There is even a “Field” section for foraging finds and hunting yields. This is a system that treats your homestead as a multi-department business, and it gives you the paperwork to prove it.
The physical design of the PDF is also a major selling point. It is formatted for a home printer in letter landscape, using thin leather frames and cream paper with no heavy ink fills. This means it won’t drain your toner, and it’s designed to be punch-bound and kept loose so a page can literally go out to the barn and come back. If you have the Forgotten Frontier Journal, every page reference in this planner points to a real page in that book, creating a seamless bridge between the narrative and your own records. If you don’t have the Journal, you can still use the planner on its own, but the two were clearly made to be kept together. You can check out the full Homestead Year contents to see exactly how the months and ledgers are laid out.
Why it’s on our radar
This is a rare find in the digital product space because it is so aggressively specific. Most “planner” PDFs are generic productivity tools. This is a 134-page operational manual for a specific lifestyle. The fact that it includes a “Your Ground” page to shift the seasonal dates to your own frost dates shows a level of customization that usually requires a $200 custom consulting session.
The “quiet money” aspect is also a standout feature. The planner includes a “Close” section at the end of the year that pulls your ledger totals onto a single page for an annual review. That is a powerful tool for anyone trying to figure out if their homestead is actually saving them money or just a very expensive hobby. One Gumroad review captures the emotional weight of the system perfectly: “Thank you for sharing this extraordinary and valuable beyond words books of your family tradition. I will keep it and it will not be forgotten.” That’s not just a planner; it’s a record-keeping tool for a way of life.
What actually matters
Before you hit the buy button, keep these three things in mind:
- Printer Compatibility: This is a 4.75 MB PDF designed for home printers. Make sure your printer can handle landscape letter sizing and that you have enough ink or toner for 134 pages. It’s designed to be light on ink, but 134 pages is still a decent print job.
- The Journal Connection: While you don’t need the Forgotten Frontier Journal to use this planner, the planner is heavily cross-referenced to it. If you want the full experience of the “seasonal round” and the narrative context, you’ll likely want to look at both the Journal and the planner together.
- The “Spare Sheets” Feature: One of the most clever parts of the design is the “Spare Sheets” section. Every working form (the ledgers, the logs, the grids) is included again, blank and undated, at the end of the PDF. This means you can print as many extra pages as you need for a particularly busy month without having to reprint the whole 134-page document.
Mid-check
If you’re ready to stop using a random notebook in the barn and start tracking your homestead with a system that actually understands the work, See current options to grab the PDF and start printing.
FAQ
Can I use The Homestead Year planner without the Forgotten Frontier Journal?
Yes, the planner is designed to stand on its own. However, the monthly work lists include references to specific pages in the Journal. If you don’t have the Journal, you can simply ignore those references and use the planner as a standalone tracking system.
Is this planner digital or physical?
It is a digital PDF file (4.75 MB) that you download and print at home. It is formatted for letter-size, landscape printing and is designed to be bound with a punch-hole binder or similar loose-leaf system.
What is the “Your Ground” page for?
The “Your Ground” page is a customization tool that allows you to map the seasonal rounds from the planner to your own specific climate and frost dates. It helps you adapt the general seasonal advice to your actual location.
Does the planner include a financial tracking system?
Yes. Each month includes a ledger for tracking what goes into your pantry and what it would have cost to buy. At the end of the year, there is a “Close” section that totals these ledgers to give you a clear picture of your homestead’s financial impact.
Bottom line
If you are running a homestead, a small farm, or a serious prepper setup, you need a system that can track the eggs, the soil, the feed, and the money all in one place. The Homestead Year is a 134-page, print-friendly PDF that does exactly that. It’s specific, it’s well-designed for home printing, and it treats your homestead with the operational respect it deserves. At $22, it’s a low-risk way to get a high-impact system into your hands.