Book Review: The Urban Homestead

I read "The urban homestead: your guide to self-sufficient living in the heart of the city" over the last few days. It is a quick read, most of the information is high-level and points you to other sources, but for someone more interested than me in the topics at least, it provides a nice high-level introduction to a number of different activities that can increase self sufficiency or at least reduce reliance on fancy consumer products.

What struck me though more than anything else is the 'purity' approach to food growing. Build one to two foot tall raised beds and fill with imported soil for your gardening? That quickly becomes an inexpensive endeavor. I can't bring myself to see a drive towards increasing self-sufficiency as one that needs expensive investments. Unless your dirt is that bad, don't buy more dirt. Besides, who says what you buy will be any better than what you are covering up, other than (maybe) its clay/silt/sand composition.

Many other projects however took a much more realistic, hands-on and low cost approach and pointed to additional sources of information.

One more note: if you are a stickler for grammer or well-edited writing, don't bother with this book. There are so many typos or editorial errors that reading the book over a couple days, it was nearly distracting. Score one for efficiency I guess.