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New Urban Habitat

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I’ll be sharing some of my recently published articles with you this week. They’re all accompanied by really useful, shareable infographs. I hope you enjoy them!

First, my article Keeping Your Harvest All Year Round: Winter Storage Dos and Don’ts appeared on Fix . Click on the image below to click over to it and discover lots of tips for keeping produce fresh without a root cellar.

Source: Fix.com

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Check out my post about urban homesteading on the CustomMade blog this week, accompanied by some beautiful graphics. (I’ll have several more articles to share soon!)

Here’s a brief excerpt:

What is urban homesteading? In short, it looks different for every family. For mine, it means we live in a regular, ranch-style house in the city. In our backyard, we have a small flock of three chickens and a large vegetable garden that provides us with peas, greens, tomatoes, corn, squash, beans, and herbs. We compost. We cook nearly all of our meals from scratch, including bread, tortillas, and pizza crust, and we brew beer. We chop wood to heat our house, and we hang our laundry on a clothesline. We make most of our own household cleaners and personal care products out of simple ingredients, like baking soda and vinegar. Biking is our main form of transit. And we try to be intentional about the things we buy. For other families, urban homesteading includes keeping bees, raising rabbits, making clothes, or preserving food. More than anything, urban homesteading is a mindset. It turns us from consumers who are disconnected from where our food and belongings come from into producers who use our hands to make some of what we need to live. Most of us have little desire to be as self-sufficient as the original homesteaders had to be and the back-to-the-landers strived to be. In my family’s case, we’re thrilled to take advantage of all of the wonderful elements of urban life, including farmer’s markets and grocery stores as well as chocolate, coffee, and cultural events.

More than anything, urban homesteading is a mindset. It turns us from consumers who are disconnected from where our food and belongings come from into producers who use our hands to make some of what we need to live. Most of us have little desire to be as self-sufficient as the original homesteaders had to be and the back-to-the-landers strived to be. In my family’s case, we’re thrilled to take advantage of all of the wonderful elements of urban life, including farmer’s markets and grocery stores as well as chocolate, coffee, and cultural events.

Click to Enlarge Image

7 Reasons to Join the Urban Homesteading Revolution Infographic by CustomMade

It’s gardening time again! It feels like it was the shortest winter in history (although I perhaps would not have said that mid-January). I planted a few of our beds a couple of weeks ago. It’s our seventh gardening season in our backyard, and I actually sort of know what I’m doing now. It helps that I have two eager little helpers. Ezra and Ira love the garden! Their faces light up at the very mention of planting.

Once we’re in the garden, our activities usually go like this: Ezra and I till a bed. Ira finds a “wormy.” Ezra and I spread fertilizer on a bed. Ira plays with the wormy. Ezra and I plant some seeds. Ira finds another wormy. Ira is enthusiastic about invertebrates.

We’re excitedly watching starts grow and seeds sprout, and we’re already harvesting a bit of lettuce and kale that self-started, perennial herbs, and lots of dandelion greens. Have I mentioned it’s prime dandelion harvesting season?

Wild foods tend to be much more nutritious than the produce in our supermarkets or even farmer’s markets. Jo Robinson, author of Eating on the Wild Side , explains that when we bred the bitterness out of our produce, we also lost nutrition. “The more palatable our fruits and vegetables became … the less advantageous they were for our health.”

Fortunately, despite many efforts to eradicate it, most of us have a wild edible green growing in abundance all around us, and it’s a nutritional powerhouse. A half pound of dandelion greens provides :

649% of your recommended daily allowance of vitamin K,

338% of your vitamin A,

58% of your vitamin C,

39% of your iron,

20% of your Riboflavin,

19% of your calcium,

19% of your vitamin B-6, and

9% of your dietary fiber

Don’t let all those nutrients go to waste! Check out this post for more information about this humble super food and links to recipes. This year I can’t wait to try Rachel Turiel’s dandelion pesto .

We’ll likely be seeing many more April showers, but you’ll hopefully find us sloshing around the garden playing with wormies or armed with a colander eying our neighbors’ weeds. Wishing you some similar spring time revelry.

Is it gardening season where you live? If so, what’s coming up in your garden? I’d love to hear about it in the comments.

I love brainstorming for solutions. That’s why I started this blog. I wanted to ponder answers to some of the questions I was asking myself after my first son was born, like how can my husband and I create a healthy, happy, sustainable family life? How can societies redesign communities for health and happiness? Four years later I’m still here brainstorming.

Often I come back to a movement that may hold some of the answers: permaculture.

Permaculture is a gardening movement that originated in the 1970s in Australia. Its “father” Bill Mollison defines it as “a philosophy of working with, rather than against nature; of protracted and thoughtful observation rather than protracted and thoughtless labor; and of looking at plants and animals in all their functions, rather than treating any area as a single product system.”

Sound confusing? I haven’t even gotten into the three tenets or twelve design principles. Honestly, I don’t wholly understand permaculture, which may be why I’ve yet to transform my yard into a food forest.

But I find it to be an incredibly refreshing and hopeful philosophy, because it re-frames a tired conversation about our role in nature.

Most of us are well-versed on humans’ criminal performance as stewards of the natural world. Nearly all my earth science lessons from first grade through college ended with discussion of humans’ destruction: a hole in the ozone layer, acid rain, rampant pollution, global climate change. After my dad died, I saw a photo of a polluted landscape and immediately recognized the emotion I’d been feeling during all of these environmental lessons: grief. I’m sure I’m not alone in that emotion.

The environmental movement often espouses footprint reduction as the solution to the devastation. In An Inconvenient Truth , we saw a list of the same solutions I heard in elementary science classes: turn off the lights, drive less, buy energy efficient appliances.

As you know, I’m all for finding joy in simpler lives. But I’m not convinced it’s the answer to our environmental problems.

Derrick Jensen makes a good point in his 2009 critique of simple living “Forget Shorter Showers” : “The logic behind simple living as a political act is suicide. . . . we can easily come to believe that we will cause the least destruction possible if we are dead.” Jensen is trying to provoke political action in his essay, but he captures how psychologically depressing and even destructive it is to think the way we can best serve the world is to disappear.

If our presence itself is the problem, how can we be the solution?

Perhaps that’s why when I first read about permaculture, I felt a rush of relief. The movement is not about shrinking, shriveling, or getting smaller. The ultimate goal isn’t disappearing. It’s about doing something productive that makes the world a better place. It’s about improving the environment through our actions.

In their memoir Paradise Lot: Two Plant Geeks, One-Tenth of an Acre, and the Making of an Edible Garden Oasis in the City , Eric Toensmeier and Jonathan Bates describe how they built a permaculture food forest that transformed their barren urban lot into a high yield food-producing habitat for fish, snails, frogs, salamanders, raccoons, opossums, woodchucks, bugs, and worms. “Imagine what would happen,” Toensmeier writes, “if we as a species paid similar attention to all the degraded and abandoned lands of the world.”

Permaculture is incredibly powerful, because it inspires us to become the solution. It shows us that we can create systems of abundance where everybody wins.

What if we apply the same mindset to other seemingly entrenched problems? We’d probably be able to re-frame all kinds of tired conversations and focus on what we can design and create to affect the world for the better.

It’s the mindset that inspired Seattle to create Beacon Food Forest , seven acres of fruit trees, berry bushes, herbs and vegetables that will be open to the public for foraging, that helped Judy Wicks build a successful business while creating a thriving local economy in Philadelphia, and that helped a Spanish biologist build a fish farm in Southwest Spain that reversed the ecological destruction of the Guadalquiver River valley.

If you haven’t seen Dan Barber’s TED Talk about that Spanish fish farm, it’s an incredible reminder of what can happen when we become the solution.

Check out these resources for more inspiration:

Permaculture and the Myth of Scarcity – Charles Eisenstein

Natural World: A Farm for the Future – Rebecca Hoskings

Farmers Go Wild

Permaculture Research Institute

Corn and Soybean Farmers Learning to Grow Veggies and Sell Locally – Michael Moss, The New York Times

This Guy Stopped Charging Clients and He Has Zero Regrets – Arin Greenwood, Huffington Post

A Gallery of Spectacular Photographs – Helen Walters, TED

13 Predictions About the Future That Were Spectacularly Wrong – Huffington Post

The Delicious Truth About Getting Older – Susannah Conway

What Happens When A Woman Gets Sick Of Divorce And Mortgages – ViralNova

Photo by Chris Breeze

Seattle to Build Nation’s First Food Forest – Claire Leschen-Hoar

22 Unbelievable Places that are Hard to Believe Really Exist – Bored Panda

Going on a Walk Could Change the World – Hannah Engelkamp

Microhousing takes off in some cities – Claire Thompson, High Country News

Mind blowing beach art – ViralNova

In 2010 and 2012 , I shared the magic moments when I heard or read something that surprised or inspired me. Moments that made me say, “aha.” As we say farewell to 2013, I have 13 more for you:

Cooking might be the most important factor in fixing our public health crisis. It’s the single most important thing you can do for your health. – Michal Pollan

The next time you look in a mirror, think about this: In many ways you’re more microbe than human. There are 10 times more cells from microorganisms like bacteria and fungi in and on our bodies than there are human cells. – Rob Stein

You can find a way to make economic exchange one of the most satisfying, meaningful, and loving of human interactions.” – Judy Wicks

Since there is no “healthy soil/healthy microbe” label that can steer us toward these farms, my suggestion is to ask this simple question: “Does the farmer live on the farm?” Farmers who live on their land and feed their family from it tend to care for their soil as if it were another family member. – Daphne Miller

In Asian languages, the word for mind and the word for heart are same. So if you’re not hearing mindfulness in some deep way as heartfulness, you’re not really understanding it. Compassion and kindness towards oneself are intrinsically woven into it. You could think of mindfulness as wise and affectionate attention. – Jon Kabat-Zinn

“A seed makes itself. A seed doesn’t need a geneticist or hybridist or publicist or matchmaker. But it needs help. Sometimes it needs a moth or a wasp or a gust of wind. Sometimes it needs a farm and it needs a farmer. It needs a garden and a gardener. It needs you.” – Janisse Ray

Thanks to cutting-edge science, we know that happiness and optimism actually fuel performance and achievement — giving us the competitive edge that I call the happiness advantage. – Shawn Achor

I melted, and accepted, and only then could I actually enjoy his presence instead of worrying about losing him or changing him. And this, as I’ve learned, is the best way to be. – Leo Babauta

Analysis of the mid-Victorian period in the U.K. reveals that life expectancy at age 5 was as good or better than exists today, and the incidence of degenerative disease was 10% of ours. Their levels of physical activity and hence calorific intakes were approximately twice ours. They had relatively little access to alcohol and tobacco; and due to their correspondingly high intake of fruits, whole grains, oily fish and vegetables, they consumed levels of micro- and phytonutrients at approximately ten times the levels considered normal today. – Paul Clayton and Judith Rowbotham

The findings suggest that job burnout is “a stronger predictor of coronary heart disease than many other known risk factors, including blood lipid levels, physical activity, and smoking. – Anne Fisher

We also know, more definitively than we ever have, that our brains are not built for multitasking — something that precludes mindfulness altogether. When we are forced to do multiple things at once, not only do we perform worse on all of them but our memory decreases and our general wellbeing suffers a palpable hit. – Maria Konnikova

Over the same decades that children’s play has been declining, childhood mental disorders have been increasing. … Analyses of the results reveal a continuous, essentially linear, increase in anxiety and depression in young people over the decades, such that the rates of what today would be diagnosed as generalised anxiety disorder and major depression are five to eight times what they were in the 1950s. – Peter Gray

The most profound thing I have learned from indigenous land management traditions is that human impact can be positive — even necessary — for the environment. Indeed it seems to me that the goal of an environmental community should be not to reduce our impact on the landscape but to maximize our impact and make it a positive one, or at the very least to optimize our effect on the landscape and acknowledge that we can have a positive role to play. – Eric Toensmeier

Did you hear or read something in 2013 that surprised or inspired you? I’d love to hear about it in the comments.

This weekend we harvested all that remained in our three sisters garden. The boys and I dug out the ten-by-ten plot and planted it at the beginning of May on a bit of a whim, and I wrote about our adventures in polyculture in June when it was in its infancy.

Since then we watched a few heirloom corn plants shoot toward the sky. Spotted rattlesnake beans twisted up their hardy stocks, and half a dozen varieties of spiky squash plants covered the ground beneath them. The soil in our plot wasn’t great, but we harvested loads of zuchinni and summer squash and at least a dozen winter squash. We ate many rounds of green rattlesnake beans and let the rest dry on the vine for cooking beans.

We eat a lot of beans around here, and it was an educational process to grow them ourselves. Beans are such a humble and inexpensive food; it’s easy to take them for granted. But once you spend an afternoon hunched over a bowl shelling them, you’re less likely to do that.

What a thrill it’s been to watch what was a patch of weeds last April transform into a robust and beautiful garden. And because beans fix nitrogen in the soil, we’ll hopefully see even bigger harvests in our plot in future years. I definitely understand why this sisterly trio has such a rich history in the Americas.

What have you been harvesting this fall? I’d love to hear about it in the comments.

My husband and I are in the middle of a Kickstarter campaign to crowdfund for my dad’s new anthology. (I wrote about the project here .) For a brief summary, my dad, who passed away last June, was a columnist for the Denver Post for 26 years, and I’ve been compiling his best columns from 1999 to 2012 into an anthology. It will be released on November 1, and right now we’re raising funds for publication, distribution, and marketing. Come on over and check out our Kickstarter if you’re interested!

The last three weeks have been a whirl of running a Kickstarter, sending out press releases, talking to the media, and setting up events. It’s been a wonderful learning experience, and I can’t wait to share more with you about the process when it’s all over. The best part, hands down, has been the lovely notes I’ve received with stories about my dad and how he impacted different people.

In addition to our Kickstarter project, I’ve been editing one article and writing another. It feels great to be busy. I am constantly in awe of how much I can get done in a day with my husband at home for the summer fielding more of the parenting duties.

Of course, I also take lots of gardening breaks. And just when I thought my garden couldn’t make me any happier, the sunflowers bloomed.

I’ll be here next week with a post about Eugene’s annual car-free festivity. Then I have big plans for August including a writing conference, a family camping trip, and a revamp of New Urban Habitat, so things will likely be quiet around here if I can resist popping in to share pictures of squash and tomatoes. (Red tomatoes in July! Seriously, this is the best gardening season ever.)

What’s growing in your garden or life this summer? I’d love to hear about it in the comments.

Oh hello there, come on in. Do you want to see the garden? That’s what I’d say if you stopped by today — even if you happened to be selling magazine subscriptions, educational materials, or hand woven baskets. Oh yes, everyone ends up out in the garden munching on plump snap peas and tender butter lettuce, watching zucchini grow before their very eyes. It’s all I can do not to gush about these bursting beds twenty-four hours a day. (Sorry, friends.)

So come on back. Check out the sun-dappled chard and the lettuce forest. Marvel at the sheer ambition of hop plants and the audacity of fennel. Learn from the sunflowers, who turn their faces to follow the sun all day.

Despite the scarcity of corn and the abundant weeds, my Three Sisters bed is bringing me constant delight. “Look at all the squash we’ll have!” I proclaim daily as I count all of the bright yellow flowers dotting the spiky vines. We’re already eating zucchini nearly every day. (Can you see the excitement on my sons’ faces?)

Come, let me show you how the bean tendrils wrap up the ears of corn. It’s better than television, I tell you.

What’s that, you need to go now? I wish I could send each of you off with armloads of lettuce, beets, and peas. (I’m sure my sons would insist you take a zucchini or two.) But alas, I’ll invite you back soon.

How’s your garden growing? I’d love to hear about it in the comments.

Hi, I'm Abby Quillen. Welcome to my blog! You can find more of my writing at abbyquillen.com . Read More…

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