Your Guide to Self-Sufficient Living in the Heart of the City
BY KELLY COYNE & ERIK KNUTZEN
This celebrated, essential handbook shows how to grow and preserve your own food, clean your house without toxins, raise chickens, gain energy independence, and more. Step-by-step projects, tips, and anecdotes will help get you started homesteading immediately. The Urban Homestead is also a guidebook to the larger movement and will point you to the best books and Internet resources on self-sufficiency topics.
Written by city dwellers for city dwellers, this copiously illustrated, two-color instruction book proposes a paradigm shift that will improve our lives, our community, and our planet. By growing our own food and harnessing natural energy, we are planting seeds for the future of our cities.
Learn how to:
- Grow food on a patio or balcony
- Preserve or ferment food and make yogurt and cheese
- Compost with worms
- Keep city chickens
- Divert your grey water to your garden
- Clean your house without toxins
- Guerilla garden in public spaces
- Create the modern homestead of your dreams
“A delightfully readable and very useful guide to front- and back-yard vegetable gardening, food foraging, food preserving, chicken keeping, and other useful skills for anyone interested in taking a more active role in growing and preparing the food they eat.”—BoingBoing.net
What the Green Living Staff Says
If you are interested in exploring the idea of urban homesteading, we recommend getting a copy of this book (the expanded and revised edition). It is chock full of valuable information, tips, and ideas, plus when we spotted it in Powell’s, we were taken with the way the book felt when we first picked it up. It just felt right – something about the feel of the cover, and the heft of the book itself, that said, “Take me home”. So, we did.
It only took reading the first page for us to realize that our first impression was right. Here was a book that we could relate to because the authors were people we could relate to. Their first four paragraphs give the essence of why urban homesteading is on the rise: “Imagine sitting down to a salad of peppery arugula and heirloom tomatoes that you grew yourself. Or a Sunday omelet of eggs laid that morning, served with a thick slice of fresh sourdough, butter, and apricot jam – all homemade, of course. Or imagine toasting your friends with a mead made from local honey. Where would you have to move to live like this? A commune in Vermont? A villa in Italy? My husband Erik and I have done all of this in our little bungalow in Los Angeles, two blocks off of Sunset Boulevard. We grow food and preserve it, recycle water, forage the neighborhood, and build community. We’re urban homesteaders.
Though we have fantasies about one day moving to the country, the city holds things that are more important to us than any parcel of open land. We have friends and family here, great neighbors, and all the cultural amenities and stimulation of a city. It made more sense for us to become self-reliant in our urban environment. There was no need for us to wait to become farmers. We grow plenty of food in our backyard in Echo Park and even raise chickens. Once you taste lettuce that actually has a distinct flavor, or eat a sweet tomato still warm from the sun, or an orange-yolked egg from your own hen, you will never be satisfied with the pre-packaged and the factory-farmed again.”
If these words don’t inspire you to get up off the couch and become a homesteader then homesteading is not your calling.
