Posted on 06/04/2008 9:19:54 PM PDT by B-Chan
Prompted over the past few years by oil wars, global warming, ecological collapse, natural disasters and our psychotic federal government, we’ve made a few changes in the way we live.
Now the day begins when Erik gets up to let the chickens out of their henhouse. It’s a structure so thoroughly secured against marauding raccoons that we’ve named it "Chicken Guantanamo." The hens have been patiently waiting for that door to swing open since first light. Next, while the coffee brews, Erik throws some flour and a cup of sourdough starter into the mixer. He bakes a loaf of artisanal sourdough bread for us every other day, and we rarely meet with any bread that tastes better.
I get up a little later than Erik and stagger into the garden first thing. I say hi to the hens, add some kitchen scraps to the compost pile, and turn on the drip irrigation systems that water our vegetable beds. As of this writing our garden is bearing tomatoes, cucumbers, fava beans, Swiss chard, figs, ground cherries, leeks, eggplants, assorted herbs and a selection of cultivated weeds. I'm looking forward to the corn, avocado and pomegranate harvest, all of which are a few months away.
For breakfast I enjoy homemade yogurt with raw honey or maybe a thick slice of the aforementioned sourdough, toasted and smeared with tangy homemade apricot butter. After breakfast I take three sheets of tomatoes down to the solar dehydrator so we'll have sun dried tomatoes in the winter. Then I hang a load of laundry out on the line.
Where do Erik and I live? In the heart of urban Los Angeles, in a decaying bungalow on a small plot of land. We are urban homesteaders.
What is an Urban Homesteader?
An urban homesteader is someone who enjoys living in the city, but doesn't see why that should stop her from engaging directly with nature, growing her own food, and striving for self-sufficiency.
We don’t wish to retreat to the countryside and live like the Unabomber in a plywood shack. We believe that people are best off living in cities and cooperating with other like-minded folks. Instead of hoarding ammo and MREs, we're building the skills and forming the conditions and networks that sustain us, our friends and our neighbors, now and into the future.
Urban homesteading is about preparedness, but we don't like that term very much. It connotes stockpiling things that you hope will keep your ass alive. Survivalism in general is about the fear of death. Urban homesteading is about life – it is a way of life founded on pleasure, not fear. Our preparedness comes not so much through what we have, but what we know. We are recollecting the almost-lost knowledge of our great-grandparents, those most essential of human skill sets: how to tend to plants, how to tend to animals, and how to tend ourselves.
Over the last couple of generations we've given up these skills in exchange for a self-destructive addiction to "convenience," becoming, as a friend of ours likes to say, the only animal that cannot feed itself. We do not make anything anymore, we just consume – we are '"consumers," defined solely by our appetites, and empowered only in how we spend a dollar.
We figured it was time to become producers again.
That is what we are trying to do here on our little urban farm: produce food, hack our house to generate power and recycle water, plot revolution and build community. Changing what and how we eat is at the heart of everything, though. Homegrown food is mind-blowingly fresh and flavorful, 100% organic, untainted by disease, blood or oil, and alive. Trust us, once you discover that lettuce actually has a distinct flavor, or you eat a sweet tomato still warm from the sun, or an orange-yolked egg from your own hen, you will never be satisfied with the pre-packaged and the factory-farmed again. The next step after growing fresh food is using the old home arts to preserve it: pickling, fermenting, drying and brewing.
Over and over again we've discovered that anything we figure out how to do ourselves tastes better than what the market offers us. If it wasn't, we probably wouldn't keep doing this. Yes, it is a "green" way to live, it is a prepared way to live, it has many virtues, but frankly, it is pleasure that inspires us to do more and more. Get into this a little, and you'll realize that all of your life you've been cheated. Urban homesteading is not about deprivation or suffering, it is about reclaiming your heritage, and your right to real food and real experience.
Make The Shift
We are not alone, and we didn't invent this idea. Urban homesteading is a movement, a quiet movement of sensible people making the smart choice of disconnecting ourselves in healthy ways from an increasingly untenable reality and creating our own culture from the ground up. We live better, we eat better, we're saving the planet. What's not to love?
Anyone can be an urban homesteader, even if you live in an apartment. You can grow more food than you think in a small space: on a balcony, a roof, a side yard. Do you live in a windowless hole? Then use a community garden plot, or claim land and become a pirate gardener. Opportunity abounds even for those of us in the dense metropolitan core. We’ve met a guy who keeps bees on his roof and harvests hundreds of pounds of honey each year in the middle of Brooklyn.
Most American cities sprawl. They possess tremendous amounts of wasted space. Once you take the red pill and open your eyes, all of that space begs to be cultivated. It is an offense on the level of sin for good land to sit unappreciated and unused under lawn and concrete. The single family dwelling with its defensive swath of front lawn and hidden backyard – the basic unit of the American dream – happens to be the perfect mini-farm. We have a vision of cities greened not by lawns, but by crops, thousands of city gardens collectively forming vast tracts of urban acreage. We each can start with our own patch of land and in so doing inspire others. Since we planted our parkway (that useless space between the sidewalk and the street that is technically city property) with vegetables, several of our neighbors have planted their own victory gardens.
Urban homesteaders are forming organic networks to share knowledge and know-how. What our ancestors took for granted, we have to reinvent.
Opinions expressed in articles linked by me on FR do not necessarily reflect my own opinions.
Where can you buy steak seeds?
Sprawl is in every country on the planet. It is simple (urban) economics. As gas prices increase, there is an incentive to move closer in to reduce transportation costs. This results in less sprawl. BUT, increased congestion results in less green space. Urban infill (the latest craze) sounds spiffy, but sprawl allows for green space.
An airgun or slingshot brings in the Whitetail of the Trees (or d-— palm rats).
Also, where I live is the occasional raccoon or opossum (in El Segundo, raccoon and opossum!)
Not that I'd bust a CB cap in a raccoon just to roast it, mind you.
WTF!! This bugs the heck out of me. Is there such a thing as cooked honey? I don't think so. What is so special about this "raw honey", does it just sound more "organic" that way. Oh, and that whole "organic" thing bugs me too. It's not like you could ever find an inorganic plant. Hippies!
But if you call them pets it’s OK, as long as you don’t have roosters.
This is a reapplication of ideas from Whole Earth Catalog and Mother Earth news- not bad ideas to consider, given the prospects of the years to come.
I may be wrong, but I believe raw honey means it hasn’t been heated so it can be vacuum packed. Otherwise who the f... knows.
“Is there such a thing as cooked honey? I don’t think so.”
Commercial honey is pasteurized at 160-180F and pressure filtered at higher temperatures. This is done so it won’t crystallize, supermarket consumers won’t buy crystallized honey. “Raw” honey is not heated at all, and is “strained” to remove wax caps and errant bee parts but not filtered. It crystallizes readily. Being processed at lower temperatures keeps the natural bacteria and yeasts alive, so it’s easier to cook with (use in bread for instance) and some people say they can taste the difference (I can, raw honey flavor is more intense, sharper). It stores longer than “supermarket honey”.
Filtered, pasteurized honey sells for $4 per pound, “raw” honey costs more, maybe twice more. Market pressures make the less processed product more valuable because lots of people favor it over Sue Bee (nothing wrong with Sue Bee, it’s a preference thing).
If you become a beekeeper, go for the raw honey market, the profits are greater.
The honey frames are usually uncapped with a hot electric knife (almost 200 F), the real purist raw honey is uncapped with a “chain uncapper” that uses no heat at all before the frame is sent to the centrifuge for spinout.
All those beeswax candles come from the uncapping process.
I know people who keep bees in the city.
I agree with you. The hippy angle can be rather distracting, but the general idea isn’t bad.
I grew up in a suburban area where we grew or raised much of our own food. We had 3/4 of an acre plot.
We raised our own steers. Two of them, rotated one out to the freezer each year and brought in a new one.
We had somewhere in the range of 50 chickens in a coop. Also had turkeys, pheasant and cornish game hens (I think that’s what they were called, they were little bitty chickens).
We also had a fair good selection of friut bearing trees, grape vines, berry patches and a good sized veggie patch.
A youngster learns lots of good lessons in all that. Food does not magically appear in grocery stores. No matter how tired or sick you are, the animals have to be fed, watered, cleaned up after. If you don’t spend the effort to keep the weeds out of your garden, and the bugs of your produce, you don’t get as much to eat later as you’d prefer.
And, last but certainly not least, old school grandmas are a heaven sent savior when its time to do the slaughtering... and the lye soap making... and the chicken plucking.
Homegrown food is mind-blowingly fresh and flavorful, 100% organic, untainted by disease, blood or oil, and alive."
I really doubt that their produce is "untainted" if it's grown in the middle of LA.
Raw honey has not been heat processed - other honey has...big difference.
I'm hoping this 'urban' farming/independence spreads - Otherwise when the sh*t hits the fan, they'll be raiding us country folk and demanding we take care of them.
Actually, I remember, back in the '50's, when I lived in a Boston suburb, being in awe of the Italian neighbors whose city back yards were in total, neat gardens - no lawns...they even grew their own grapes and made their own wine.
Count me in
Ask anyone who is a serious gardner or a farmer, and they will tell you that growing enough food for a family to actually live on is a major operation and would probably require several acres to get enough diversity and to rotate crops each season. Never mind that a hailstorm can wipe out the entire drop in a few minutes or that you are constantly concerned about infestations, varmints, and the weather. Then you have to preserve everything so your 1-month crop can last for 12 months. It ain’t easy by a long shot.
Steak seeds come 12 gauge, .308 cal or by the arrow.
Yes. Most store-bought honey has been pasteurized, which destroys nutritive enzymes, and filtered, which removes other components that can help build up resistance to allergies.
These processes also make your "cooked" honey tasteless -- raw honies taste a hundred times better. Store-bought honies are blended (which ensures a consistent product), whereas many raw honies are sold by the type of flower/plant that the bees made the honey from -- clover, buckwheat, sourwood, and many others. The different flavors between honies are as varied as the tastes of different wines.
If you'd like a great supplier of raw honey, I heartily recommend Draper's Super Bee Apiaries in northeast Pennsylvania (http://draperbee.com). I've visited there; it's a pretty neat place to visit. Disclaimer: I have no association with Draper's, other than being a satisfied customer.
Heck, why bother with property rights! What would they think if someone stole veggies out of their garden or took off with their hens and eggs?
I use raw honey everyday. Its helped my daughter with allergies & seems to give me energy. It is also good to put on a wound. Somehow it seems to make it heal faster. I like royal bee jelly too.
Nightline did a segment on them last month .. video is
Right side ... "The Real Simple Life"
Here' the family's story and website
It really intrigued me. They make you see it's possible ... and soon, who knows, this society may need to go back to some of those basics of self-sufficiency. I've told my sons ... use some of that backyard for a few tomato plants, lettuce, cucumbers. Food's going sky high, and I don't see it coming down anytime soon.
but I would love to live in a city....to be able to walk to church...to the library....to the store....to be able to go down to the coffee shop and read the paper....you can have enough of a garden on a city plot and maybe it would be more carefully taken care of since there wouldn't be that much to worry about...
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