| | |  | Sustainable Housing | Home » » The Urban Homestead: Your Guide to Self-sufficient Living in the Heart of the City (Process Self-reliance Series) | | | | | | | 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.
| | | Product Details: | | | Author:
| Kelly Coyne | | Paperback:
| 330 pages | | Publisher:
| Process | | Publication Date:
| June 01, 2008 | | Language:
| English | | ISBN:
| 1934170011 | | Product Length:
| 8.8 inches | | Product Width:
| 6.12 inches | | Product Height:
| 0.74 inches | | Product Weight:
| 1.09 pounds | | Package Length:
| 8.9 inches | | Package Width:
| 5.9 inches | | Package Height:
| 0.7 inches | | Package Weight:
| 0.95 pounds | | Average Customer Rating:
|  based on 57 reviews |
| | | | Customer Reviews: | |
Average Customer Review:
 ( 57 customer reviews )
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239 of 243 found the following review helpful:
 Worth reading because it is differentJul 31, 2008
By Harold A. Roth
I've read various books on self-sufficiency in the past ten years, but this one is different. First, it doesn't tell you how to recreate a 19th-century homestead, which is beginning to seem to me like another version of faux chateaux, but which also is not going to work very well if it is not surrounded by other 19th-century homesteads. And it doesn't describe what you can do "some day" when you get your five acres and independence. Instead, it focuses on what you can do right now in your own city to become more self-sufficient and sustainable. That makes it unique.
The reviewer who said that this is not a compendium of how-tos is right. It is more of an idea book, although there are many references to sources of detailed info about, for instance, raising ducks. But the problem with other self-sufficiency books I have run across is precisely that they are NOT idea books--that they become absorbed with one particular way of growing food, for instance, or one particular way of heating your (19th-century farm) house. There is nothing about woodstoves or woodlots in here.
This is the first book on self-sufficiency I have seen that directly addresses the fear that underlies the desire many people have to become more independent of the economy--the fear of some apocalypse, social collapse, disaster, etc., which they here dub "when the zombies come." I loved that they use humor to address that fear. There is a LOT of humor in this book; it's almost worth reading just for that.
Other books on self-sufficiency focus on being isolated and seeing other people as the enemy. I read one that recommended you get a house in a dip that no one can see from the road. They'll tell you how much ammunition to squirrel away with your self-heating lasagne rations. This one tells you to get to know your neighbors, because there is strength not in isolation but in community, where we can trade not only stuff like food, but our skills. In that way, it is similar to Food Not Lawns, but much as I admire the ideas in that book, this one offers ideas that are much more doable, I think, for most people.
It is a bit strange that Amazon is bundling this book with Gardening When It Counts, since that book recommends using extra-wide spacing to grow vegetables in situations where you do not have irrigation, and space is a real problem when you are growing on a city lot. Gardening that is a bit more intensive works better in that situation. But Gardening When It Counts is good in the way it ranks veggies by growing difficulty.
270 of 299 found the following review helpful:
 Don't bother if you have any agriculture experience at all....Jun 04, 2008
By J. Sullivan
I was so excited to receive this book-- as someone who has had some experience farming and who hopes to continue in the future BUT who will be living in a city for the foreseeable future, I couldn't wait to get my hands on my guide to sustainable homesteading in the city.
While this book is full of great concepts, it fails to deliver on the instruction side of things. This is not a Guide Book as the cover proclaims-- it is an Ideas book. The authors suggest planting fruit trees in your yard, and to save space, prune them into "an espalier". How do you do that? The authors kindly refer you to another book.
I understand that covering all the skills involved in Urban Homesteading in-depth would require a tome many times the length of this paperback. But an Urban Wild Edibles section with no pictures? Seriously?
This is a great tool for people who haven't gardened before and who have the motivation to seek out the actual technique elsewhere. But this is nowhere close to a guidebook, and most of the sections were wildly uninspiring, under-explained, and uninformative. If you had the foresight to seek out this book, you can probably figure out on your own that you can bake bread even in the city (!), red lettuce and green lettuce look pretty together in your garden, and composting may help reduce some of your soil woes.
To be fair, the cooking section and home cleaning supplies section, while not very enlightening in terms of ideas, has a slightly more complete informative style. But really, this is a basic, basic book, and while some of the book caters to those of us in tiny apartments with no yard space, the majority deals with ideas best tackled with large kitchens, some sort of yard/roof, and owners (or at least tenants of some very permissive landlords) of their own place. There was nothing particularly urban about most of these instructions, and this book doesn't even go near anything I would call homesteading.
In the end? If you won't do any growing of your own food if you don't buy this book then BUY IT. But, if you're like me and you are hoping for something to really make your apartment more sustainable, you may be better off reading Gaia's Garden and making the necessary adjustments yourself.
50 of 56 found the following review helpful:
 When the power goes out in the grocery store...Jun 07, 2008
By Evan Dump
"xpgltr"
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.
22 of 23 found the following review helpful:
Positive, encouraging guidebook w/ much useful information presented clearly.Jun 06, 2008
By E. Schoenholz
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.
28 of 31 found the following review helpful:
 Some fairly serious problemsOct 08, 2010
By FroggyMama
I own the original version of this volume, so I don't know if these problems have been addressed in the new expanded edition or not. While this book does contain a wealth of information, much of it useful, I found several things that ranged from minor oversight to serious problem.
1) My father has sold tires since before I was born. He lives and breathes the tire business. So I have always been aware that tires are extremely toxic to human health under the right conditions. Exposed to sunlight, heat, and water, they WILL leach toxic substances into the soil. You should never use tires for planting food, and I am amazed the authors would even consider it.
2) As quoted from the book, the authors mention that raising your own livestock is a way to avoid eating meat that has been "monkeyed with more than anything else (antibiotics, growth hormones...)". Then the authors advise you to give your chickens antibiotics, if needed, and they give the go ahead to eat your chickens. If I'm avoiding antibiotic-fed meat from the store, why would I produce it myself?
3) Kudzu root starch is produced from the plant Pueraria lobata, a native of Japan. I love to use the root starch in my cooking, it is the best thickener I've found. Arrowroot powder is from the plant Maranta arundinacea, native to rain-forest habitats. These two products are NOT the same substance, as the authors erroneously assume.
4) According to the USDA recommendations for canning at home, "Jars do not need to be sterilized before canning if they will be filled with food and processed in a boiling water bath canner for 10 minutes or more or if they will be processed in a pressure canner. Jars that will be processed in a boiling water bath canner for less than 10 minutes, once filled, need to be sterilized first by boiling them in hot water for 10 minutes before they're filled." The authors state that all quart-sized jars do not need to be sterilized, but smaller jars do. They would have been better off mentioning the processing times involved rather than making generalizations about jar size.
5) It is quite dangerous for anyone in a position such as the authors to suggest that a citizen knowingly break the law. If beekeeping is against the law in your city, you shouldn't keep bees. That's that.
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