The Urban Homestead PDF

 Table of Contents Title Page Dedication Acknowledgements Preface leashing The Homesteader Within Chapter One - Start Your Own Farm Strategies For Growing Food In The Urban Setting Permaculture The Practicalities Of Growing Food Chapter Two - Essential Proj...

 Table of Contents Title Page Dedication Acknowledgements Preface leashing The Homesteader Within Chapter One - Start Your Own Farm Strategies For Growing Food In The Urban Setting Permaculture The Practicalities Of Growing Food Chapter Two - Essential Projects Essential Projects A Treasure Chest of Garden Projects and Advice Chapter Three - Urban Foraging Feral Edibles Invasive Edibles Fruit Foraging Tools For The Fruit Harvester How To Eat Acorns Dumpster Diving Revive Day-Old Bread Chapter Four - Keeping Livestock In The City The Chicken is the New Pug Chickens For Meat Chicken Q & A Ducks Rabbits  Pigeons: A Modest Proposal Quail Bees Chapter Five - Revolutionary Home Economics Preserving The Harvest How To Can Pickling via Lacto-Fermentation Dehydration: Why Save It For Hangovers? Three Methods For Drying Food Preserving With Vinegar Preserving Fruit In Alcohol: Le Cherry Bounce (Cerises à l’eau-de-vie) Preserving Root Vegetables Transforming Excess How To Culture Milk Cheesemaking Making Butter How To Make Fruit Butter Making Stock Five Ways to Preserve a Tomato The Homestead Speakeasy: From Mead To Moonshine Baking On The Homestead Cleaning The Urban Homestead Our Cleaning Cupboard Other Cleaning Aids You Might Want to Keep Around “Green” Cleaners We Are Not Really Down With, But Others Use: All-Purpose Spray Cleaners Less Toxic Ways To Deal With Unwelcome Critters A Homestead Of Your Own Location Location Location Chapter Six - Be Your Own Utility: Water And Power For The Homestead Harvesting Water Harvesting Rainwater Rainwater Harvesting Technique 1  Rainwater Harvesting Technique 2 Rainwater Harvesting Technique 3 Rainwater Harvesting Technique 4 Rainwater Harvesting Technique 5 Rainwater Harvesting Technique 6 Non-Invasive Greywater Methodologies Highly Invasive Greywater Strategies Power To The People Principles Heating 49% Cooling 49% We’re Fans Of Fans Water Heater 13% Alternatives To The Gas-Heated Shower Solar Water Heaters For General Household Hot Water Lighting 10% Stoves and Microwaves And Small Appliances (8%) Parabolic Cookers The Built-In Solution: A Wall Cooker Electronics 7% Washer & Dryer 6% Refrigerator 5% Dishwashers 2% Generating Your Own Power Electricity From Solar Power — The Components Solar Systems: Small, Medium And Large Chapter Seven - Transportation Transportation Principles: The Urban Homestead Transportation Triangle: Walking, Biking, Mass Transit Conclusion: The Future Resources About the Authors Copyright Page This book is dedicated to the South-Central Farmers, and the memory of 14 acres that once fed 360 families. Aknowledgments First, we would like to thank our amazing contributors for sharing their stories with us: Amy, Taylor Arneson, Severine Baron, David Byrne, Deena Capparelli, Laura Cooper, the Greywater Guerrillas, Eva, John Howe, Suzanne Mackey, Ken & Lorie Mars, Mary McGilvray, Jean-Paul Monché, Nicholas Sammond, Elon Schoenholz, Maya Shetreat, and Claude Willey. And then we must kneel in gratitude before our keen-eyed, patient and insightful beta-readers: Caroline Clerc, Bryn-Ane MacKinnon and Elon Schoenholz. Before, during and after the writing of this book we’ve been inspired by the work of the following people and organizations. We offer this short list knowing we’re going to forget a lot of people. Once you put your special glasses on, you’ll see there’s so many smart people doing cool things out there that it’s hard to keep track. But we’d like to at least mention Nance Klehm, David Kahn, Steven Box, Enci, The Culture Club, Sandor Katz, Melinda Stone, Tara of Silver Lake Farms, Paul Mackey, Nick Taggart, the revolutionaries at the Eco Village, the Bike Kitchen and the Fallen Fruit collective. They’ve all shown us the way. Thanks also to the visionaries behind Process Media: Jodi Wille and Adam Parfrey, for liking our blog and asking us if maybe we’d like to write a book. And of course, where would we be without our moms? Thanks, Moms! Preface When we began this book in the spring of 2007, we had no idea that we were sitting on the crest of a wave. Traveling around since then, we’ve met hundreds (thousands?) of wonderful people from all walks of life who are embracing the home arts of gardening, brewing, home cooking and small- stock keeping. DIY living — sustainable, grounded and local — represents a cultural sea change, one that is happily here to stay. We’ve had a heck of a good time meeting you all — and it’s been an honor, too. Thank you. Kelly and Erik October 29, 2009 Los Angeles  leashing The Homesteader Within Unleashing The Homesteader Within Let’s get together and get some land Raise our food like the man People people We gotta get over before we go under — James Brown, Funky President Imagine sitting down to a salad of peppery arugula and heirloom tomatoes that you grew yourself. Or a Sunday omelet of eggs laid that morning, served with a thick slice of fresh sourdough, butter and apricot jam — all homemade, of course. Or imagine toasting your friends with a mead made from local honey. Where would you have to move to live like this? A commune in Vermont? A villa in Italy? My husband Erik and I have done all of this in our little bungalow in Los Angeles, two blocks off of Sunset Boulevard. We grow food and preserve it, recycle water, forage the neighborhood, and build community. We’re urban homesteaders. Though we have fantasies about one day moving to the country, the city holds things that are more important to us than any parcel of open land. We have friends and family here, great neighbors, and all the cultural amenities and stimulation of a city. It made more sense for us to become self-reliant in our urban environment. There was no need for us to wait to become farmers. We grow plenty of food in our backyard in Echo Park and even raise chickens. Once you taste lettuce that actually has a distinct flavor, or 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. Our next step down the homesteading path was learning to use the old home arts to preserve what we grew: pickling, fermenting, drying and brewing. A jar of jam that you make of wild blackberries holds memories of the summer, and not the air of the Smucker’s factory. When you grow some of your own food, you start to care more about all of your food. Just where did this come from? we’d find ourselves asking when we went shopping. What’s in it? At the same time, we began to learn about cultured and fermented foods, which have beneficial bacteria in them. Few of these wonder-foods are available in stores. The supermarket started to look like a wasteland.  A little history The idea of urban farming is nothing new. Back in the days before freeways and refrigerated trucks, cities depended on urban farmers for the majority of their fresh food. This included small farms around the city, as well as kitchen gardens. Even today, there are places that hold to this tradition. The citizens of Shanghai produce 85% of their vegetables within the city, and that’s just one example of a long Asian tradition of intense urban gardening. Or consider Cuba. Cubans practiced centralized, industrial agriculture, just as we do, until the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1989. Overnight, Cubans were forced to shift from a large, petroleum-based system to small-scale farming, much of it in cities. Today, urban organic gardens produce half of the fresh fruits and vegetables consumed by Cubans. The United States once was a nation of independent farmers. Today most of us do not know one end of a hoe from the other. In the last half of the 20th century, a cultural shift unique in human history came to pass. We convinced ourselves that we didn’t need to have anything to do with our own food. Food, the very stuff of life, became just another commodity, an anonymous transaction. In making this transition, we sacrificed quality for convenience, and then we learned to forget the value of what we gave up. Large agribusiness concerns offer us flavorless, genetically modified, irradiated, pesticide-drenched frankenvegetables. They are grown in such poor soil — the result of short-sighted profit-based agricultural practices — that they actually contain fewer nutrients than food grown in healthy soil. Our packaged foods are nutritionally bankrupt, and our livestock is raised in squalid conditions. The fact is that we live in an appalling time when it comes to food. True, we have a great abundance of inexpensive food in supermarkets, but the disturbing truth is that in terms of flavor, quality and nutrition, our greatgrandparents ate better than we do. There is a hidden cost behind our increasingly costly supermarket food. The French have a term, malbouffe, referring to junk food, but with broader, more sinister implications. Radical farmer José Bové, who was imprisoned for dismantling a McDonald’s restaurant, explains the concept of malbouffe:  I initially used the word ‘shit-food’, but quickly changed it to malbouffe to avoid giving offense. The word just clicked — perhaps because when you’re dealing with food, quite apart from any health concerns, you’re also dealing with taste and what we feed ourselves with. Malbouffe implies eating any old thing, prepared in any old way. For me, the term means both the standardization of food like McDonald’s — the same taste from one end of the world to the other — and the choice of food associated with the use of hormones and Genetically Modified Organisms as well as the residues of pesticides and other things that can endanger health. — The World is Not for Sale by José Bové and François Dufour So what are the strategies urban homesteaders can follow to avoid malbouffe ? Farmers’ markets, co-ops and natural food stores serve as good supplements to the urban homestead, but we’ve found that growing our own food, even just a little of it, rather than buying it, not only results in better quality food, it has changed our fundamental relationship to food and to the act of eating itself. Now, now not only do we know our crops are free of pesticides and GMOs but we discovered an entirely new world of taste and flavor that big agribusiness had stolen away from us. Growing your own food is an act of resistance. We can all join with José Bové in dismantling the corporations that feed us shit. We’ve also shifted from being consumers to being producers. Sure we still buy stuff. Olive oil. Parmigiano reggiano. Wine. Flour. Chocolate. And we’re no strangers to consumer culture, not above experiencing a little shiver of desire when walking into an Apple computer store. But still, we do not accept that spending is our only form of power. There is more power in creating than in spending. We are producers, neighbors, and friends. Think you don’t have enough land to grow your food? Change the way you see land. Before you start thinking that you have to move somewhere else to grow your own food, take another look around. With a couple of notable exceptions, American cities sprawl. They are full of wasted space. As a homesteader, you will begin to see any open space as a place to grow food. This includes front yards as well as backyards, vacant lots, parkways, alleyways, patios, balconies, window boxes, fire escapes and rooftops. Once you break out of the mental box that makes you imagine a vegetable garden as a fenced-off parcel of land with a scarecrow in it, you’ll start to see the possibilities. Think jungle, not prairie. The truth is that you can grow a hell of a lot of food on a small amount of real estate. You can grow food whether you’re in an apartment or a house, whether you rent or own. Do you have 4’ × 8’ feet of open ground? If you don’t have a yard, do you have room on a patio or balcony for two or three plastic storage tubs? If you don’t have that, then you could get a space in a community garden, a relative or neighbor’s house, or become a pirate gardener, or an expert forager — some of the tastiest greens and berries are wild and free for the taking. Think you don’t have time? Think again. We homestead at our own pace, to suit ourselves. Some things, like bread baking, have become part of our regular routine. Other kitchen experiments, like making pickles, come and go as time allows. More ambitious projects, like installing a greywater system, take time up front, but save time once implemented. It’s unlikely that we spend any more time on our food- producing yard than we would on a traditional lawn-and-roses-type yard. You can set up your urban (or suburban) farm so that it takes minimal time to keep it going — we talk about ways to do that in this book. Sometimes, when life gets too crazy, we don’t do anything beyond the barest maintenance, and eat a lot of pizza. Nothing wrong with that. Besides saving time, with the exception of a few ambitious projects, like converting to solar, everything we talk about in this book is also cost- effective. Homesteading is all about reusing, recycling, foraging and building things yourself. Seeds are cheap, composting is free. Nature is standing by, waiting to help. And as oil prices continue to rise along with the cost of food, learning to grow your own may be one of the wisest investments you can make. The paradigm shift Urban homesteading is an affirmation of the simple pleasures of life. When you spend a Saturday morning making a loaf of bread, or go out on a summer evening after work to sit with your chickens, or take a deep breath of fresh-cut basil, you unplug yourself from the madness. Many of us spend a lot of each day in front of a computer. Homesteading hooks us into the natural world and the passing of the seasons, and reminds us of our place within the greater cycle of life. Our style of homesteading is about desire. We bake our own bread because it is better than what we can buy. We raise our own hens because we like chickens, and we think their eggs are worth the trouble. Erik bicycles everywhere because that’s a thrill for him. There’s mead brewing in our guest bedroom because you can’t buy mead at the corner liquor store — and because fermentation is the closest thing to magic that we know. Maybe you aren’t so into gardening, but would like to brew your own beer. Maybe you’d like to tinker with a greywater system for your house. Maybe you want to make your own non-toxic cleaning products. Try it! Start by doing just one project, one experiment, and you may well unleash the homesteader within.  Chapter One Start Your Own Farm Start Your Own Farm Strategies For Growing Food In The Urban Setting No matter where you live, there is always somewhere to grow food. What follows is an overview of four basic strategies for urban gardening. This is just to get your wheels turning. A little later we will get down to the nitty- gritty of how to grow food. The four general strategies are: 1 Container Gardening 2 Edible Landscaping 3 Community Gardening 4 Guerrilla Gardening Urban Growing Strategy 1: Container Gardening You might live in a high-rise, or maybe your landlord won’t let you touch the landscaping. Whatever the case, if you have no access to soil, you can grow your food in containers on patios, roofs or balconies, or even indoors, if you have enough light. For practical suggestions regarding container gardening, please see page 81. What follow are ideas to help you envision different ways you can turn your apartment into a mini-farm. A Window Garden If you’ve got nothing else, you’ve got a window. Or we hope you do. Grow some herbs in your window. Herbs are a great way to get started on your farming career. They do well indoors, and don’t need much care. Store- bought herbs are expensive and never around when you need them. Once you get used to having fresh herbs on hand, you’ll never go back to the packaged stuff. Herbs are your gateway plants to a farming addiction. First and foremost you need a sunny window, because herbs are sun lovers. You might find that herbs that grow well for you in the summer die- off or go into suspended animation during the short, dark days of winter. If that is the case you should view them as a summer crop: grow as much as you can while you can and preserve them the excess for winter use. Just trim off the luxuriant growth, tie the stems in bundles and hang them upside down out of the sun to dry. But given sufficient light, herbs are easy to grow indoors. Try the reliable window herbs first — chives, parsley, cilantro and thyme. Basil and rosemary prefer to be outside, but can be coerced into living indoors, especially if they get to live outside part-time. Herbs don’t need plant food or special care. The only trick is to not over-water them. If you have a bright, south-facing window, you can go beyond herbs and try some other plants. Try this: coerce your cat out of that sunny spot and plop down a cherry tomato in a great big pot and see what happens. Indoor plants do better if you supplement your sunshine with artificial light in the evenings. A traditional fluorescent bulb or a compact fluorescent will work well — just position the bulb as close to the plants as you can. There is no need to buy fancy grow lights. Beans can also grow in a south-facing window in a big pot. Use transparent monofilament to make an invisible trellis in front of your window, then plant pole beans and let them crawl up the wire to form a living curtain. If you are lucky enough to have a giant south-facing window, treat the entire area in front of it as you would a balcony or patio garden. See next section. Got a head of garlic just beginning to sprout? Break it up and plant the cloves close together, pointy side up in a pot and cover them with about an inch of soil. Keep slightly moist, but not soggy.  Shoots will start sprouting up in about a week. Cut the green, garlicky shoots with scissors and use as you would chives or scallions — in salads or in cream cheese or in eggs. These garlic shoots don’t need much light, and are an excellent winter crop to hold you over when your other herbs are dead or just hanging on. Don’t be shy about using them up though, because the shoots only have a lifespan of a month or so — they exhaust their bulb, and eventually peter out. As you use the shoots, keep poking new garlic cloves in the pot to keep the whole thing going. The Patio/Balcony Garden The key to patio gardens is to maximize all available space in all directions. Use a combination of low-growing plants, plants that creep up trellises and railings and fire escapes, and plants that grow in hanging pots. You can improvise a trellis by stretching rows of string or heavy monofilament wire between two points, like between the railing of your balcony and the roof. Vines can also grow on fire escapes, and along stair rails. If you’ve never grown vining plants before, you will be amazed at how well they grab on to things. Group smaller plants on shelves, or arrange them in rows, with the plants in the back rows raised higher than the front, as if they were on a staircase. Play with growing more than one thing in one pot. There is no reason to waste an inch of space. We are conditioned to seeing plants growing all alone in pots, or in tidy rows in fields, but nature doesn’t think that way at all, and neither should you. The only thing you have to be a little careful about is to be sure that you don’t combine plants with very different water and light needs. A sage plant and a lettuce plant wouldn’t make good roommates, for instance, because the sage prefers some dryness. You can’t go wrong matching types: all leafy greens have similar needs, as do most root vegetables. As you gain experience you can grow progressively bolder in your experiments. Try this:  Fast-growing things can be planted with slow-growing things — radishes and carrots together, for instance. Sprinkle green onion seeds in different pots, among your lettuces, your greens, your beans, your tender herbs. A few green onions won’t take up any room in a pot, and are good to have on hand. Plant two or three kinds of leafy greens together, for variety. Plant a cucumber and train its vine to run up a pole or trellis, then plant dill at its base. Then you will be all set to make pickles. For small gardens you are best off giving priority to fruit-bearing plants, because those just give and give and give, unlike, say, a cabbage, which takes a long time to grow and gives you one meal in the end. So plant all sorts of beans and peas in the spring and tomatoes and melons and cucumbers and squash in the summer. You can get small varieties of zucchini and melons that are no bigger than softballs. Whereas these kind of plants usually need some sprawling room, the small-fruited varieties will do well on trellises. When you are arranging your containers, you want to give the sunny positions to the plants that are sun-greedy, like tomatoes, peppers and eggplants. The rule of thumb for all food crops is that they need at least six hours of sun a day. But this rule is flexible. Your lettuces and root vegetables will tolerate some shade particularly in the heat of summer, when they actually appreciate it if other plants are running interference for them. Put these tender types under or just behind the sun lovers, or tuck them in shadier corner spots. Keep in mind that plants do not have to be in direct sun to thrive. A plant will pick up sun reflecting off the wall near it, or the concrete beneath it. If your balcony tends to be dark, play with mirrors, white gravel or white boards to capture sunlight and bounce it to dark corners. Think about jungles. In a jungle every available surface has something growing on it. Nature likes things lush. It does not care for modern minimalist aesthetics. You want your balcony to look like a jungle — kind of like that lady down the way with the 300 creepy spider plants on her porch, only your jungle is all food. Rooftop Garden: The Holy Grail If you have access to your rooftop and an understanding landlord, this is the best possible situation for the apartment gardener, simply because it affords you so much space and light. You of course will want to make sure that the roof can bear the weight. Rooftops are hot in the summer, freezing cold other times, and usually windy. Try to set up the garden in a spot that is buffered from the wind, or contrive some kind of windbreak. Constant wind battering will stress your plants, and interfere with their growth. Self-watering containers (Essential Project 5), which we recommend in all situations, are heavier than normal pots, but do insulate the plants from the extreme temperature fluctuations of the roof. They also save you from having to run up to the roof twice a day to water, and they don’t leak like regular pots. I have lived in New York City for the duration of my residency in pediatrics and fellowship in pediatric neurology. So, it’s been a long haul. Living by your values can be really difficult when you’re busy and reside in a big urban center. I have always tried to “reduce, reuse, recycle” but I was still disgusted by the amount of garbage we made each day. So, I began to vermicompost. We use the compost we produce mixed with potting soil on our indoor vegetable garden. While we do belong to a CSA (community supported agriculture) to get fresh organic fruits and vegetables in the warmer months, I still wanted to supplement with my own fruits and vegetables that I could pick fresh myself. I also wanted my children to have the experience of tending a garden and picking fresh food, even if it is a bit unnatural to raise crops indoors. Most importantly, I think that nurturing a garden is a truly spiritual experience. We have turned our bedroom into a semi- greenhouse by taking big five-gallon containers and filling them with mixed soil and compost. We placed them next to windows but found we needed to supplement with artificial light as well. Our harvest has yet to come, but we now have climbing beans, Tom Thumb green peas, tomatoes of all varieties, sweet pepper, and many herbs.  My children have delighted in all aspects of this experience. They love having their worm “pets” and watching how they make our garbage into something useful. They are attentive to the plants, searching for aphids or noting that the leaves are looking dry. We have shown them that waste isn’t necessarily to be thrown out, but that it can be used as part of a life-cycle in which all matter has a meaningful role. We are trying to have less of an impact on the planet in our small way. All around, important lessons for city kids. Maya Shetreat, New York, NY Urban Growing Strategy 2: Edible Landscaping Edible landscaping is a good strategy to employ when you are colonizing any space visible to the public, whether you own the space or not. It is simply the practice of choosing landscaping plants on the basis of both looks and edibility. A turnip patch may only be beautiful to the enlightened, but many edibles are attractive as well as tasty and these can be put to use creating a practical, attractive landscape that gives you food in return for your investment of time, energy and water. This is an ancient form of gardening: think of Roman gardens full of olives and grapes, or medieval cloister gardens that grew food and medicinal herbs for the monks, or colonial kitchen gardens with their climbing beans and apple trees. It’s simply a practical way to interact with nature: the crops provide all the lush green and scents and flowers your eyes and your soul crave — and then you get to eat them. We propose that our tended gardens be woven into the fabric of our lives. The artificial separation between city life and nature will disappear. Just imagine every yard, every median strip, every balcony, every roof and even every sunny window given over to food, healing herbs and habitat. Food can and should be grown in public spaces, along parking strips, in front of office buildings, in public parks. Every nook and cranny should be blooming with life. With a little rearranging any city could keep itself in fruits and vegetables. This grand vision may take time, but we all can begin in our own spaces. First Steps Toward An Edible Landscape If you live in a house, or on the ground floor of a building, you likely have the advantage of soil at hand — the area around your front door. Or maybe you have access to some weedy common ground, such as the space between building units, or around the parking area. To an urban homesteader, any empty place means an opportunity to grow food. If you rent, you should work with the building manager or landlord to get permission to colonize these areas. If you own, you have to deal with the neighbors who are not used to seeing food grow in public. In both cases, attractive presentation helps smooth the way. To overcome possible resistance to your farming, start by surreptitiously planting small, easy things like herbs and radishes or green onions around whatever is already there — usually that would be some kind of spindly, badly pruned shrub or uninspired ground cover. If you have a flowerbed to trick up, consider some of these strategies for incorporating food with flowers: Liven it up with some colorful Swiss chard, bright colored, wrinkly red lettuce, or big purple cabbages. Plant strawberries around the borders. Nasturtiums have edible flowers, leaves and seed pods. Basil is a beautiful plant, and it gives you pesto. Chive plants throw up cute purple pom-pom flowers, which are edible themselves. Italian parsley is attractive, and so useful to have on hand for cooking. Pea plants have flowers just a little less showy then those of their floral cousins, the sweet peas. A pole or runner bean can grow up a fence behind a flower bed, or grow up the wall by your front door. There’s nothing wrong with planting a cherry tomato plant in flowers. Just choose a “patio” variety (i.e. small and well-behaved)  so that it doesn’t take over the entire bed. You don’t need to slave over starting seeds. All of these plants are easy to find in nurseries and in some farmers’ markets as seedlings. If flowers are managing to grow in a location, odds are that the veggies will like it there too. Just dig a little hole and tuck them in there. Keep doing little interventions like this, and no one will notice that you are secretly farming. Ambitious Edible Landscaping If you have control over an entire front yard, there are two basic ways for you to go. The first is a larger scale version of what we discussed above: you switch out familiar landscape elements with edible equivalents. Plant fruit or nut trees in your front yard instead of traditional shade trees. Plant berry bushes instead of useless shrubs. Replace your flower beds with beds mixed with edible flowers, strawberries, herbs and greens. If you live under the tyranny of a neighborhood association and have to keep your front lawn, that’s fine. Just encroach on it slowly. Widen the beds around the sides of the yard and pack them with edibles. Keep widening the beds a little more each year. By the time your lawn dwindles to a single square foot of turf, your neighbors will be converted to your side by your gifts of green beans and tomatoes. The other route is more radical. You make no pretense of your yard being a traditional landscape anymore. You make it into a show garden, an elegant potager made up of several well-arranged and tidy vegetable beds. This is more work than edible landscaping, which relies on perennial plants that are more or less permanent fixtures. It takes work to make an ever-changing vegetable garden look good all the time. But it may be worth it, particularly if your best sun exposure happens to be in your front yard. To give your garden curb appeal plant colorful things and mulch your beds so they look neat. Add lots of flowers to the mix, and keep the flowers closer to the street. Most importantly, you’ll want to keep all your gardening equipment hidden out back. The neighbors don’t want to see your compost pile, all your tools and crappy plastic pots filled with seedlings. Treat the front yard as a show place, keep it neat, and the neighbors might surprise you with their acceptance. Be A Tree Hugger No matter how you landscape, do not neglect to add as many fruit and nut trees as possible, choosing those that work best in your region. They give you a lot of food for very little input. Maximize the number of fruit trees you can have in your yard by investigating dwarf varieties, and learning the value of pruning. Fruit trees can be kept quite small through vigilant pruning, but will still give a lot of fruit. They can even be grown flat against a wall so they take up no space at all. A tree trained into two-dimensionality is called an espalier. Some fancy nurseries sell young trees that are already trained in that shape, but you can train a young tree all by yourself. Espalier looks elegant, but is not difficult. You just have to encourage growth in certain directions, and clip off anything that grows contrary. Look for how- to’s in a good pruning book, like Taunton Press’ The Pruning Book by Lee Reich. Espalier Our neighborhood is pretty mellow, but when we planted our parkway with vegetables we wondered if the city or neighbors would have anything to say about it. It is a fairly attractive setup, consisting of two square raised beds, each with a wire obelisk in the center to act as a trellis. Wood chips cover the ground around the beds. After two years we’ve had nothing but pleasant comments from our neighbors, and no interaction with the city, though technically what we have done is illegal. Our neighbors are curious about what we are growing. We’ve discovered than many people don’t have the slightest relationship with vegetables in their native state — they can’t even identify a carrot top or a tomato plant. People come by with their kids so that the young ones can see what growing vegetables look like. We’ve met many neighbors that way, and have come to consider frontyard gardening a key to our own community involvement. Whenever we meet a neighbor while we are working out front, we try to send them away with a little fresh produce, but we have not found that people are much inclined to help themselves to the produce in our absence. If they did, they’d be within the law, because the median strip that we plant in is public property, so that food belongs to everyone. But in our experience, tomatoes seem to be the only thing people take. We only grow cherry tomatoes in the parkway, and those are so prolific we can afford to lose some. No one ever touches the root vegetables or leafy greens. Urban Growing Strategy 3: Community Gardens A community garden is a large parcel of land — urban, suburban or rural — that has been subdivided for use by individuals in the community. Some community gardens are guerrilla ventures that have slowly become permanent, others are owned by their cities, others are owned by private individuals or foundations. Most are democratically organized, and being truly grass-roots organizations, no two are exactly alike. When you join a community garden, you will be given a plot of ground to farm. The size of the plots varies a great deal, but something around 10’ × 15’ might be a reasonable size to expect in an urban setting, though some are much bigger. You may have to pay a modest rent, or contribute to the garden in other ways. There may or may not be a waiting list to get a plot. Even if you do have to pay a small rent, it will be well worth it, because you will probably have access to free water, compost, fertilizer and tools. Joining a community garden is an excellent option for any city farmer; not only will you get space to grow food, you will also become part of a community of experienced gardeners. For a beginner, this is invaluable. Beyond that, it will also ground you in your community. With so few public meeting spaces left to us, a community garden is a great place for neighbors to get to know one another and talk about what matters to them. Community gardens often interact with the greater community through outreach and education programs. They help tie the whole community together. If there is no community garden available to you, start one of your own. The community garden movement is a vital part of the greening of American cities. If you don’t start one, who will? About six years ago I joined the Altadena community garden, which was started back in the 1970s. It was sort of squatted by a bunch of mostly African-American families, many of whom were from the South. They planted these pea patches or victory gardens and then it became part of the parks and rec. system of Los Angeles. I grow mostly vegetables — all organic — and for the first year I’m starting to grow some flowers just for fun. My 300-square-foot plot is huge for me, as a single person. I get 85% to 90% of my produce from my garden. A few specialty things I’ll go to a farmers’ market for. I’m at my garden twice a week. It’s all seasonal of course. I’m probably there for an hour or two a week. I could put in a drip system on a timer if I wanted to, but I like to actually go down there and hang out with the folks and get my hands dirty. We happen to have two master gardeners in our garden who we use as resources. At our general meetings they give us information on how to control pests organically. People seem to be respectful of those who want to use chemicals and others that want to use organic methods. This 94-year-old gentleman, African-American, whose family was from the South gave me what are called rattlesnake beans. Its like a lima bean, a butter bean that you grow on a pole. They came from his great-great-greatgrandfather, who was a slave.  When he gave these to me, he said, “These are special and you’re a special person and I want to give you these things.” I practically burst into tears right there.there. Mary McGilvray, Altadena, CA Urban Growing Strategy 4: Guerrilla Or Pirate Gardening Urban gardeners have to be creative to get the most out of the small parcels of land that they can claim as their own. It can be particularly frustrating once you are in the farming mindset to see parcels of land going unused and unappreciated. That’s when some people start to question who really owns the land. Pirate gardening can take many forms, from casual interventions like tossing a few seed balls (see page 30) into the landscaping of an office building, for instance, or in a remote corner of a city park. At the time of this writing, gardening revolutionaries in London just celebrated their second annual harvest of lavender planted along the city roadways (see guerrillagardening.org). Guerrilla gardening may be considered activism, an art form, both or neither. If pirating vacant property doesn’t appeal to you, take over land belonging to your friends, family or neighbors. It’s a gentle form of piracy. Plenty of people would be relieved if you took over their yard maintenance for them, particularly if they got some homegrown veggies out of the bargain. The two of us always look longingly at unoccupied stretches of city land, ones that seem to be begging to be colonized, but we’ve never pirated a piece of land ourselves. That’s why were glad to meet Taylor Arneson, who has planted multiple guerrilla gardens around Los Angeles, claiming land everywhere from the 150 feet of the medium strip of Bundy Avenue (yes, the street made famous in the O.J. trials) to the banks of the L.A. River. On these sites he plants some of the more sturdy summer crops, ones that can stand up to the punishing Los Angeles sun without coddling: corn, squash and beans, as well as fig and mulberry trees, both of which do well in this climate. He waters his gardens with the water belonging to the property, so one thing he always looks for before he begins planting is a working spigot. Talking to him has convinced us that pirate gardening is not necessarily a confrontational activity. Though we’d expect that the owners would toss him right off the land when they discovered what he was doing, that has not proved to be the case at all. He claims that sometimes the vegetables do get picked, which he intends, but that he’s never had to rip out a garden, nor ever had one ripped out for him. Taylor’s Advice For Would-Be Guerrilla Gardeners: There’s a couple of key things you look for in a guerrilla garden site — any soil is workable but ideally you want something that you can  penetrate with a shovel. Preferably water — there should be water in close proximity that’s available. Who it’s owned by is a minor issue because tap water is so cheap that you can do a large garden for a few dollars a month, especially if you’re growing things that are appropriate for the region and you use the water sparingly. I don’t go out of my way to approach the owners and I don’t go out of my way to do it undercover either. I wait for the opportune time to have a conversation. So far I haven’t had any problems. Usually the owners are pretty flexible and they’re interested to help as long as they’re not actively wanting to do something with the property. There’s a lot of benefits for both parties. They get their space to look better so they don’t have as many complaints from the neighbors and I’m building soil for them for when they go to do landscaping in the future. PROJECT HOW TO MAKE SEED BALLS The seed ball is the Molotov cocktail of the urban homesteader Peanut-M&M-sized balls made of seed and clay, seed balls are meant to be lobbed anywhere you want to grow something but can’t really plant it and tend it in the traditional manner — a fenced-off vacant lot, for instance. Or your neighbor’s backyard. You just scatter the balls on the ground and leave them. In their clay coats, the seeds are protected from being eaten or blown away until the rains come. When the rain does come the clay softens and the seeds sprout in the balls, where they are nourished and protected until they get a good start in the ground. Seed balls are an ancient technology, but they were popularized recently by natural farming pioneer and author of The One Straw Revolution, Masanobu Fukuoka. He calls them “earth dumplings” (tsuchi dango). They are an important part of his very hands-off methodology of raising crops. And though they are not well-known in North America, they are used all over the world in re-greening projects. Fukuoka used them to grow grain without invasive tilling and sowing. Others have used them to green the desert or to reintroduce native species to wild areas. In the city, a great thing to do with seed balls is use them to reclaim waste land by introducing wildflowers and other “weeds” that feed beneficial insects and nourish the soil. But you can also try them out with seeds from plants that might feed you. Be careful how you use these things. In the city it does not matter much where they go, but never lob them into natural areas. These balls work, and the seeds you put in them will end up in direct competition with natives. Check with your nursery where you get the seeds to find out which plants grow best in your area without supplemental irrigation, and which plants are best for your local beneficial insects, and when to plant them. Some classic choices for feeding insects are: mustard, fennel, dill, buckwheat, clover, and wildflowers such as coneflower, goldenrod, yarrow, ironweed and sunflower. Ingredients: Dry red clay, fine ground.  You can use potting clay or dig clay out of the ground, as long as you dig deep enough so there are no weed seeds in it. The subsoil in most of the country is clay, so it is easy to find, especially at building sites or where roads are being built. If you use potting clay, be sure to only use red clay, because the other kinds might inhibit seed growth. Spread it out to dry and then grind it up between two bricks to make powder. Dried-out organic compost of any kind. Seeds of your choice, one kind or a mix. Mix one part seeds into three parts compost. Add five parts dry clay to the compost/seed mix and combine thoroughly again. Add a little water to it, just a bit at a time, until the mix becomes like dough. You don’t want it soggy. Roll little balls about the size of marbles — be sure to pack them tight — and set them aside to dry in a shaded place for a few days. To make the strongest impact, distribute these balls at the rate of about ten balls per square yard of ground. Permaculture But the greatest change we need to make is from consumption to production, even if on a small scale, in our own gardens. If only 10% of us do this, there is enough for everyone. Hence the futility of revolutionaries who have no gardens, who depend on the very system they attack, and who produce words and bullets, not food and shelter. — Bill Mollison, Introduction to Permaculture An urban gardener has to be practical, crafty and adaptive. Your motto should be whatever works, works. There are many books about growing food, and many worthy systems that you might want to try, like Mel Bartholomew’s Square Foot Gardening, John Jeavons’ Grow Biointensive system or for those with spiritual leanings, Rudolf Steiner’s Biodynamic agriculture, to name a few systems that work for people gardening in small spaces. We have always adopted techniques from a variety of sources, but on an overarching, conceptual level we have always been intrigued with the principles of permaculture, and those ideas inform the way we go about tending our garden, and the fundamental principles behind this book. Now, there’s been a lot of buzz among the avant-gardening set about permaculture in the U.S. of late, though in its birthplace, Australia, it is widely adopted and un-exotic. Here there is still a tendency for permaculture to be regarded as an intimidating and somewhat esoteric science, but it doesn’t have to be. Permaculture is a term coined by Australian naturalist and scientist Bill Mollison to describe a philosophy for creating sustainable human environments. The name reflects the intertwined concepts of permanent agriculture and permanent (human) culture. Permaculture seeks to imitate nature by creating interconnected and useful systems with each component complementing each other, forming feedback loops that enhance the health and functionality of the system as a whole. Permaculture design principles are taken from the observation of nature, and are biased towards creating environments useful to humans, i.e. for providing food, shelter and medicine. While often making use of native plants, permaculturists are not dogmatic and will mix plants from many different regions and combine both wild and cultivated species to achieve their ends. Though Mollison and his student David Holmgren developed the concept of permaculture in the 1970s, the concept is ancient. When Westerners first encountered indigenous peoples in the tropics, they assumed that such “primitives” did not practice agriculture. In fact many indigenous peoples classified by Europeans as “hunter-gatherers,” actively influenced their environments, encouraging wild edible and medicinal plants in subtle ways, letting them grow in a much more ecologically diverse environment than Western farming methods allow. Living with and encouraging the diversity of a jungle or forest in this ancient way turns out to have numerous advantages. An ecological system where food comes from multiple sources is much less likely to face the kind of catastrophic failure through disease or insect infestations that has caused many a famine in our world — most of which have been predicated by over-reliance on one crop or one system of farming. The ecosystem of a forest, jungle or desert takes care of itself just fine and does not need to be artificially fertilized or sprayed with pesticides. As in nature, plants in a diverse system provide each other with their own fertilizer and beneficial insects attack another. Permaculturists seek to imitate this balance and create useful and productive surroundings that need as little human input as possible. An example of such an interdependent system, called a “guild” in permacultural parlance, is the Native American practice of growing the Three Sisters. The Three Sisters are corn, beans, and squash planted together. The corn provides a support for the beans to grow up. The beans, being a type of plant called a “nitrogen fixer,” take nitrogen from the air and pump it into the root zone, thereby fertilizing both the corn and the squash. The squash grows on the ground, suppressing weeds and shading the soil, thus saving water. A possible “Fourth Sister,” Rocky Mountain bee plant (Cleome serrulata), has been found at the site of Anasazi ruins. The bee plant, the sort of super-plant permaculturalists seek out due to its many uses, attracts beneficial insects that protect the other crops while itself providing edible shoots, leaves and flowers, as well as black dye and even a treatment for stomach upset. Interplanting food this way not only nurtures the plants by providing them with good company, but also makes the most out of the space available, producing the maximum amount of food possible over an extended growing season. More, it ensures that if one crop fails for whatever reason, that same piece of land might still produce others. Overall the threat of losing even one crop to pests is reduced by the biodiversity inherent in the system. Pests love monoculture — planting acres of a single plant is like ringing the dinner bell for bugs. Permaculture is a way to think about balance and sustainability in our actions and lives. Take the simple act of riding a bicycle as opposed to driving your car. The bicycle gets you from one place to the other, just like a car. But in the same way the interconnected relationships of the Three Sisters benefit your garden, a bike not only provides transportation, but also proves you with exercise, and at the same time helps you develop relationships with your community that you could not initiate while locked inside your car. So the choice to ride the bike instead of driving makes sense in certain situations, because biking accomplishes more than one thing at a time — it gives you a high return on investment. But permaculture is not about absolutes, it’s about doing what works, so we will also acknowledge that there will be other circumstances where taking the bike may not be the best choice. Permaculture is more a way of thinking than something solid you can point to. Don’t get hung up on research — just relax, observe and help nature do its thing. The Practicalities Of Growing Food Believe us, you can grow a whole lot of your own food — even if all you’ve ever grown in the past is shower mold. But before you dive into the projects later in the chapter, read over our seven principles below. The Seven Guiding Principles of Successful Urban Farming (or what we’ve learned the hard way) 1 Grow only useful things. 2 Region matters. A lot. 3 Build your soil. 4 Water deeply and less frequently. 5 Work makes work.  6 Failure is part of the game. 7 Pay attention and keep notes. Grow Only Useful Things You don’t have acres of space, so every plant counts. Everything allowed in your growing space has to be edible or medicinal, provide forage for wild or domestic animals, or serve some other function, such as providing mulch or shade. Our general rule of thumb is, “If you water it, you gotta be able to eat it.” Water is a resource. Time is a resource. Space is a resource. We no longer squander these resources on merely decorative plants. Food-bearing plants are plenty decorative. Aesthetics is low on our list of priorities, but nonetheless our yard has never looked better, because now there is intention behind everything we plant, and we care for everything we plant. The first level of priority in our garden goes to our fruit trees, food plants. They get the water and most of our attention. Second in priority are the plants that live around our place in a semi-feral state. They survive without watering and with minimal tending. We let them take up space because they are useful in some way. Perhaps we eat them — this is true for some weeds and our prickly pear cactus — or perhaps they feed beneficial insects — this is true for the wildflowers. If you take this principle to heart, you will quickly realize that one crop the urban homesteader does not tend is turf. Unless you are a croquet champion, it is time to say goodbye to that waste of time and resources: your lawn. Lawn is the largest crop produced in the U.S., sad to say. It is time to change the thinking that makes that acceptable. One hundred years ago no one would water, weed and slave over something they could not eat. And you know what? They were smarter than us. Lawn Facts Some 85 million households in the U.S. have their own little patch of green — the average size about one-fifth of an acre. All totaled, the U.S. supports 30 million acres of lawn. A gas-powered push mower emits as much pollution in an hour as 11 cars. Lawns require two to four more water than shrubs or trees.  Homeowners are using 50% more herbicides than they did 20 years ago. The average homeowner spends about 40 hours simply mowing the lawn each year. $8.5 billion is spent annually on lawn care products and equipment. Source: The EPA and the National Audubon Society Kids and dogs are often held up as reasons why any decent family would keep a lawn in their yard. The truth is that kids love hunting for food in vegetable gardens and climbing low-slung fruit trees and playing in little pockets of wildness, while dogs love sniffing and scratching in all that mulch. Kids and dogs alike benefit from the sensory stimulation provided by permacultural yard. A lawn is a flat void. A little jungle is a whole world to explore. One of the basic tenets of urban homesteading is that your land works for you — you do not work for your land. This does not mean you do not work your land, but the work you do is productive and meaningful. You do not slave at a job to pay a gardener to maintain a lawn that you do not use. If you own property, think about how much you are paying for every square foot, both in real estate and maintenance, and then consider how very much use or enjoyment you get out of your outdoor spaces. Do you use your yard as often as you would like? What do you do out there? Would you feel different if your yard held dinner? Beautiful tomato bushes heavy with fruit? Herbs for cooking? More zucchini than you can shake a stick at? What if a couple of chickens were scratching around out there, laying eggs for your breakfast? Would you want to go outside? Would you miss your lawn? How do you transform your lawn? You lay down sheet mulch right over it. No digging required. See page 55. Region Matters. A Lot. Your best source of information about what to grow and when to plant it will come from your fellow urban gardeners, people in your own neighborhood. Fancy coffee-table books and TV shows — i.e. garden porn — will most likely lead you to heartbreak. Seed packet information is not universal. This is why it is so important to hook into a network of local people doing what you want to do. They are out there. Once you become interested in homesteading, the magic attractors that rule the universe will bring you together with like-minded folks. If you can’t find any gardeners within shouting distance, you might find them through various community and advocacy groups. Or hook up with other local gardeners through the internet, particularly through vehicles like Yahoo Groups and Meetup. Don’t search under gardening — that will yield too broad a spectrum of people. Search under your city names and the terms permaculture, organic gardening, sustainable agriculture, and edible landscaping. Gardeners of a similar mindset might also be found through simplicity groups, slow food advocates and people who are concerned about peak oil. Beyond that, seek out a knowledgeable local nursery and patronize them, even if they cost more than the big-box stores. Their stock will be healthy and chosen to match local conditions. Big-box inventory tends to be more generic. Small outfits are happy to make special orders for you too. And if you have a question, your local guys are going to be there to answer it for you. Imagine, if you will, bringing a diseased leaf into a big-box store and trying to find someone who can identify the problem. Enough said? If you are determined to be anti-social and want only the company of books, seek out books written specifically for your region. The U.S. is a big place, with lots of climates within its borders. One size does not fit all. You have to figure out how to grow food in your unique climate, whether you live in the desert or the mountains, the far North or the deep South. And general region is just the start. Even within a single city there will be considerable variation between neighborhoods. Our climate here in central Los Angeles is different than the climate nearer the coast, where the summer temperatures are much lower. For this reason, we are not going to get as good advice from a homesteader living in one of the beach cities as we are going to get from someone living in our own neighborhood. It really makes a difference. Build Your Soil An urban garden is pretty much guaranteed to be small — whether it is a backyard, a community garden plot, or a bunch of pots. In a small garden you have to use your soil very intensely, the same patch over and over again, whereas if you had lots of space you could let parts of your garden lie fallow some years and take a rest. So the ongoing success of your crops is directly related to how well you care for the soil. Soil is not a neutral growing medium. It is packed with nutrients and minerals, worms and other insects, microbes, fungi — more stuff than we understand. Growing food depletes the soil over time. Bad soil causes weak plants. Weak plants attract disease. Disease infects the soil. To prevent this all you have to do is give back to your soil what you take out. You build soil these ways: Compost all your yard and kitchen waste Use mulch to protect and build the soil Try not to till your soil Rotate your crops to prevent depletion and disease Never use pesticides or herbicides Compost Waste not, want not. Start a compost pile for your yard trimmings and kitchen waste and return all those nutrients to the garden. Your finished compost can be used as soil to fill raised beds, or it can be used as a mulch and spread around your crops to enrich the soil. Either way you are giving back what you took out in your last harvest. Compost is a simple thing (nothing is more inevitable than decomposition), but it is the single most invaluable resource for your garden. Mulch Your Soil As we are defining it, mulch is a thick layer of organic matter that you spread all over your yard, particularly around your plantings. You can mulch with compost, but usually mulch is less decomposed: it can be made up of leaves, bark chips, straw, pine needles, etc. This protective blanket helps regulate soil temperature, retains moisture, keeps the plants clean, discourages weeds, provides habitat for beneficial insects and, as it breaks down, improves the quality of your soil. It also has the benefit of unifying the look of your garden, making everything appear polished and organized, even if it is not. This is a real boon in the front yard, particularly if you’ve torn out the lawn. Try Not To Till Your Soil Tilling is the practice of digging deep into your soil and turning it over, mixing up the top layer with the lower layers. It is commonly practiced and recommended in many books, but we lean toward the no-till camp, and this is why: tilling your soil is like a cheap high. First there is a buzz, but after that it’s all downhill. By tilling soil you are releasing a quick surge of nutrients by causing the death of large amounts of soil organisms, whose corpses give plants a botanical buzz. Unfortunately, when soil organisms die it takes a long time for them to come back, leaving your plants without the nutrients they need to thrive. Tilling also disrupts the complex symbiotic relationships that exist in healthy soil between fungus, earthworms and soil organisms. That said, sometimes soil is so compromised that it absolutely needs to be broken up and have amendments worked into it. There are no absolutes, we would only recommend that you don’t till as a matter of course every time you plant. See page 110. Rotate Your Crops “Crop rotation” sounds intimidating, like something taught in agricultural programs, but all it means is that you shouldn’t plant the same thing in the same place all the time. Each plant, or more correctly, each plant family draws differently from the soil and attracts its own set of pests and diseases. If you switch your crops around annually it takes some of the burden off the soil and confuses the pests. This applies to pots, too. Say you grow tomatoes in pots one summer. The next summer change the soil and scrub the pots, or grow something else in those pots. See page 102. Never Use Pesticides Or Herbicides Or Chemical Fertilizers The urban homestead is organic, make no doubt about it. Organic is nature’s way. All the inputs are at hand, and free, part of a grand cycle. You do not want to be beholden to Monsanto et al. in any way, and you don’t want to mess up your soil with poisons. As we said earlier, the soil is an amazing, living mass of many interdependent life forms. When you pour any of these chemical concoctions onto the soil whatever you do not manage to kill will be knocked out of whack. The alternative is pesticide-free gardening (page 97), and relying on good compost (page 46) and homemade fertilizer teas to feed your soil (page 77). Water Deeply And Less Frequently The sight of someone standing in their yard flipping their hose lackadaisically at the end of a long hot summer day is enough to make us froth at the mouth. These people are wasting their time and everyone’s water. And their plants aren’t very happy either. Deep watering encourages good root development. As the water sinks into the soil, the roots follow it. Deep-rooted plants are strong and less susceptible to heat and shock and drought. If all you do is sprinkle your plants for a few minutes with the hose, the water will hardly penetrate the soil, so the plants will keep their roots close to the top of the soil as well. If you fail to water them every day, they are bereft and wilt like an abandoned lady in a Victorian novel. A good watering is deep and slow and lasts an hour or more like…uh…a good massage. Now, you don’t have an hour or two or three to stand around with your hose in your hand. What you need is a soaker hose, or its more upscale cousin, a drip emitter system. This kind of watering imitates the benefits of a good rain. The kind of rain that makes the flowers grow in the spring is, after all, not a passing shower but the slow, steady soaking of rainy days. You want to keep the drips system running until the water penetrates deep and is spread in a wide radius around the hose or emitter. The minor effort of laying down a drip system is repaid many times over in easier and less frequent watering. Another advantage of drip systems is that they keep the leaves of your plants dry. Wet leaves on many plants, particularly tomatoes and squashes and melons and the like, can lead to mildew and other problems. However, plants with edible leaves, like lettuce and cabbage, like a little water on the leaves now and again. It’s good to give them a shower once in a while to wash off dust, bugs and pollutants. Just make sure you give them enough time to dry off before the sun goes down: a full two hours of sunshine. You don’t want them going to bed with wet leaves. So how much water is enough water? The answer is it really depends on the plant, on the soil, and the weather, but here is a clue. Don’t trust what the soil looks like on top. It might look soggy, but be bone dry one inch down, or the opposite. Get out your little spade and dig down several inches. The soil should be spongy moist no matter how deep you go. Not dripping wet, and not dry. Clay soil (the kind that forms a ball if your squeeze a handful of it) retains water over time, so should be watered less frequently. Sandy soil lets the water drain straight through it, so needs more frequent water. The ideal soil is neither sandy nor clay. Your soil will improve steadily if you keep adding mulch and compost, until it becomes something loose and dark and rich. In the meanwhile, and in general, it’s better to let plants dry out ever so slightly between waterings, so they can get some air, than to keep them constantly sopping wet. See page 84. Work Makes Work This is a permaculture truism that we’ve taken to heart. The gist of it is that the fussier you are, the more you try to force your will on the garden instead of working with it, the harder things will be for you. What does this mean in practice? A bunch of different things, but all in all, the end result is that your garden, even if it is just a tiny square of land, even if it just a bunch of pots on your balcony, should feel like a forest. A little wild. The most sterile zones on this planet are those yards that consist of a sheet of poisoned lawn and a row of rose bushes. What lives in these all too typical yards? Two species: lawn and rose bushes. Maybe a few bugs who eat lawns and rose bushes try to move in once in a while, but they get doused with pesticides, along with any beneficial insects as well. A few weeds pop up, and they get doused with herbicides. Truly, these yards are wastelands. You want your space to be a little messy and humming with life. You want to grow lots of different kinds of plants. You want the kind of garden that is full of birds and bees. This might sound like a strange analogy, but give it a listen. The bread guru Nancy Silverton, co-founder of the La Brea Bakery, speaks eloquently about how bread dough made from wild yeasts and given time to raise slowly is a living thing. It is not cookie dough. Real bread dough crackles and pulses between your hands, full of invisible life. You want that kind of quality in your garden: full of crackling, invisible life and secret happenings. There’s bugs in the soil, bees in the flowers, roots being formed, compost breaking down, all sorts of things you can’t see going on, but you feel it. This kind of state comes in one way only — by you doing as little as possible. When Leaves Fall, Let Them Lay They’re mulching! Or at most, push them to another area of the yard where they’re needed more. In other words, don’t be obsessively tidy. Don’t waste your time collecting leaves to throw in the trash. Leave twigs around for birds to use, leave rocks and logs in odd corners as mini-wildlife refuges. If the floor of your yard begins to resemble that of a forest, you’re doing well. Cultivate A Positive Relationship With Weeds Some are a pain, yes, and that is what mulching is for. Don’t spend your spare time cursing and weeding. And whatever you do, don’t break down and use toxic herbicides such as Roundup! Keep on top of your weeds by eating them for dinner. We go so far as to encourage little beds of edible weeds in our yard, though some people just grab them where they find them. See the Feral Greens section for the 411 on foraging. Also, chickens love weeds, so you might also consider weeds animal fodder. Are you getting the idea that your garden is not going to look like Martha Stewart’s garden? Good. Embrace The Wildlife Birds and bees and spiders and ladybugs do your garden good. Now, wild creatures don’t like artificial environments, so the wilder your yard, the more creatures it will host. “Wild” means a lot of things, but it means diversity first and foremost. You want to grow lots of different kinds of plants, so something is always happening in your yard: things are sprouting, things are fruiting, things are seeding, things are rotting. Wild means there are flowers for creatures to feed on, not just roses, but the blossoms on fruiting trees, the flowers on your herbs, the flowers sent up when you let your crops go to seed. You don’t have to do extra work to attract birds and insects. Left alone, your yard naturally attracts birds and insects. Birds eat a phenomenal amount of insects. Nothing warms our hearts more than watching our favorite bird, the phoebe, swoop down on the white butterflies that turn into cabbage worms. The phoebe staked out its claim on our yard after we put in the birdbath. It is just one of many birds that have started dropping by since then, amazing birds we’ve never seen before. One day a hawk stopped by for a drink. A birdbath doesn’t have to be a gaudy Victorian monstrosity (though most baths you find at garden centers are just that). It could be as simple as a hubcap sitting on top of a post. Just make sure it is elevated, because birds like to be out of the reach of cats. In case you are wondering, we don’t have a bird feeder, because we want our bird friends to dine at our splendid insect buffet. But if you live in a cold winter place, they’d surely appreciate food during the freezing months when the bugs are sleeping.  When we first started trying to grow things, we’d find evil-looking red and black bugs on our plants and worry we were infested by some awful plague. Turns out they were ladybug larvae. These tiny alligator creatures are prodigious aphid eaters. They eat more aphids than mature ladybugs. Next time you see one, give it a hug. Grow Edible Perennials Perennials are plants that live on year after year (or come back year after year), as opposed to annuals, which spend their entire life-cycle in one season. A grape, for instance, is a perennial plant, whereas a cucumber is an annual. A grape dies back in the winter and sends out new growth in the spring. The cucumber has to be reseeded. To work less, dedicate a part of your garden to plants that bear food without you having to think about it. All fruit and nut trees fall into the perennial category. There are dwarf and semi-dwarf varieties that do not take up much room, but deliver plenty of fruit. Between pruning and selecting the right variety, we promise you that you can keep a tree, maybe even a tiny orchard, in the smallest yard. With trees you have annual harvesting and pruning duties, which is some work, but less than shepherding annual plants from seeds to harvest. Citrus plants do well in big pots, and you can bring them indoors for the winter. We have a potted kumquat which we adore, because though it is just a little thing, it gives hundreds of sweet fruits every winter. After trees, there are fruiting bushes, like blackberry and raspberry bushes. These are usually grown on trellises to control their growth and make harvesting easier. As with trees, this is some work when you set it up, but not constant work afterward. Blueberry plants are also excellent fruit- bearing perennials. You don’t see them in home gardens much because they need special soil. But for this very reason they are a great container plant — so even patio growers can have blueberries on their cereal in the morning. Grapes are fantastic, as are the almost forgotten berries like the gooseberry or the red currant. Not all perennials are trees and bushes. Some are more tender plants that die down in the winter, but then come back of their own free will in the spring. A favorite perennial vegetable is asparagus. Once established, an asparagus bed will hand you a bounty of asparagus every spring with little attention from you. Similar plants that come to mind are strawberries, fennel, artichokes, Jerusalem artichokes, rhubarb and many herbs, like chives. Some annuals or biennials can be made to behave like perennials. Many of your leafy crops — broccoli, collards, kale, lettuces — will give you a second harvest if you harvest them by cutting off their heads, leaving their root system and some stalk intact to send up another flush of growth. Other plants multiply and can be subdivided. Chive plants are already perennial, but you can make them multiply more quickly. Dig them up and carefully tear the root mass in two, then plant the other half somewhere else. Both halves will expand and thrive. Keep doing this and you’ll be up to your ears in chives. In a similar vein, let some of your herbs and veggies go to seed, they’ll show up somewhere else in your garden the next year. This is almost like having perennials. Italian parsley and cilantro and dill weed are very good at popping up wherever they want. So are some greens, like arugula. Let them have their way. Any plant that wants to grow on its own, that will take the initiative for you, is your new best friend. Envision your yard as place where you go out and forage, not a place that you have to control. Start Small Most first-time gardeners fail not out of incompetence, but out of ambition. They plant too much and end up overwhelmed. Small problems quickly become big ones, things spiral out of control. Then the would-be gardener tells herself she’s not meant for it, and resolves to subsist entirely on take- out. Don’t let this be you! The first year start with a small bed or a few pots. If you get a community garden plot, you don’t have to plant every inch of it the first year. Leave room to expand. Failure Is Part Of The Game You will make mistakes. This is how you learn to garden. Sometimes you are forgetful, or lazy, or misinformed. Other times, shit happens you can’t control: frosts, heat-waves, wind, punishing rains. For these things, learn to let go. As for the rest, be ruthlessly Darwinian about your garden. Keep what works and forget about trying to grow anything frail, sensitive or fussy. Pay Attention And Keep Notes It does not take all that much time or hard work to grow food, but it does take a little attention, and sometimes that’s hard enough to find. Try to make it a habit to walk among your plants each morning — maybe as you drink your coffee. Get to know your plants. When all is well, they definitely have a contented, industrious look about them that you will learn to recognize. “Ah, happy plants!” you’ll say, and feel all is right with the world. When you’re watering, look for any problems, especially bug infestations or signs of disease or other problems. When you’re growing organic, you need to catch problems early, because there is no nuclear solution. Clip the diseased foliage off a plant. Get that cabbage worm before it does more damage. Putting out little fires like this saves big trouble down the road. Keep a farmer’s notebook, noting what you planted, when you planted it, and where you planted it, when you harvested it, and note whether it worked out or not. Trust us, you think you will remember, but you won’t. You will forget what you planted before it sprouts. Your notebook will be an invaluable record to help you: Figure out what works best in your garden and under what conditions. Time your plantings so your crops come in successive waves, rather than all at once. Plan your crop rotations. This principle is explained on page 102. Chapter Two Essential Projects Essential Projects Urban homesteading is about action. What follows is a compendium of hands-on projects and how-to’s that help you grow your own food.  The first five projects we consider indispensable, and so have labeled them “Essential Projects.” When friends ask us how they should start growing food, these are the first things we suggest, because they are the basic techniques that make small-scale, intensive gardening possible. ESSENTIAL PROJECT 1 START A COMPOST PILE This first project is one everyone can and should do, whether they garden or not. All the space you need is a patch of bare ground large enough to set a garbage can on. If you don’t have that, you can still compost. There’s no reason not to compost — it’s easy and the benefits are many. If you’re growing food you need fresh compost to renew your garden. If you’re an urban homesteader you don’t want anything to go to waste, and that includes your kitchen scraps, your yard trimmings, and the chicken poop from your hen house. Composting transforms all of this waste matter into new soil. As unromantic as decomposition may seem to the uninitiated, homesteaders have gushed to us about how much they love composting, the simple miracle of it. There’s a lot of b.s. in the gardening world about the “science” of composting and an equal number of expensive devices that you supposedly need to accomplish the decomposition that nature does for free. With a few exceptions that we’ll get into, it’s hard to go wrong in composting. Yes, there are efficient ways to go about it that will speed up the process, but no matter what you do you will eventually end up with usable compost. Acquiring A Compost Bin The easiest bin to start with is simply a lidded garbage can with a few holes punched in the sides. This will keep in moisture which speeds decomposition and will help keep out rodent visitors. Both plastic and galvanized metal cans work fine. The metal lasts longer, but the plastic is easier to punch holes in. Choose the largest can your space allows. If your bin is going to sit directly on soil (as opposed to your porch or something), punch a lot of holes ¼” or larger in the bottom of your garbage so worms can come up through the soil and help you compost. If you have to keep your bin on concrete, you’d better leave the bottom intact. If you do compost on bare ground, the ground beneath the can will become very rich with nutrients. Move the bin every once in a while so you can plant in that spot. You can also create an open, circular bin simply by rolling a length of chicken wire or hardware cloth into a tube and securing the ends together with a few twists of wire. Or you could nail four pallets together into an airy box. Open bins dry out fast, so if you live somewhere dry you might want to stick with the more closed system. They also attract more animal visitors. But it is nice to be able to see your compost. Another possible composting container is a stack of used tires. Every year the U.S. generates just under one used tire for every man, woman and child, meaning that there’s a hell of a lot of rubber out there waiting for the industrious urban homesteader. To re-use them as a compost container, simply start with a couple of stacked tires, and add more as the pile grows. The black rubber will help heat up your pile, which is a good thing. If you have the ambition to do so, cut out the sidewalls of the tires so your compost doesn’t get hung up in the tire wells.  You can buy ready-made composters. We have one that we got at a steep discount from the City of Los Angeles. It is basically an extra-commodious plastic garbage can with a built-in harvesting door at the bottom. If you want to pay for something like this that is fine, but we’d warn you away from the more complex composting gadgets out there. They simply aren’t necessary. They are another attempt by the Man to sell us stuff we don’t need. Composting is free! All you have to do to start composting is set out your can, or tire stack, or whatever, and start tossing your yard trimmings and food scraps into it. It’s good to keep a balance between the types of materials you’re tossing on your pile. We like to keep a ratio of about half nitrogen-rich material, what we call “green” stuff, and carbonaceous material, or “brown” stuff. Green materials consist of fresh leaves, kitchen scraps, garden weeds, manure from herbivores, and organic lawn trimmings (even though as a righteous urban homesteader you of course don’t have a lawn). Though brown in color, used coffee grounds are an excellent “green” material that many cafés give away for free. The more finely-chopped your green and brown materials are, the faster the pile will decompose. “Brown” or carbonaceous material is dead stuff like dried leaves, wood chips, sawdust, and shredded newspaper. Avoid using sawdust from pressure-treated lumber or glossy magazine- type paper, as both contain bad chemicals. The brown layers in your compost pile serve to absorb moisture and allow oxygen to reach the interior of the pile since they are generally more loosely packed than the “green” stuff. Without them the green materials go mucky and stinky. The rule we follow is that each time we add a layer of green stuff, especially kitchen scraps, we cover it with brown stuff. Leaving exposed kitchen scraps is like sending out an invitation for a giant maggot party. We keep shredded paper, newspaper, dried leaves, etc., in a separate, covered bin next to our compost pile for convenience. If you ever add too many kitchen scraps, you’ll know it by the smell and the maggots. Just add some brown stuff and give your pile a stir to bury the maggots. No matter what the ratio is, the simple fact is that everything rots eventually, and in the case of compost, rotting is a very good thing. Your pile should be kept moist but not soggy. If you live in an area that gets a lot of rain, you may need to cover your pile to prevent it from getting waterlogged. The consistency of the pile should be like a sponge that’s just been wrung out. In dry places you may need to water your compost every so often. One way to do this is to take a whiz on the pile once in a while. A compost pile makes an excellent urinal for gentleman urban homesteaders, though we’ve heard talk of some intrepid sister homesteaders placing toilet seats over their compost piles. The occasional addition of urine is a great way to add both nitrogen and moisture to the pile. Some people choose to turn their compost piles once a week or so. Turning means stirring — going in there with a shovel and mixing it up. The idea behind turning is that it speeds decomposition. Being lazy, we are inclined to believe the need for turning is exaggerated, so we only do it if we end up with a maggot infestation. This may mean our compost doesn’t break down as fast as it can, but speed is just not a high priority for us. So turn your pile exactly as often as it pleases you. The fastest composting system, if you’re wondering, is said to be the worm bin, which turns scraps into compost in three months. See project 2. It is not advisable to add bones, meat, fish, stuff with oil on it, dog or cat poop, or dairy products as these items could attract pests and your pile may not be able to achieve the hot temperatures required to safely decompose that kind of icky stuff.  Compost is done when it looks like soil. Good compost is dark and crumbly and smells nice. The best compost we’ve seen almost looked like crumbled chocolate cake. You might find a few things that just aren’t going to break down in your finished compost, like a stray avocado pit or a stick, but other than that you shouldn’t be able to find anything identifiable. Identifiable objects mean it’s not done yet. The top of your pile isn’t going to ever look “done.” The good stuff is found at the bottom of the pile. You have two ways of inspiring your compost to become that crumbled chocolate cake. One is to empty out your compost bin. Spill it out on some clear ground. Shovel the unfinished top stuff from the top back into the container, then collect the finished compost. It takes up to a year using our lazy no-turn system to achieve compost, so if you don’t find anything that looks finished, don’t despair, just shovel it all back in and wait some more. Decomposition speed depends so much on temperature, climate, and the materials being composted. The second option is to cut a little door at the bottom of your bin. A door allows you to reach in and scoop out compost from the bottom without disturbing the top. The downside of it is that if the door is not secured, critters will pry it open and rifle through the compost looking for bugs. Compost shrinks. So don’t worry if you fill your bin with a lot of yard scraps. It will drop down pretty quickly, and you’ll have room for your usual kitchen scraps. We call it the equilibrium of the pile: there’s always just enough room. However, if you’re a composting fiend and you really do fill your bin, just start a new one. Some forward-thinking people in Oakland put out a humble and wonderful series of publications a while back titled Eat to Live. The photocopied newsletters could be found for a brief period during the late ‘90s in East Bay pizza parlors and laundromats. Issue number two appeared with the headline “You Can’t Compost Concrete.” The writers of Eat to Live hailed the Chicago Pneumatic Paving Breaker as the gardening tool of the future and promoted backyard unpaving parties to get things started. I can’t say that my love of composting stems entirely from the “Eat to Live” directives, but I do gain a keen sense of reattachment to the ground under my feet when I walk across the paved backyard of our Culver City compound and deposit our uneaten food scraps into the compost pile on a small patch of dirt surrounded by so much dead pavement. My compost is a bypass around the concrete sealant that separates me from the living ground underneath my feet. Composting keeps me from taking things for granted. Should I throw those tortilla crumbs away? If I throw them in the compost they’ll feed a bunch of bugs and then some smaller bugs and then become soil. No waste. It’s a crazy sort of accounting. We’re done with the food, but it’s still food. It still matters. Composting is, perhaps more than anything else to me, a meditation on death. Mine, in particular. Whenever I walk out to my backyard to turn the compost — about every other day — I look into it and think, “That’s where I’m going.” And it makes me feel all right. Makes me feel as though I belong somewhere. And I’ll contribute in a meaningful way, at least after I die. There are so many lofty reasons to get a compost bin going in your backyard, or apartment porch. But those reasons fall away when you start looking forward to seeing the progress your microbial waste management crew is making every couple of days. It’s fun to play in the dirt and watch bugs. Remember the carrot peeling tossed into the compost at the beginning of the week? No orange in sight now. Bad yogurt? Gone. Lawn clippings? They’re soil now. It’s sort of like making a big soup that’s always evolving and always cooking; always changing colors and ingredients. And best eaten once it’s worked its way back up through your garden as a new vegetable or fruit.  Elon Schoenholz, Los Angeles, CA ESSENTIAL PROJECT 2 VERMICULTURE or COMPOSTING WITH WORMS Worm bins are the only feasible method of indoor composting for apartment dwellers, but this is no second-rate method. Even if you do have a yard and a traditional compost pile, you might want to keep a worm bin for your kitchen scraps, because the compost that comes out of a worm bin is some of the best you can get. Worms will eat your kitchen scraps for you and give you a black, odorless, extraordinarily rich compost in return. Worm castings (a polite way of saying worm poop) are the gold standard of natural fertilizers: they are packed with water-soluble nutrients as well as beneficial microbes and bacteria. Castings can be applied to the surface of the soil, directly around your plants, or mixed into soil to enrich it, or soaked in water to make an energizing fertilizer tea that you pour over your crops. You can keep worms indoors in a plastic bin small enough to fit under your sink. Properly kept, they do not smell or attract flies. The worms could also live on the back porch, backyard, mudroom, basement or the garage. Keep them anywhere they are safe from extreme temperatures. Worms can survive down to freezing or up to 100°F, but they work their best at room temperature. In its simplest form, a worm composter is just a box with some drainage holes poked in the bottom, full of shredded newspaper, worms, and kitchen scraps. The problem with this system is that it is a pain in the ass separating the worm castings from the worms (trust us, we’ve been there). Far better to have a stacking system, sort of a worm condo, where the worms can be lured away from finished stuff for ease of harvesting. You can buy fancy worm bins online, though some are shockingly pricy. The next project will show you how to make a good bin for the cost of two plastic storage tubs. But first, some basics of worm wrangling: What To Feed Your Worms Worms like fruit and vegetable scraps, coffee grounds, tea bags, plain pasta and cooked grains, your basic vegan diet. Don’t give them any fats or dairy products or meat. Feed them food prep waste, not plate scrapings. Grind up eggshells for them once in a while so they get the calcium they need to breed, or give them a crushed Tums if you don’t eat eggs. Worms love rabbit poop and do great things with it, so if you have rabbits, you’re in luck. Some people even set up the worm bins directly beneath their rabbit hutches. But no, they will not clean your cat box for you, so don’t get any ideas. Pure herbivore poop is all they can deal with. How To Feed Them All you have to do is pile the scraps in the bin, and then cover with moist, shredded newspaper. The newspaper is important. The scraps have to be covered up so that they don’t attract flies. Rotate your scrap pile to a different corner of the bin every week so that the worms spread their love around. How Much To Feed Them How much to feed them depends on how happy and hungry your worms are, how many worms you have and what you are feeding them. When you are figuring this out, remember that your worms are, hopefully, breeding. That means they will eat more as time goes on. It all comes down to getting a feel for it. Shoot for a pound of scraps a week when you start off, and see how they do with that. Try feeding them twice a week. If the food is just sitting there, the worms are overwhelmed. Give them time to catch up. The cycle from new garbage to completed compost is about three months. Simple Two-Level Worm Bin You need: Two matching 8-10 gallon rectangular plastic storage bins with lids. They must be opaque, because worms hate light. Wooden blocks or bricks for the bins to sit on A drill with a bit and a ¼” bit A bunch of shredded newspaper One lb. redworms (Eisenia foetida), about 1000 worms 1. Using your big ¼” bit, drill about 20 evenly spaced holes in the bottom of each bin. These are for drainage and worm migration. 2. Using the ” bit, drill ventilation holes near the top rim of both bins, and also around the lower edges of both bins. See illustration. The exact location and spacing of the holes does not matter very much. You can add more later if the bin seems too humid. 3. Using your ” drill bit again, drill at least 20 ventilation holes in the top of one of the lids, but not in the other. One must stay intact. 4. Optional: if you have some screening material around, or perhaps some nylon, you can line the bottom of the bin with it to keep clumps of compost from falling out of the drainage holes. This is tidier, but not necessary. 5. Cover the bottom of one bin with about four inches of damp shredded paper newspaper, cardboard, letter paper or brown paper, any kind of paper except shiny paper, such as that used in catalogs and newspaper inserts. Leave the second bin empty for now. Dampen the paper by submerging it in a bucket of water, and then squeezing  it out before it goes in the bin. It should never be dripping wet. Worms drown. Its consistency should be like a wrung-out sponge. That said, their bedding must also be kept damp at all times, because a dry worm is a dead worm. Mix in more dry or wet newspaper to get the right consistency. 6. Mix in a handful or two of soil of any kind in with the paper to give the worms the grit they need to digest. 7. Add your worms to their new home. Feed them very modestly at first. Begin by burying just one handful of scraps in a corner of the bin the first week, working your way up to greater quantities as they acclimate. 8. Choose the bin’s final location. Lay the lid that has no holes in it on the ground. It is going to be used to catch drips. (There should not be much liquid spillage; if there is, the bin is too wet. But if you do catch some, feed it to your plants.) Arrange the bricks or blocks on top of the lid, and then rest the bin on top of them. Cover the bin with the second, ventilated lid to keep out flies and vermin. A third intact storage tub could be used to collect the drips instead of the lid — just nest the other bins in it. 9. What about the second bin? Use it when you’re ready to harvest your compost. In the meantime, you can nest it under the working bin, or store it somewhere else. You’ll know it is time when most of the contents of the bin have transformed from food and newspaper to something that looks like soil. Of course your most recent additions will still be recognizable. Don’t worry about those. Set the empty bin directly on top of the compost in the first bin. Fill the new bin just like you filled the first one: with damp newspaper and a little soil. Add some nice fresh food scraps and the worms will begin to slither their way through the holes up to the new digs. Continue as usual for one or two months, until your worms have finished the food in the first bin and completed the migration  upstairs. Then remove the first bin and reap the benefits of a whole mess of fresh worm castings. Escaping worms: If the worms evacuate out the bottom, they are desperate. Either they are drowning or starving to death or suffering from light exposure. If they are dying, maybe they are too dry. The contents of the bin should always be damp and fluffy, not soggy and dank, or dried out. Bad smells: The bin may be too wet. Add more newspaper, drill more ventilation holes, leave the lid off a little while. You may be putting in too much food for the worms to handle. Stop feeding for a while. Fruit flies: Keep the food well buried. You can lay a sheet of cardboard directly over the bedding to help with this, too. Note: Be sure to buy redworms (Eisenia foetida) for your bin. These are proper composting worms. You can find them at bait shops, the occasional farmer’s market and online. When choosing a supplier choose one near to you so the worms don’t have to be shipped across the country. ESSENTIAL PROJECT 3 MULCH YOUR YARD No other tip, trick or technique will help your garden more. Mulching is an integral part of the urban farm, and it replaces the lawn in the homestead aesthetic. Mulch generously, frequently, passionately. Think of the rich duff on a forest floor, a soft carpet of fallen leaves many inches deep. When you walk on it you sink down a little and your steps are silent and you smell that rich, peaty smell. You want your yard, your garden beds, even your planted pots to be like that.  Mulched plants are happy, healthy plants. Mulch holds in moisture, stabilizes the soil temperature and represses weeds. As the mulch breaks down it feeds the soil; it actually becomes soil. Because it keeps the soil moist, earthworms move in beneath mulched areas and start doing their own improvements. Other beneficial insects use mulch for habitat. Mulch also looks pleasant — it creates a nice visual unity that makes your yard look tidy. Once you become a mulch convert, you will begin to cringe at the sight of bare soil. While mulch will improve soil and make for better growing conditions, it can also be used in places where you don’t plan to plant anything at all, like walkways, open areas, seating areas. Let it replace the lawn as a sort of a placeholder. Ideally, your entire yard will eventually be mulched anywhere it is not hardscaped. We are going to describe three styles of mulching in ascending stages of complexity: regular mulching, sheet mulching and lasagna mulching. All three are simply variations of laying down loads of organic matter in your yard. What Is Mulch? Where Do You Get It? Mulch can be made up just about any organic material you can lay your hands on: fallen leaves, small wood chips or wood shavings, straw, pine needles, corn husks, even dried seaweed — whatever is cheap and plentiful in your area. Lawn clippings are fine — just make sure they haven’t been sprayed. You can mulch with any of your yard trimmings provided they don’t have seeds in them. Those seeds will sprout later on; for that reason you should never mulch with hay, only straw. Many cities offer free wood chips for the taking, as do many tree trimming services. To find out where to get free mulch in your city, do an internet search with your city name and “free mulch” and you should find your answer pretty quickly. Largish wood chips are fine for the outer reaches of your yard, under trees, on walkways, etc., but you will probably find you prefer something a little finer right around your food. You may want try your local equestrian center. Stables will often allow you to haul off truckloads of used horse bedding for free, which makes a fine mulch/compost, though your place will smell horsey for a week or so. Rocks, polished glass and decomposed granite are mulch, too, and are okay to use in patio areas or on paths, but obviously they are not going to build the soil. Some people also call plastic sheeting and shredded tires mulch, but those, while they do suppress weeds, don’t build the soil or improve the beauty of the landscape. And worse, they never go away. If you have a large area to cover, and you absolutely have to buy your mulch, it is much cheaper to order your mulch in bulk than it is to buy many bags of it from the nursery