I am a (non) Urban Homesteader!

Well I can't quite say I am an Urban Homesteader living in the country as I do, so for today I will have the (non) put in front of the term while I use it. Today is "Urban homesteader Day of Action" and us here at Wolf Woods wish to participate.

So for those of you who have not been following us fully welcome to our (Non) Urban homestead!

We started this off technically years ago for both me and Silver with just an idea (even before we met each other), we both felt the need to grow our own and live in the quiet of the country and take care of ourselves. As much as we possibly can. Over the years I have read countless information on Urban Homesteading, trying to get ideas to apply to my hopeful future "on the farm".

Oddly enough most ways of farming that Urban Homesteaders use can be applied to a small scale farm in the country, and this we are going to try on our 5.29 acres. The big thing here is our ground is a very thin layer of dirt and lots of clay under it, so we need to do raised bed gardening. The best place to find the most info on raised bed gardening is through Urban Homesteaders.

Now as you might be able to see here you can grown in the soil here, even with little added to it. These are my hot peppers from last year, and boy did the plants grow; granted the sweet peppers grew taller. They only had my lovely goat manure/bedding mulched over them, and they did not produce as much as I would have liked, but dang they grew!

I have my own ideas for setting up a raised bed but it takes a year to prepare it, and here I shall give it to all Urban Homesteader and (non) urban homesteader alike:

First you need to build your raised bed it has to be wide enough to fit a bale of straw in it while that bale is still bound. After you have made this raised bed if you used wood you probably want to line the sides (btw have the bottom open). Next place a whole straw bale in it, then cut the bindings -DO NOT LOOSEN IT!-(as in leave it intact after removing the binding). Now over that add a layer of peat moss, then a layer of manure (make sure there is no chemicals in it), and then on top of that a layer of soil. Continue layering till almost to the top of the raised bed, then take another straw bale and unbind it and spread a thick layer of straw over it. During the course of the year make sure you pull anything growing in it out, and in the late fall rototill the bed (yes rototill); then again add more straw. When the next spring rolls around rototill again add a little peat,soil, manure if you need more substance in the bed and plant away!

Now the reason for leaving the bottom open is that this way you are amending the soil underneath, just doing it a space at a time, and somewhere down the line the ground will have wonderful soil. However you can just keep using the raised bed, infact when I get to build mine they will be permanent.

Back to my little history of us:

When me and Silver first met we both discovered we both liked the idea of growing our own food, and both of us wanted to own some land so that we could do this. After about 2 years of looking at one website that offered us land with no down-payment and no credit check (the drawback is the cost, but hey my credit sucks!), we spent that 2 years looking at the same property as well. An opportunity (as we see it anyway) popped up for us to take and buy and leave where we lived so we did.

We moved here to Wolf Woods, with no house, and no working well.

We spent most of our first year here in this tent, that "blue pile" was our "stuff" we brought with us. Camping out is tons of fun... however camping out for 6 months with 3 kids is not fun! Also cats seem to like to climb on tents and we we had to "spot fix" the tent a lot or we'd get wet when it rained.

We also started off with a dug well that had a pump in it, but as we were not sure if the pump worked we waited 4-5? months before we even tried hooking up the well to the electric.

We were so happy when the water started flowing that we even called our friend 10 miles away to let them know the wire they picked up for us worked! The best part was, we didn't have to ask our neighbor's for water anymore, and that for us was a big relief. Also made taking baths much easier as we could do it every day now not just ever couple of days when we'd get water.

Our next "big moment" here was when we got our "Winter home" as I'm calling it now though our "offical name" for this building is "The bunk house".

Our pretty blue/green shed 12x24 in space and 5 people live in it, we put in a sawdust toilet, which I wonder if there is a way for an Urban Homesteader to try to use one as that would lower your water usage greatly. I have also come to love the sawdust toilet a lot more than a flush one, and when our house is done being built we are going to just keep using sawdust toilets in it.

During our winter months we finally finalized our ideas for our house building which for us is what we really need to accomplish next. We are going to use the ideas on this website as the base of our ferrous concrete geodesic domed house:

http://www.birdcagedome.com/

We are even considering using this idea for our chicken coop (I'd free range, but... last time I did our garden got eaten; and my lab just loved chasing them!), we are also going to build our animal barn this way. Now on the subject of animals while Urban Homesteaders have done amazing things in their cities with raising livestock (where they can), as we are planning on a cow (2 prob) we need ideas from somewhere else. I found the methods from PolyFace Farms the best:

http://www.polyfacefarms.com/

The man who owns this farm uses techniques that mimic the animals "wild" ancestry, for instance giving the cattle pasturing that mimics what buffalo would have done. The animals are kept close in small pastures and are moved daily to another one. The plan here is to take 1-2 of our acres and divide it into 1/4 acre plots all connected half saved for "field hay" for winter food of course and the others for the few animals we will have. so with that plan every 4 days they are back on the first one, we will see how it works, we might have to increase the amount of plots or shrink the pasture size.

Right now we are trying to set up what growing we will do this year, and cleaning up the space where the house will go; also seeing if our chainsaw will start. It died last fall guess we just over worked the poor thing...

Anywho like I said, I love Urban Homesteading, but as I am rual I'n a (non) Urban Homesteader!

Be Well and Blessed Be...

DISCLAMER:

(I am a blogger and not a reporter therefore please note that some of my materials may not be all there is out there in the world or internet on the subject and I might get something wrong. I'm sorry but it's human nature to make mistakes) <--- This is going to be the newest joke on the web.

Derveas= Dan Quale?

I thought I'd try to play “devil's advocate today and look into something that struck me this morning. Technically the Dervaes' family is claiming they created and started the urban homestead movement. Well I sat there this morning while getting breakfast ready for the kiddies and though, “hey if they created urban homesteading then Dan Quale created the internet. He spent lots of time and possibly money telling everyone he created it after the internet existed.

This is the wikipedia entry on the internet:

The origins of the Internet reach back to research of the 1960s, commissioned by the United States government in collaboration with private commercial interests to build robust, fault-tolerant, and distributed computer networks. The funding of a new U.S. backbone by the National Science Foundation in the 1980s, as well as private funding for other commercial backbones, led to worldwide participation in the development of new networking technologies, and the merger of many networks. The commercialization of what was by the 1990s an international network resulted in its popularization and incorporation into virtually every aspect of modern human life. As of 2009, an estimated quarter of Earth's population used the services of the Internet.

From “the history of the internet” on Wikipedia:

These research efforts included those of the laboratories of Vinton G. Cerf at Stanford University, Donald Davies (NPL), Paul Baran (RAND Corporation), and Leonard Kleinrock at MIT and at UCLA. The research led to the development of several packet-switched networkingsolutions in the late 1960s and 1970s, including ARPANET, Telenet, and the X.25 protocols. Additionally, public access and hobbyist networking systems grew in popularity, including unix-to-unix copy (UUCP) and FidoNet. They were however still disjointed separate networks, served only by limited gateways between networks. This led to the application of packet switching to develop a protocol for internetworking, where multiple different networks could be joined together into a super-framework of networks. By defining a simple common network system, the Internet Protocol Suite, the concept of the network could be separated from its physical implementation. This spread of internetworking began to form into the idea of a global network that would be called the Internet, based on standardized protocols officially implemented in 1982. Adoption and interconnection occurred quickly across the advanced telecommunication networks of the western world, and then began to penetrate into the rest of the world as it became the de-facto international standard for the global network. However, the disparity of growth between advanced nations and the third-world countries led to a digital divide that is still a concern today.

So as I can see yes! Dan Quale created the internet... just like the Dervaes started the Urban Homesteading movement …

Wikipedia entry for “Urban Homesteading the “history” section:

aving an allotment or vegetable garden has been common throughout history, notably, victory gardens during the WWII era, immigrant gardens, and the inner-city community gardening movement in the 1970s. The "back-to-the-land" movement of the 1960s, exemplified by numerous groups, such as Tennessee's The Farm, has recently been reformed into a "back-to-the-city" movement. A wealth of urban homesteading books (Urban Homestead by Kelly Coyne, Erik Knutzen; The Backyard Homestead by Carleen Madigan; Urban Homesteading by Rachel Kaplan, K. Ruby Blume; Toolbox for Sustainable City Living by Scott Kellog) have been published in the past decade. All over the world, people have found ways of growing their own food in inner-city urban areas.

Now there is proof this term has been in use since before the 1990's, I have seen people quoteing seeing it mentioned in the 1970's. I do have a link that goes to an article in “Mother Earth News” from 1980 about “urban Homesteading”:

http://www.motherearthnews.com/Modern-Homesteading/1980-09-01/Community-Homesteading-Programs.aspx

So it looks like the Dervaes came up with this “claim” on this term after all the work had been done just to get their bit of money because now you need to quote them, or point back at them when you use it. (I'm sorry folks that ain't happenin here) Many, many people have written books on this subject and have used it for years before this family has decided they needed to own it. FINE! Trademark, “The Dervaes Institute style of Urban Homesteading”, that is fine by me and I'm pretty sure many others would be Ok with that too.

However trademarking a phrase that a whole movement has access too, that is wrong. You have made it so that many people are now considering “urban homesateading” a bad word, this “movement” is/was a community of like-minded people. Who now wants to seperate Dervaes family from it any way possible; as the members of this community are all about free sharing of information.

Yes I have a donate button on my own blog... GUESS WHAT? I don't expect people to send me money (it would be nice we do need it) , I don't want people to give me money because I am begging for it. I looked at your website cause oddly enough not long before this debacle started I acctually was thinking about looking your family up as I remember seeing the article on your family and wanted a closer look at the pictures from that article. Guess what? After looking over your website and saw the multiple times your family asks for money I hit the brakes at full stop; it was too much. Seeing as how your family makes money selling produce to restaurants (hey anybody check their books lately?), you don't need whatever money I might beable to send your way.

Now I -DON'T- live in an “urban” area.. I'm country here and quite happy to be here, I look into “urban Homesteading” to get ideas for useful things I can use on my “little homestead”, now I will make sure that if people ask me for info on it I won't send them too you.

I have also noticed that you (dang I wish I knew where the link was) want to move to South
America and buy 900 acres for your family plus whoever... Guess what -THATS NOT URBAN- not unless you are planning to build a city on the edge of it.

Anywho folks this will be my last post on this family.. however I will be participating in the online protest Monday.. so bear that in mind. Later today I'll have new pictures up from my “Homestead”, for all who want to see it!

Be Well and Blessed Be...

DISCLAMER:

(I am a blogger and not a reporter therefore please note that some of my materials may not be all there is out there in the world or internet on the subject and I might get something wrong. I'm sorry but it's human nature to make mistakes) <--- This is going to be the newest joke on the web.

Trade Marks!

Watch out everyone who uses the word "urban" with the word "homestead" or "homesteading", it has been trademarked by a family.

Kelle posted a link to this on her blog and now I will too -PLEASE READ-

http://blogs.ocweekly.com/stickaforkinit/2011/02/pasadena_family_trademarks_the.php

Maybe everyone should boycott them for this... it's ridiculous...