The Urban Homestead: Your Guide to Self-Sufficient Living in the Heart of the City

if you are into homesteading/sustainability/self-sufficiency...this book is for you. fun to read and super informative.

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.

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.

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.

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.