The Urban Homestead (Expanded & Revised Edition): Your Guide to Self-Sufficient Living in the Heart of the City (Process Self-reliance Series)

This book is as much about people consciously creating the future as it is about how to make, grow, find, or trade for everything you need.I always thought of myself as a big supporter of sustainable living. I realized, after reading this book, that I also have been thinking, wrongly, that I had no choice but to cheer it on from the sidelines. I thought there was very little I and people like me could do to reduce waste, pollution, destruction of resources, vulnerable dependence on others for survival, and all the social despair that this sense of helplessness spawns.If you're like I was, an hour with this book will change you. Whether you are or not, you'll find this book is like having two experienced teachers welcome you to their community as they educate you (in the most friendly, readable language) about far more than the basics and benefits of urban homesteading.As a resource. On page after page of this book are references to excellent resources, and I briefly feared I'd have trouble finding specific ones again - until I flipped to the end and found a long, generous resources list, organized by topic. For reducing dependence on purchased power, even in the city, there are categories of references for solar power, water conservation/graywater, and transportation. For growing some of your own food, even in the city, you find resources for edible landscaping, general gardening, "guerilla" gardening (for the most urban of urban gardening tactics), permaculture, worm composting, container gardening, drip irrigation, and non-poisonous pest control. For growing some of your own livestock, even in the city, you get leads on experts with poultry, rabbits, and bees. For building or renovating shelter to make it more self-subsistent is a list of books and web site addresses about canning, solar cookers, solar dehydrators, fermentation, cleaning. And this is not to mention the list of resources for foraging -- even in the city!As your fundamental how-to guide. But before you get lost in web sites and what's going on in the entire urban homesteading world, you can start with page one of this sturdy book, which is cleverly designed, by professional book packagers it appears, for the kind of heavy-duty hands-on use its readers are going to subject it to in the garden and garage. The corners are rounded, so banging it around, even in moisture and dirt, won't bunch them up. The different sections begin with full-green pages that bleed off the edge and so are easy to flip to. With lots of reassuring commentary, advice, tips, and points of view, it walks you through projects of widely varying degrees of difficulty, with the ingredients (or parts and tools) succinctly listed before clear well-illustrated step-by-step instructions on exactly what to do with them. Examples (to name a few): make seed balls; mulch your yard; build a self-watering container; sprout and transplant seeds; grow chickens, ducks, rabbits, pigeons, quail, and bees; make flour from acorns; preserve food ("Nature gives in waves, and we've learned to surf these waves," say the authors) with the sun, vinegar, alcohol, fermentation, dehydration; clean without poisoning yourself and your home; harvest and conserve water; build a beehive; and make a bean teepee. There are strategies for literally every urbanite or sub-urbanite, whether you live deep in layers of concrete-non-jungle city or are blessed to be surrounded by acres of open fields.As a money saver. How much would you save if you grew, say, even 25 percent of your own food and preserved it for year-round use? If you reduced the amount of water you buy from the city by even 25 percent? If you reduced the amount of power you buy from the utility company by ten percent, and maybe even generated some of your own to sell back to them? If wholesome food and more exercise made you even 25 percent healthier into the last decade of your life?As an anti-depressant. If you have a nagging feeling that, as a species, we've all left the gas on the stove burning full blast and gone out of town, that we're a herd of lemmings headed for a cliff, that to hell in a row boat is where we're all mechanically and mindlessly paddling, you might find (as I did) that in addition to all the practical information this book provides is a lifeline that can pull you out of that sea of modern-life despair. It does that not only with good humor, but also by going way beyond dump-lists of problems and shoulds that end up seeming to be beyond the average person's control, opening your eyes to the fact that there are thousands of simple, realistic, practical things people can do, and in many cases have done for centuries, to thrive from endless cheap and free resources that are everywhere.As an inspiration for lifestyle change. Does this book say you can turn a tenth-floor studio apartment in a housing project into a self-sustaining urban farm? Nope. It reminds you that cities are built on earth, and that underneath, on top of, and in between all the structures and slabs of concrete are places to grow food, catch water, build chicken coops, and create lots of ways to live a lot more independently of distant corporations and utility companies than 99 percent of us do now. "Community building is the next step beyond this book," say the authors, with the vision of how much safer and better off everybody would be if we "build a community of urban homesteaders." It reminds you there was a time when people did things like trade the food they grew and the livestock they raised, and helped with each other's harvests. And I also recalled that, with the same numbers of minutes in a day as we have, they survived and thrived without electricity, grocery stores, pre-cut lumber, and ready-made tools, and even had time left over for things like dancing, music, courtship, and a full day of rest every week.With its density of information, the clarity of instructions, and the breadth of references to additional resources, this book just might be the best trailblazer of them all for how much more complete, human-like, and secure city-dweller life can be.addendum: I just read some of the other reviews, which prompted me (a former professional editor and proofreader) to look for spelling errors in this book. I didn't find any.

Since I'm an apartment dweller who has never gardened before I wanted a guide to show me where to start. That's exactly what I got from Urban Homestead.General: It's an engaging read full of interesting trivia and personality from the writers. It's well organized so it's easy to sit down and read from cover to cover or to go directly to the section that interests you. Although this won't be the end place for any particular subject, this is a great book to generate ideas. It also includes illustrations for several build-it-yourself projects.The two chapters (162 pages) are about growing your food and helpful projects to aid that objective. They continue to be mindful that readers don't have a lot of room to grow food so space matters so you can take advantage of windows, patios, balconies, rooftops, community gardens and what little yard you might have. Then, it goes into how to start composting with or without worms and other gardening advice. The writers also keep cost verus time effectiveness in consideration by telling you how to build things yourselves. For example, they tell you where you can buy a $40 self watering container if you're short on time and they also give you step-by-step instructions on how to build your own if you want to save money. There are recipes for potting soil and seed balls. There's tons of advice on how to plant, water and deal with pests. It's never condescending, always helpful.The third chapter is on urban foraging. Their first advice is to seek professional help rather than a book and gives suggestions where to find that professional. Since plants can easily be mistaken by amateurs, this made sense to me so I skimmed through the descriptions of helpful "weeds" you can forage is almost any city. It's a good chapter, though, and I might seek a local group to help me start foraging.Chapter four is about keeping livestock in the city. It made me wish my landlord would agree to chickens, ducks, rabbits, pigeons (people eat them!), quail and bees. It mostly focused on chickens but included short intros on the others I listed. Again, this is more of a place to get informed ideas rather than a comprehensive guide.Chapter Five is about natural (and cheap) house cleaning solutions and how to preserve different types of food, including some that you grow in the garden mentioned in chapter one. It's very practical advice that isn't common to those of us who grew up as suburban and urban kids whose parents fed us out of a box. The writers talk about drying, fermenting, pickling, etc.Chapter six is about saving water and electricity. It's probably useful for homeowners but not practical for apartment dwellers beyond throwing suggestions at your landlord.Chapter seven is about green transportation. Beyond showing how to build your own bike light, there's nothing terribly revolutionary about this chapter. It's a good reminder, though, that it's healthier to walk, bike and ride the bus not just for the environment but also for personal health physically and emotionally.There's a resource list in the back which is super helpful. I know that this book has inspired me to branch out in several directions. You can check out the writers' website: [...]

A brilliant, practical and inspiring read. Since most people live in the city, and the dream of living on the land may not become a reality, it is vital that those in the city learn to live sustainably. This book gives masses of helpful and practical advice, with lots of humour along the way!

Love it! So informative!

Brilliant! Very detailed and every home should have one... you realise how self sufficient you could be and how much you can save.

This book very basic, it doesn't go in-depth, however it does have some good general information for beginners and will get you started on your homesteading journey. It does also have some good recipes and a fairly good section on composting. It's not bad, but the author could have expanded much more on ideas or possibly written a follow up book with more in-depth concepts. I will definitly be keeping it for a quick reference and recipe book,

I found this book very interesting and an easy read. The information was useful and informative. The added bonus of witty authors was great. I really enjoyed the casual and fun but dedicated attitudes.I liked that it wasn't injected with end of the world doom and gloom or praising Gaia and Mother Earth. Just straight forward if you want to have a sustainable homestead in the middle of an urban setting here is how.A very good book to get your fingers itching to get in some dirt. It really makes it seem so easy and practical to grow your own veg and have chickens in the back yard. It just makes me ask why aren't we all doing this?