Suburban Homesteading – Frugal Living

I stumbled across this article and video from an issue of New York Magazine and thought you all might enjoy it. It’s about a Brooklyn family man who takes his 40×60-foot backyard and makes it his soul source of food for one month. He spends his entire summer changing his home and yard into a small farm in the middle of New York City. It’s fabulous, frustrating and inspiring.

He’s doing exactly what SuburbanHomesteading.com is trying to encourage people like you to do right in their own backyards, no matter where they live. We may not do it all in one summer, but the article can give us hope that with hard work and dedication we too can be gathering ingredients for our next meal just feet from our backdoor.

The entire article talks about his experiences with planting, rabbits, chickens, ducks and other things many of us have become familiar with. With the “eat local” and “100-mile diet” movement quickly building, it’s a really fascinating read. You can read a bit of the article below, just to wet your appetite, and follow the rest by clicking the link at the end.

As Manny puts it – “A farm essentially is… Dirt. Death. Sex.”
-Manny Howard, The Farm Project

At 6:40 a.m. on August 8, the tornado hit my house in Brooklyn. Most people viewed it as a snow day in summer, a meteorological oddity. Not me. After a sleepless night listening to the wind and the rain intensify, I watched the sky turn green, then heard the hemlock tree in the yard next door split in two, clip the gutter on the third floor of my house, and bounce off the roof of what used to be our garage and had come to be known as “the barn.” As the wind torqued up even further, the limb of an oak torpedoed the most productive quarter of my vegetable garden, smothering a thicket of tomatoes, snapping the fig tree, pulverizing the collard greens, burying the callaloo, and splintering the roof of my main chicken coop.

That’s right, my chicken coop, which happens to be in my tiny backyard farm—800 square feet of arable land.

A tornado hadn’t struck Brooklyn since 1889, when Flatbush was farmland; this one laid waste to the lonely little farm that I had planted in my backyard and that, within days, I planned to rely on as my sole source of food for an entire month.

I started my farm, hereafter referred to as The Farm, in March, with my eye on August as the month I’d eat what I had grown. It was, in original conception, equal parts naïve stunt and extreme test of the idea that drives the burgeoning “locavore” movement. According to this ethos, we should all eat food produced locally, within 100 miles—some say 30—of where we live, so as to save our planet and redeem our Twinkie-gorged souls. Now that the “organic” label has rapidly become as ubiquitous and essentially meaningless as the old “all-natural,” the locavores have established a more sacred code, one meant to soothe our anxieties about what goes into the food we eat.

Read more…