The Urban Homestead: Your Guide to Self-sufficient Living in the Heart of the City (Process Self-reliance Series) (Paperback)

by Kelly Coyne (Author), Erik Knutzen (Author)
Key Phrases: polyculture bed, gopher wire, solar dehydrator, Essential Proj, Water And Power For The Homeste, Los Angeles (more...)

Editorial Reviews

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.

About the Author
Kelly Coyne and Erik Knutzen are creators of the blog homegrownrevolution.org, a green living and self-sufficiency resource for urbanites. They contribute regularly to Daniel Pinchbeck's new online magazine, realitysandwich.com. They live in Los Angeles.

Product Details

• Paperback: 330 pages
• Publisher: Process (June 1, 2008)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 1934170011
• ISBN-13: 978-1934170014
• Product Dimensions: 8.9 x 6 x 0.9 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1.1 pounds (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 4.3 out of 5 stars See all reviews (21 customer reviews)
• Amazon.com Sales Rank: #3,820 in Books (See Bestsellers in Books)

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  #4 in	Books > Home & Garden > Sustainable Living > Energy Efficiency
  #5 in	Books > Home & Garden > How-to & Home Improvements > Green Housecleaning
  #6 in	Books > Home & Garden > Home Design > Remodeling & Renovation

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

56 of 59 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars Worth reading because it is different, July 31, 2008

By	Harold A. Roth (Elmira, NY) - See all my reviews (REAL NAME)

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.

77 of 90 people found the following review helpful:

2.0 out of 5 stars Don't bother if you have any agriculture experience at all...., June 3, 2008

By	J. Sullivan - See all my reviews (REAL NAME)

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.

21 of 23 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars When the power goes out in the grocery store..., June 6, 2008

By	Evan Dump "xpgltr" (Los Angeles, CA United States) - See all my reviews

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.