The Urban Homestead: Your Guide to Self-sufficient Living in the Heart of the City
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Description
The Urban Homestead is the essential handbook for a fast-growing new movement: urbanites are becoming gardeners and farmers. Rejecting both end-times hand wringing and dewy-eyed faith that technology will save us from ourselves, urban homesteaders choose instead to act. By growing their own food and harnessing natural energy, they are planting seeds for the future of our cities.
If you would like to harvest your own vegetables, raise city chickens, or convert to solar energy, this practical, hands-on book is full of step-by-step projects that will get you started homesteading immediately, whether you live in an apartment or a house. It is also a guidebook to the larger movement and will point you to the best books and Internet resources on self-sufficiency topics.
Projects include:
- How to grow food on a patio or balcony
- How to clean your house without toxins
- How to preserve food
- How to cook with solar energy
- How to divert your grey water to your garden
- How to choose the best homestead for you
Written by city dwellers for city dwellers, this illustrated, smartly designed, two-color instruction book proposes a paradigm shift that will improve our lives, our community, and our planet. Authors Kelly Coyne and Erik Knutzen happily farm in Los Angeles and run the urban homestead blog www.homegrownrevolution.org.
The Urban Homestead: Your Guide to Self-sufficient Living in the Heart of the City
The Urban Homestead was a bit simplistic for my tastes. Living in Seattle ,(where the majority of residents do not live in apartments) I was a little blindsided by how this book focuses strongly on apartment dwellers. However, aside from that standpoint, I feel the book was a bit simple in it’s approach. Perhaps the authors tried to tackle too many topics, but I felt a bit shortchanged on many of the topics. At first, I felt as if the authors were only focusing on what they knew – but then I read the portion of the book about beekeeping. The author actually keeps bees in New York City. I bet that could be a book in itself! However, instead, there was about 3 pages dedicated to the topic.
Good effort. Might be good for apartment dwellers. However, there are many books on this topic which do a better job.
Rating: 2 / 5
The Urban Homestead: Your Guide to Self-sufficient Living in the Heart of the City
A must read for anyone who cares and is interested in the world they occupy. Gardeners and social activists alike will enjoy this witty romp through there urban habitat.
Rating: 5 / 5
The Urban Homestead: Your Guide to Self-sufficient Living in the Heart of the City
This book entertainingly and simply explains a wide variety of homesteading subjects as low tech as foraging and as high tech as solar power. It gives advice and how-to’s for each subject and makes a great intro to homesteading.
Rating: 4 / 5
The Urban Homestead: Your Guide to Self-sufficient Living in the Heart of the City
This book contains plenty of useful information and unique approaches to home gardening that I have never heard of before. While it isn’t strong on the instructional side of things, it is fairly packed with ideas that one can research more fully on their own time. My biggest beef with this book is the sheer number of spelling and grammatical errors. I find it hard to read a book that has a significant number of such errors. It is ridiculous in some cases, like they didn’t even bother running the book through a spell-checker before printing. I think it is worth reading, regardless, but be prepared if that sort of thing bothers you.
Rating: 3 / 5
The Urban Homestead: Your Guide to Self-sufficient Living in the Heart of the City
Simply put, this is s great book. I have read a ton of material recently about urban farming and this book is simple, straightforward and filled with good common sense advice. It is written by real people and not some kind of Martha Stewart-esque couple living on a big spread in the Hamptons. If you live in a city, have a small yard and lots of close neighbors and thought you could never have a farm, read this book and you’ll be on your way!
Rating: 5 / 5
The Urban Homestead: Your Guide to Self-sufficient Living in the Heart of the City