• Plant Profiles: Fact sheets on common plants
• Plant Care: Information leaflets on fruit, vegetables, home propagation, etc.
• How To: Variety of AG publications
• Horticulture on the Internet: Extensive directory of sites and pages, organized by topic

Just one of over a hundred videos from a general homesteading/prepper YouTube channel.

(Via Urban Woodsman)

(Via City Farmer News)

1) Stay In One Place
Decide to make a commitment to one place. Become passionately attached and attuned to your surroundings. Learn what your community needs, discover what you can offer, and get involved.

2) Observe, Reflect, Then Act
Take the permaculture approach of observing your surroundings and reflecting on what you can learn from Nature’s example. Although it can be tempting to quickly advance your homestead, taking your time and reflecting on the long-term goals before taking action can help avoid many mistakes. Once you know your place and have set your goals, you can act with wisdom and confidence.

3) Grow Some Food
A simple way to start reconnecting with the land, cycles, and seasons, is to grow some food. The desire for healthy food is often the catalyst for making a more complete shift into a sustainable lifestyle. Plant a few tomatoes or create an elaborate edible landscape; just find some time each day to be outside with your hands in the soil.

4) Start Becoming Re-Skilled
Become well versed in homesteading skills – preserving food, making soap, mending clothes, knitting socks, chopping wood, fixing your bicycle. These are valuable life skills that save us money, allow us to move from being consumers to producers, and reconnect us with our past. Discover the wide range of knowledge that is available, often for free, in your city. Learn from your elders, set up an apprenticeship, take workshops, attend lectures, volunteer with a community project, devour resource books at your local library.

5) Get Rid of Your Car
Try an experiment by leaving your car at home for one week and making your regular commutes by alternate methods. What did you discover? Did you strike up conversations with other pedestrians? Did you feel more energized? Was your stress level reduced? Become familiar with the many transportation options your city has to offer – walking routes, bicycle paths, bus services, carpooling networks, car sharing organizations.

6) Reduce Your Energy Consumption
How much energy does your home consume each month? Get to know what the major sources of electrical consumption are in your house – washers, refrigerators, dryers, and older furnaces. Use your appliances wisely, and make a decision to reduce your energy consumption in your daily life in these areas.

7) Make and Make Do
Go way beyond reducing, reusing and recycling. Add in restoring, reviving, reinventing, repairing and, most importantly, refraining from unnecessary consumer purchases.

8) Involve Your Children
Urban homesteading is a daily lifestyle filled with rich educational potential, and can be immensely fun when shared by the whole family. Allow your children to be a full part of the homestead, with special tasks that are all their own. Collecting eggs, watering the garden, baking bread, and tending the worm bin are all situations ripe for learning new skills, building confidence, and generating meaningful discussions.

9) Engage your Community
Urban homesteading is not about achieving self-sufficiency. It’s about building a network of skilled, resourceful, ecologically minded people in a community, who can share their knowledge with each other. It’s about developing a resilient city where people can rely on each other as needs arise.

10) Work with Joy
Emma Goldman has been quoted as saying, “If I can’t dance, I don’t want to be part of your revolution.” Amid the demanding bustle of daily life on our urban homestead, we need to remember to take time for celebrating, working mindfully, and including elements of beauty and art. Only if we do our tasks with joy will we be able to sustain the long-term goals of our homesteading life, and inspire others to join us in this movement.

…one of the most valuable things a person can do for the environment is to “stay in one place.” If we are constantly on the move, we lose connection with our surroundings, our landscape, our communities. We become disengaged from civic involvement and, because we are unfamiliar with our environment, we are unaware when advocacy needs to happen. To choose a place that becomes our own, imperfect as it may be, allows us to forge connections, take ownership, and become attuned to the needs around us – in short, it allows us to care, and through caring comes action.

This quote comes from Living the Good Life in the City Creating Your Sustainable Urban Homestead, an article by Karin Kliewer of Little City Farm. The rest of the article is equally excellent, but this section struck me.

Staying in one place isn’t a value held by my parents’ generation. For them, movement brought opportunity and represented success. For them, global thinking is more important than local. I believe this is their own reaction to their parents’ generation. A reaction to limited opportunities and parochialism.

But it seems that my own generation is now reacting to my parents’, with a return to the local. Not to embrace it’s limitations or to return to a provincial lifestyle, but to recapture the good that was lost in only looking outside one’s current community and place. To be somewhere, even if it’s not NY or LA. To make a place in whatever town or community you are in. To take ownership and participate in that community. To make it a better place. To make it the kind of place others want to be.

The Internet may also encourage this return to the local, as the opportunities that once could only be found by living near or in great civic hubs are now available in the most remote regions. Telecommuting, online university and web-based communities allow people to reach many of the things they once could only find in moving. Perhaps, over time, we’ll see more people staying in their small towns and rural communities because the need for “big city living” is met well enough online.

• For Urban Gardeners, Lead Is a Concern (NYTimes.com)
• Lead in the Home Garden and Urban Soil Environment (University of Minnesota Extension)
• Children, gardens, and lead (Cornell University)

Here are a few points from those articles:

• If you live near high-traffic roads or old buildings, it might be worth getting your soil tested
• One option for dealing with leaded soil is to add lime to raise pH of soil and add organic matter, which will help bind the lead in the soil
• Another option is to just use raised beds with clean soil and compost brought in from elsewhere
• Fruit crops seem to be safer to grow in leaded soils than leaf and root crops
• At least one experiment found that growing spinach in leaded soil for three months (and discarding it) reduced the lead in the soil by 200ppm!

The class is taught by Will Hooker, a professor and permaculturist in Raleigh. (Here’s an article about him on Treehugger. Here’s another article put out by the NCSU College of Agriculture and Life Sciences.)

I’m on the fifth session from this course and it’s great material!

Novella wrote Farm City: The Education of an Urban Farmer. I haven’t read it, but after seeing that video, I think I have to!

(Here’s the full article at The Vancouver Sun.)