The Urban Homestead: Your Guide to Self-sufficient Living in the Heart of the City (Process Self-reliance Series) (Paperback)

The Urban Homestead: Your Guide to Self-sufficient Living in the Heart of the City (Process Self-reliance Series) (Paperback)
by Kelly Coyne (Author), Erik Knutzen (Author)

Amazon.com Product Description
The Urban Homestead is the essential handbook for a fast-growing new movement: urbanites are becoming gardeners and farmers. Rejecting both end-times hand wringing and dewy-eyed faith that technology will save us from ourselves, urban homesteaders choose instead to act. By growing their own food and harnessing natural energy, they are planting seeds for the future of our cities.

If you would like to harvest your own vegetables, raise city chickens, or convert to solar energy, this practical, hands-on book is full of step-by-step projects that will get you started homesteading immediately, whether you live in an apartment or a house. It is also a guidebook to the larger movement and will point you to the best books and Internet resources on self-sufficiency topics.

Projects include:

* How to grow food on a patio or balcony
* How to clean your house without toxins
* How to preserve food
* How to cook with solar energy
* How to divert your grey water to your garden
* How to choose the best homestead for you

Written by city dwellers for city dwellers, this illustrated, smartly designed, two-color instruction book proposes a paradigm shift that will improve our lives, our community, and our planet. Authors Kelly Coyne and Erik Knutzen happily farm in Los Angeles and run the urban homestead blog www.homegrownrevolution.org.

(via Boing-Boing)

Small Strawbale: Natural Homes, Projects & Designs

Small Strawbale: Natural Homes, Projects & Designs
By Bill Steen, Athena Steen, Wayne Bingham

Amazon.com Product Description
This practical guide is filled with rich photos of homes, greenhouses, studios, sheds, open-air structures and more, each pulsating with unique yet subtle creativity. Both a pragmatic construction manual and a philosophical, artistic guidebook, Small Strawbale is an inspirational starting point for a strawbale dreamer, and a great source of information for those who are ready to get bailing.

Building a Straw Bale House: The Red Feather Construction Handbook

To help our readers flex their DIY green spirit, we're going to start covering some useful books. First I'm going to start out with this great book about straw-bale construction. If you're not familiar with straw-bale construction, check out Wikipedia for a primer.

Building a Straw Bale House: The Red Feather Construction Handbook
By Nathaniel Corum

Amazon.com Product Description
"This book is a timely and important tool for the empowerment of communities facing housing deficits. The Red Feather project is extremely important; it is truly making a difference."—Jane Goodall

For more than a decade the Red Feather Development Group, a volunteer-based organization, has built and repaired straw bale houses for Native Americans. Somewhere along the way—and this was certainly not the plan—they created an architectural phenomenon: This inexpensive, environmentally sound, easily constructed, and downright beautiful form of building has, for good reason, caught the public's imagination. Here, Red Feather provides a step-by-step, easy-to-follow manual for would-be strawbale builders—indeed, they supply everything you'll need but time, energy, and lots and lots of straw. Informative sections on safety, design, tools, and materials, and case studies picked from over thirty-five Red Feather projects give a comprehensive overview to straw-bale building.

But this book is much more than a construction manual. It is also the inspiring story of Red Feather itself, a tale of community action and cooperation that suggests a can-do solution to the growing housing crisis on America's Native American reservations.