Hope Beneath Our Feet_ Restoring Our Place in the Natural World - Martin Keogh [48]
Over the last couple of generations we’ve given up these skills in exchange for a self-destructive addiction to “convenience,” becoming, as a friend of ours likes to say, the only animal that cannot feed itself. We do not make anything anymore, we just consume—we are “consumers,” defined solely by our appetites, and empowered only in how we spend a dollar.
We figured it was time to become producers again.
That is what we are trying to do here on our little urban farm: produce food, hack our house to generate power and recycle water, plot revolution, and build community. Changing what and how we eat is at the heart of everything, though. Homegrown food is mind-blowingly fresh and flavorful, 100 percent organic, untainted by disease, blood, or oil, and alive. Trust us, once you discover that lettuce actually has a distinct flavor, or you eat a sweet tomato still warm from the sun, or an orange-yolked egg from your own hen, you will never be satisfied with the pre-packaged and the factory-farmed again. The next step after growing fresh food is using the old home arts to preserve it: pickling, fermenting, drying, and brewing.
Over and over again we’ve discovered that anything we figure out how to do ourselves tastes better than what the market offers us. If it wasn’t, we probably wouldn’t keep doing this. Yes, it is a “green” way to live, it is a prepared way to live, it has many virtues, but frankly, it is pleasure that inspires us to do more and more. Get into this a little, and you’ll realize that all of your life you’ve been cheated. Urban homesteading is not about deprivation or suffering, it is about reclaiming your heritage, and your right to real food and real experience.
Make the Shift
We are not alone, and we didn’t invent this idea. Urban homesteading is a movement, a quiet movement of sensible people making the smart choice of disconnecting ourselves in healthy ways from an increasingly untenable reality and creating our own culture from the ground up. We live better, we eat better, we’re saving the planet. What’s not to love?
Anyone can be an urban homesteader, even if you live in an apartment. You can grow more food than you think in a small space: on a balcony, a roof, a side yard. Do you live in a windowless hole? Then use a community garden plot, or claim land and become a pirate gardener. Opportunity abounds even for those of us in the dense metropolitan core. We’ve met a guy who keeps bees on his roof and harvests hundreds of pounds of honey each year in the middle of Brooklyn.
Most American cities sprawl. They possess tremendous amounts of wasted space. Once you take the red pill and open your eyes, all of that space begs to be cultivated. It is an offense on the level of sin for good land to sit unappreciated and unused under lawn and concrete. The single family dwelling with its defensive swath of front lawn and hidden backyard—the basic unit of the American dream—happens to be the perfect mini-farm. We have a vision of cities greened not by lawns, but by crops, thousands of city gardens collectively forming vast tracts of urban acreage. We each can start with our own patch of land and in so doing inspire others. Since we planted our parkway (that useless space between the sidewalk and the street that is technically city property) with vegetables, several of our neighbors have planted their own victory gardens.
Urban homesteaders are forming organic networks to share knowledge and know-how. What our ancestors took for granted, we have to reinvent. It is hard to figure all this out alone, so we have to help each other. Erik and I have been documenting our homesteading