Categories
Urban Homestead

the Urban Homestead

One of my main experiments at the moment is is trying to create an Urban Homestead. A living environment, as independent of(f) the grid as can realistically be obtained.
In this category I’ll try to keep track of my progress. mainly as notes-to-self, as I rather practice-than-preach.
As is the nature of any urban homestead all my experiments are locally hardcoded to my actual house, so results (either way) may vary, should you try them yourself. Please keep this in mind to avoid endless discussion. If it works (or doesn’t work) for me, no argument will exist on the contrary. Such is the way of Science!

Goals:

  • Become self-sufficient
  • Low energy footprint
  • Grow my own (fresh) food (indoors)
  • Have enough stock to last a year
  • Low maintenance
  • Zero waste
  • Zombie apocalypse proof

Become self-sufficient:

One of the biggest problems of cities (the ‘Urban’ in Urban Homestead) is their dependence on rural resources like food, energy, water or waste disposal. This does not need to be the case though.
Cities have rain, sun, wind, space, but also a lot of waste which goes wasted.
Their destructive outward focus should be turned around towards their inner abundant resources, like a city under siege.

Short of running for mayor, my Urban Homestead is a Proof of Concept setup (if only for myself) to show it can be done, even on a small scale.
Yes, my experiments borderline on the extreme and plenty of them fail or are simply not economic, but what works does actually work, at least for me. And as the “Law of One” (see lexicon page) prescribes: one person doing it always trumps “can’t be done”.

(to be continued)