everyday urban homestead

Our yards contain vegetable gardens, decorative perennial gardens, sleek designer gardens, hippie reuse gardens…but what if our urban lots became an integral resource supporting our everyday life, serving local self-sufficiency, and providing residents with locally abundant and health-giving:

• fruit and vegetables
• water from conserved rainwater and reused graywater
• animals for eggs/meat/dairy
• plants for medicine, textiles, dyes
• cyclic reuse of materials (compost, vermiculture, polyculture)
• value-add food products: beer, bread, wine, pie
• habitat
• biodiversity

Outside of streets, residential lots comprise a huge chunk of our urban land.  We live on these lots, we cook and eat, relax with friends and family and teach our children on these lots.  Although I love community gardens, especially their enriching social environment, I prefer to save my intense gardening for my own backyard, even if it’s tiny.  Lugging tools and materials and supplies seems onerous, especially when the tending and harvesting of resources becomes part of everday life.  I can share resources, lessons, ideas with neighbors, friends and the community through various means, including community gardens, but I want my food to grow right along with me.

I’ve read about folks who offer edible landscaping services, sometimes integrated with urban permaculture principles.  Often, the gardens look somewhat ragged, include token landscape elements of flagstone paving and wooden arbors, and do not integrate with the unique architecture of the house or the other multiple functions that a residential lot must serve.  Sometimes, the installed gardens all about veggies, which is cool, but this ignores opportunities for efficient use and reuse of water, which is critical for these intensive gardens.  Few offer services that include animals.  Once installed, these gardens often go to waste as residents (who needed someone to design and install the gardens) don’t know how-to or don’t have-time-to keep the gardens moving through the season’s cycles or regenerate spent soils.  One business in Portland seems to maintain the gardens over time and even share bounty between different urban lots, which begins to resolve some of these issues for their busy urban clients.

As we finish our own yard and help with work on Jeff and Tom’s yards, we will keep close tabs on time and materials requirements for the design, installation and maintenance of the gardens to understand how we might build a small business.

Resources

• Path to Freedom homesteaders in Pasadena, CA
• Petaluma Urban Homestead
• Mother Earth News article (1980) on HUD homesteading program
• Edible landscaping enterprises, article on sprig
• Your Backyard Farmer, an urban distributed CSA in Portland
• Homegrown LA edible landscape service in LA
• Sustenance Design in Atlanta area
• Stone Lake Farm, not-so-urban off-grid homestead
• http://www.howtohomestead.org/
• Farmer D in Savannah, GA

we.r.natur

In 1941, Jackson Pollock visited a MOMA show on Indian Art of the United States. Curated by Rene d’Harnoncourt, this show employed a full-scale re-creation of a wall of Southwestern pictographs, shop window-type arrangements of contemporary fashion designs featuring Indian handiwork, and live demonstrations by Native American sand painters, dancers and silversmiths. The sand painters created an image on the ground by ‘painting’ with colored sands dropped from their fists.

Certainly the forms of Native American art and visual culture were brought into New York school paintings – the nested symbols, zoomorphic (animal-inspired) forms-within-forms, the bold earth colors. But possibly even more important to these painters seeking an authentic American art was the position of the shaman as a healer in society.

Lee Krasner (above: sun woman II, 1957), a painter and Pollock’s wife, been a student of Hans Hofmann. She poured her energy and intelligence into furthering Pollock’s efforts.

Hofmann abhorred Surrealism and sought to teach the underlying rules of form-expression. Believing that the inspiration for art lay outside the artist, in “nature.” (Hans Hofmann, Still Life, 1939)

Hofmann’s experiments remained merely exercises in abstracting form from motif (Hans Hofmann, Spring, 1940), always subscript to a system he called “push & pull” (Hans Hofmann, Push and Pull, 1950), his “signature style.” (Hans Hofmann, Cathedral, 1959 )

When I paint, I paint under the dictate of feeling or sensing, and the outcome all the time is supposed to say something. And that is most often my sense of nature. . . it might suggest landscape and might only suggest certain moods, and so on but this must be expressed in pictorial means, according to the inner laws of these means. Only this is acceptable as art.

–hans hoffman

In reply to a query from Hofmann as to why he did not work more from nature, Pollock is said to have replied, “I am nature.”

quality

“When you’re not dominated by feelings of separateness from what you’re working on, then you can be said to ‘care’ about what you’re doing. That is what caring really is: ‘a feeling of identification with what one’s doing.’ When one has this feeling then you also see the inverse side of caring, Quality itself.”

Persig, Zen and Art of Motorcycle Maintenance