The Urban Homestead

Well I have been feeling semi-disgusting all weekend due to various allergy-related ailments, so I got to dig into this book that I checked out from the library last week:

The Urban Homestead, by Kelly Coyne and Erik Knutzen, is a beginner's handbook for people who long for a bucolic eco-friendly homestead, but also want to take advantage of all the awesome green-living benefits of living in the city. Think "Little House On the Prairie", but for multi-unit buildings. Coyne and Knutzen encourage us to plug into the real community opportunities the city provides, be thankful for public transit infrastructure and walkability, and then get creative and see how you can make your current space as self-sufficient and earth friendly as possible.

I gotta tell you, I am LOVING this book. I may even go out and buy it. I can't renew it because there is a que of other desperate urbanites eager to get their hands on it's treasure trove of very doable ideas.

When I read about it online, I figured all their ideas would be out of my reach. I live in a one-bedroom apartment with zero access to a yard, balcony, or an external fire escape. We can't even have window boxes. I can't build a grey-water system. I can't grow my own fruit trees. I can't raise chickens. I have no desire to install a composting toilet. And I probably can't install solar panels on anything I own.

But guess what I CAN do?
- Collect my "heating up the shower" water to water plants, soak nasty dishes, or gravity-flush the toilet
- Make my own yeast and bake my own bread from scratch
- Grow salad greens and herbs in the window
- "Guerrilla garden" in the alley, or sneakily in the fire escape windows
- Make my own jam, vinegar, vegetable stock, butter, cheese, or yogurt out of things that would usually be dumped in the garbage
- Make a teeny-tiny compost bin to use just for my indoor window boxes
- Make all my own cleaning supplies
- Start making a list of things to look for in a future apartment or house

And this one little book has instructions for ALL of those things, and a zillion more ideas to custom-build your own urban homestead.

I feel really compelled and twitchily excited to try these things.  "Why bother?", You may ask. You can buy perfectly good butter, tasty and healthy bread and salad greens in any grocery. Maybe it is part nostalgia. Pulling radishes out of our garden, snapping fresh peas into my mouth, gathering wild raspberries from the brambles that grew on the edge of our yard, sitting impatiently at the counter waiting for the fresh bread to be cool enough to eat - my childhood was full of this kind of "homesteading" stuff. I watched my mom can vegetables and make home-made bread from scratch when I was a kid, but it never occurred to me that someday I would want to do those things myself.

If I dip even further into the psychology of my urge to homestead, I'd tell you that it saddens me to think that in one generation, we've completely lost the ability to make our own stuff. My mom MILKED COWS. She made butter and ice cream. She drove a tractor, grew vegetables, composted, and knew about crop rotation, darning socks, chopping wood, and preserving food. All of these things were part of daily life on the farm. She brought some of those things into our family life and our little garden. So did my dad, but I never once saw him darn a sock or pick any vegetables. He could change the oil in the car, though, and knew how to repair just about anything that crumbled or broke around the house.

I, on the other hand, do not know how to keep a basil plant alive in a pot on the windowsill. And sadly, I don't have the chance to learn about those things from my parents. Thank God for the internet.

I don't have an expansive yard. There are no wild vines growing anywhere near our micro-home on the third floor of this prissy courtyard building. But I do have a kitchen, some creativity, and a hubby who will support my ridiculous trial-and-error attempts to bring the simple life up to our little corner of the world.

So stay tuned, good readers! I have a whole list of projects to try out for you. Grow my own yeast culture? Don't mind if I do!


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