urban homesteading

I'm still not 100% done with the stairs to the carport, but they're fully functional and passed the elderly mother-in-law test. I still need to add more spindles to the railings, and some more lighting, but the stairs and railings are there.

Once that's done, I probably won't have as many DIY projects to blog about, so I plan to blog more about urban homesteading. I was inspired in part by Novella Carpenter here in Oakland, who wrote Farm City: the education of an urban farmer and runs Ghost Town Farm. I've also found inspiration from City Homestead here in Oakland. They don't have much in the way of an urban or city homestead yet, but they both feel strongly about local food and are taking steps in that direction. Quite a bit further along are my friends at Casa Decrepit in Alameda. They grow all sorts of fruits and vegetables, and have kept chickens for eggs for a number of years.

But the real inspiration of where to head is from Root Simple (formerly known as Homegrown Evolution) and authors of The Urban Homestead: Your Guide to Self-sufficient Living in the Heart of the City. Back when I was first reading Farm City and started following various urban homesteading blogs, Root Simple was one of the first and best I came across. K didn't know I was following their blog at that point, but came home from a business trip with a book for me -- The Urban Homestead.

For me, it's not about saving money (though that's a bonus), it's about knowing where your food comes from. That's a large part of why I became a vegetarian over a decade ago -- the idea of factory farms and having no idea what's going into your food, and a process that's damaging the environment -- it's clearly not sustainable in the long run and not very healthy in the short run.

World Food Day

On the heels of the Blog Action Day on poverty comes World Food Day, "to increase awareness, understanding and informed, year-around action to alleviate hunger." Food is tightly tied to poverty; if people spend all their waking hours trying to get food, there's no time for anything else like education or trying to improve things for your family.

But hunger is one of those things we've licked here in the U.S., right? Wrong. With the recent economic meltdown, the numbers of people utilizing food banks have soared. Even before that, our local food bank was providing assistance for 40,000+ people, the majority of those children and the elderly.

It's likely to get worse before it gets better. In the 20th century, the U.S. went from from smaller farms raising a variety of crops to industrial farms raising a single crop. Fertilizer synthesized from fossil fuels helped create huge increases in yields, and government subsidies helped make yield the only thing that mattered (you can read more about the industrialization of food in The Omnivore's Dilemma.) It lead to corn becoming ubiquitous in processed foods, especially fast food. Corn-fed beef, corn-fed chickens, sweetened with corn syrup, fried in corn oil. If we are what we eat, a lot of us are corn. But that cheap corn is dependent on fossil fuels (even as some of it is being used to create alternatives to fossil fuels, a misplaced approach if there ever was one), and as supplies drop and costs rise, that will effect the cost of those cheap processed foods. The monoculture of industrial farming also leads to depletion of nutrients from the soil, downstream pollution, loss of genetic diversity in food plants, less nutritious foods, and a host of other problems.

There's no easy answer, but increased awareness is where it begins. Read Michael Pollan's open letter to the next president for more information. Support your local food producers. Eat less meat. (As an added bonus, it's healthier and cheaper.) Plant a vegetable garden. And volunteer and donate to your local food bank.

...and not a drop to drink

California is facing another drought. It's not that surprising given that California is basically semiarid (the north coast gets more, and other areas get less) and has a large population and lots of agriculture. One bad precip year isn't generally a problem, but this is our second. Rainfall is only part of the equation, as we mostly rely on the melting snowpack to carry us through the summer and fall. We had a relatively warm, dry spring, so the snowpack is 1/3 below normal. So the various water districts are asking for voluntary cutbacks, and some (like our very own EBMUD) are considering mandatory rationing.

There's a nice write up over at TreeHugger with the unappetizing title, "How To Green Your Water" (better than some other colors, but...) We're already doing a lot of things on the lists (not eating meat is big), but that's not to say we couldn't do more. So I'm thinking again about some of the same water-saving ideas I was a while ago, namely a hot water recirc pump, and rain barrels or maybe even a cistern.

One big thing almost all of you can do is give up bottled water. Not only does it take a lot of water to make a plastic bottle, it takes a lot of energy and petroleum products to make it, transport it, and then (at best) recycle the bottle. Chances are you've already got better water coming out of the tap that costs a lot less. A reusable water bottle (avoiding hard plastic bottles with BPA, of course) is a much better idea in the long run. At Google, every Noogler (new Googler) gets a spiffy Google-labeled water bottle. Besides plug-in hybrids that employees can borrow and investing in alternative energy, it sounds like Google is moving towards banning bottled water on their campuses.

Even if you live somewhere that's not facing another drought, consider this: 3/4ths of our lovely home planet is covered in water. However, only 2.5% of that is fresh water, and most of that is in the glaciers and polar ice caps. Even if you disagree about the origins of global warming or even that there is such a thing, you can't argue with the fact that glaciers are melting at record rates and the polar ice caps are shrinking. That means we need to use what fresh water we've got wisely, and work towards affordable desalination systems. Those of course take energy to run, and that's in short supply, too.

Yum!

Yesterday was Katarina's birthday. We went to San Francisco and walked around Crissy Field near the Golden Gate Bridge. It was a little chilly, but an absolutely beautiful day. Lots of birds on the shore and in the wetlands, lots of dogs and kids running around on the beach and the field.

Our original plan had to go for a hike at Briones Regional Park near Lafayette, but it rained much of the weekend, and while it would have been beautiful, it would have been quite muddy, too. Crissy Field also had the advantage of being near our destination for dinner.

Dinner was at Greens. It's not only one of the top restaurants in San Francisco (a city renowned for great food) and has great views of the bay and the Golden Gate Bridge, it's also all vegetarian. I've been vegetarian for quite a few years, and Kat doesn't eat much meat anymore either. I refer to myself as an ovo-pesco vegetarian. Wikipedia's article says I'm a pescetarian. My pastor calls me an eco-tarian. The last touches on my primary reason for not eating meat -- raising it has a horrendous impact on the environment. There are places in the world where it makes sense to raise cattle because the land won't support traditional crops that people can eat, but will support cattle that people can use for milk, blood, meat and leather. But many places in the world, the environment is not suited for it, and land must be irrigated to support the cattle, and it goes downhill from there from antibiotics, feed lots, sewage, slaughterhouses, and a cornucopia of diseases.

For me it was a gradual process. First I gave up beef. Then when I learned about how much sewage huge pig farms around the country create and how intelligent pigs are, I gave up pork. Chicken and other poultry followed shortly after that because of factory farms. I only buy free-range eggs, get cheese made with microbial or vegetable rennet, and I'm careful to buy fish that's sustainably harvested. There are other reasons besides the environmental impact, like animal cruelty, cost, and health, but that's the main one. And while various diseases appear in vegetable handling, they're usually ultimately from animal sources, and are much more common in meat. Then there's stuff like mad cow disease or the as yet unnamed neurological condition from pig's brains, and I really don't miss it. Especially when the vegetarian food is as yummy as it is at Greens.