The Urban Homestead: Your Guide to Self-sufficient Living in the Heart of the City (Process Self-reliance Series) | 
 enlarge | Authors: Kelly Coyne, Erik Knutzen
Publisher: Process
Category: Book
List Price: $16.95
Buy New: $10.15
You Save: $6.80 (40%)
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Rating:  11 reviews
Media: Paperback
Pages: 330
Number Of Items: 1
Shipping Weight (lbs): 1.1
Dimensions (in): 8.9 x 6 x 0.9
ISBN: 1934170011
Dewey Decimal Number: 643
EAN: 9781934170014
Publication Date: June 1, 2008
Availability: Usually ships in 1-2 business days
Shipping: International shipping available
Condition: Brand new item. Over 4 million customers served. Order now. Selling online since 1995. Few left in stock - order soon. Code: P20081121113532S
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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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| Customer Reviews: Read 6 more reviews...
 Gifts Of The Earth's Bounty, Even In The City November 2, 2008
Andrea Sharp (CA United States)
1 out of 1 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.
Well written October 28, 2008
J scout (Ava MO USA)
A true book of facts and examples... Not a re-due of over done Green Trendy Crap the society is milking for the last dollar we have....
Well spent $$
Thanks
 Not bad, but lots of grammatical/spelling errors. September 8, 2008
Teckwolf (Bloomington)
3 out of 5 found this review helpful
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.
 Great ideas, little detail, really poor editing September 2, 2008
Scott Sanders (Cambridge, MA)
2 out of 4 found this review helpful
I love the breadth of topics in this book. It gave me some great ideas. But it's only a starting point.
For the topics I really wanted to know more about, I felt the detail was really lacking. For other topics that are really too ambitious for me to tackle (like recycling shower water to use as "graywater"), there was WAY too much detail. And when the detail lacked, there really weren't suggestions for further reading or research.
But most troubling to me was the many, many spelling and grammatical errors, and the many sections that seemed like they could use the help of a good editor. I caught a spelling or grammatical error on perhaps 1 out of every 4 or 5 pages, which is really not acceptable. I generally expect that a book in the mass market would have been checked over better than this, and I almost want my money back.
The Urban Homestead gave me some great starting points for more research, but I was really hoping it would be more of a "how to" guide than what it offered.
Worth reading because it is different July 31, 2008
Harold A. Roth (Elmira, NY)
10 out of 10 found this review helpful
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.
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