The Urban Homestead: Your Guide to Self-sufficient Living in the Heart of the City (Process Self-reliance Series) |  | Authors: Kelly Coyne, Erik Knutzen
Publisher: Process
Category: Book
List Price: $16.95
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Seller: Lance Whipple
Rating:  37 reviews
Sales Rank: 72494
Media: Paperback
Pages: 330
Number Of Items: 1
Shipping Weight (lbs): 1
Dimensions (in): 8.9 x 5.9 x 0.7
ISBN: 1934170011
Dewey Decimal Number: 640
EAN: 9781934170014
ASIN: 1934170011
Publication Date: June 1, 2008
Availability: Usually ships in 1-2 business days
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Product 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.
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Showing reviews 1-5 of 37
 When the power goes out in the grocery store... June 7, 2008
Evan Dump (Los Angeles, CA United States)
36 out of 39 found this review helpful
For those of us city-dwellers contemplating the fundamental lifestyle adjustments demanded by the looming global socio-economic reorganization, this book provides a detailed, lucid, step-by-step, blueprint that takes what seems to be an overwhelming task of historical reversal and transforms it into an open-ended series of tangible, human-scaled projects. The writing and design make it easy to browse, read straight through, or use for reference, and it brims with an infectious curiosity and enthusiasm for the exploration and reclamation of our culture and species' relationship to the land. The longest journey begins with a single compost heap.
Positive, encouraging guidebook w/ much useful information presented clearly. June 6, 2008
E. Schoenholz (Picfair Village, CA)
17 out of 18 found this review helpful
I've been reading the authors' blog, HomegrownEvolution.com for more than a year, so I had a pretty good idea what to expect from this book, and I was not in the least disappointed. I think perhaps even more than all of the practical advice and specific directions in The Urban Homestead, Coyne and Knutzen's perspective and approach are what I value most. There's an overriding attitude--almost philosophy, really--that the authors convey so well. It's positive yet somehow never sappy. They recommend doing what you can and doing what you like.
They also warn: "Work makes work" in the gardening section, and to me that perspective is more valuable than knowing how frequently to water my sweet peppers once they've flowered. (Which brings up another thing I've enjoyed so much about reading this book and the H.E. blog: The blog pointed me to Pat Welsh's Southern California Gardening for more specific and advanced gardening advice.)
The Urban Homestead is laid out in a way that makes it easy to pick up and read a little bit here and there. And I've been picking up my copy every chance I get, rereading sections, too, both for knowledge and enjoyment. It's really oriented toward people with a new or recent interest in living more like their great-grandparents did, more engaged in the world around them, even if that world is a major metropolis. It's less about preparing for disaster than thwarting it.
If you want to ditch your TV, buy less crap at the supermarket, learn how to use a bicycle to transport your self and your stuff, conserve, reuse, bake, make and otherwise reject so many things that until recently our society believed were progress, this book will get you going on the right path.
A Great Source To Jump-Start Your Visions of Self-Reliance June 5, 2008
W. D. Campbell (Los Angeles)
10 out of 10 found this review helpful
Like the first reviewer, I too have been long looking forward to this title's release. Unlike the first reviewer I am not at all disappointed with "The Urban Homestead." It's a well-written and engaging resource and I don't find fault in it as a book of ideas and initiatives rather than as all-encompassing encyclopedic volume. In fact I like that I don't have to be entirely dependent on something trying to show me how to be independently sufficient.
The authors are obviously well-informed and hands-on involved and thanks to them I'm already planning my first project involving gray-water capture, storage and re-use.
The Urban Homestead June 8, 2008
Stephen Box (Los Angeles)
10 out of 11 found this review helpful
My wife and I were delighted to get our hands on The Urban Homestead. We have been following the Urban Homestead journey via the authors' blog and we have enjoyed the projects, the experiments, the successes and the failures. Most of all, we have enjoyed a shift in our consciousness as we began to evaluate our relationship to our home, our community and our environment.
And so, with book in hand, we can now leave the computer, go for a walk, sit and read and contemplate the future and the route we'd like to take in getting there.
This book is a great value, even if you never set out to garden or raise chickens. The conservation and home ec projects alone have given us great pleasure.
The authors challenge the reader to live less as a consumer and more as a producer. The Urban Homestead is an effective and inspirational guide to making that journey a successful reality.
Gifts Of The Earth's Bounty, Even In The City November 2, 2008
Andrea Sharp (CA United States)
11 out of 13 found this review helpful
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.
Showing reviews 1-5 of 37
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