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Urban Homesteading: Heirloom Skills For Sustainable Living (2011)

by Rachel Kaplan(Favorite Author)

3.81 of 5 Votes: 2

ISBN

161608054X (ISBN13: 9781616080549)

languge

English

genre

Food & Cookbooks

publisher

Skyhorse Publishing

review 1: The first few chapters are for skimming in my opinion - the author gets up on her soapbox and is a little patronizing since readers probably won't pick up this book unless they already carry some of these beliefs. However, the rest of the book is a gold mine of tips and instructions on how to get back to the basics in your own backyard - everything from gardening to foraging to building a composting toilet and moving towards a zero waste household. I love that ideas were scaled to different levels of commitment and ability so you could easily see how to use your resources to make different projects possible.
review 2: Great intro to permaculture, especially the ethical & holistic nature of that system. And if you like woowoo kinda earth spirituality, you'll ... morelove this. But I pretty quickly ran out of patience, and this felt like a whole lot of blahblahblah. Written by California hippies who live in sprawling cities where every home has a yard, where people own their homes, and where you already have access to a "local neighborhood seed bank" and a warm, sunny climate all year round. Every few chapters had a little paragraph "for renters" and "for cold climates" as an afterthought, but the bulk of the projects and ideas really don't fit into a small-space, small-budget, short-lease, wintery paradigm. Which is fine if that's not you, but this book really was not useful for me. The authors were surprisingly sheltered and dense in their recommendations, seemingly having no idea that not everyone in the world lives in their climate and circumstances, despite a nod at social justice in the text. less

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