Urban Homesteading

Since I started writing this blog again and since I've been reading a lot more lately, I thought I should probably grab a book on something "green" from the library.  I didn't ask, I just tried to remember where I found "green" books before and I ended up in front of some organizational books with a few homesteading things thrown in there.  I left the organization for another day and grabbed a few books on homesteading.  The first one I'm reading is The Urban Homestead: Your Guide to Self-Sufficient Living in the Heart of the City by Kelly Coyne and Erik Knutzen.  As usually I'm writing this post early.  I should write it once I've finished the book, but I'm a little harried today with the invalid puppy and IAT meeting and crayon in the dryer so you're just getting my take on the first section. So there.

So the first section I read was about farming, which translates to just gardening.  They had a TON of useful info about how to plant in small spaces, which is kind of what I have.  I actually have a really big yard, but so much of it is in the shade that it doesn't allow for a lot of room for veggies.  This book is about homesteading though which suggests that you turn even your front lawn into a useful plot of land for food.  I considered this for about a minute then realized that part of my front yard has a hard time growing grass, so it probably wouldn't make the best place for a veggie garden.  The other half...well, I'm just not ready to make that jump yet.  While I agree that the front yard is really pretty much a waste (this book says that the #1 crop produced in the US is lawn) I'm not totally ready to make such a cut from the "norm".  One thing that I AM willing to try in the front yard is a bean teepee.  You take stakes or poles or anything else that beans will climb and assemble them to make a teepee.  Plant beans around the base of each pole and as they grow they'll naturally climb the poles and fill in the gaps to make an enclosed structure.
How fun would THAT be for the kids to play in?!?  I also liked a lot of their tips about using self-watering containers, especially the suggestion about how to plant lettuce.  I have a really big pot from my mom (my birthday last year, maybe?) that I used to plant a few herbs and eggplant in last spring.  I wasted the eggplant because the pot was by the garage, away from my view in the kitchen and I forgot that I had them there until it was too late.  I used some of the herbs, but not enough to make them worthwhile to grow.  But this lettuce idea sounds really easy.  Sprinkle the lettuce seeds, cover lightly with soil and then water.  As the leaves sprout thin them out by pinching off the leaves at the bottom.  You'll have lots of salads of baby lettuces and be thinning out your container at the same time.  When there are only a few left and the danger of overcrowding is over you can just take off the outer leaves to make salads.  When the lettuce plants bolt tear them out an plant something else.  I'm super excited to try this in the spring.  This is why I read books like this in the winter.  I get all these grand schemes then when it comes down to it, I actually follow through with only a few of them--about as much as I can handle in a season.

I still have a lot of maintenance yard work to do from when we moved in that I just couldn't get done in just one summer.  I'll continue to do that in the spring and summer, but the idea that I can do some fun gardening as well as weeding and edging and pruning makes the boring stuff a little easier to bear.