I Am an Urban Homesteader
by Colleen Vanderlinden • February 21, 2011 • Miscellaneous • 17 Comments
My urban homestead is 1/4 acre of heaven, 8 houses from the Detroit border. At the end of my block is a main street, the one that is supposed to separate Detroit from the suburbs. Looks pretty much the same on both sides, if you ask me. On the corner, there’s a liquor store. Across the street is a hair and nail salon. It’s noisy here. You can usually hear a siren of some type, intermittently throughout the day. Most nights, at least a gunshot or two. Music, from the cars that drive down our street with the bass thumping, to the teenage boy who walks past my house every morning singing gospel music at the top of his lungs. At noon and six, the church bells at St. Jude Catholic church ring throughout the neighborhood.
There are many drawbacks to living here. We are endlessly picking up trash, bags and bags of it. Pizza boxes, cigarette packs, fast food containers of all kinds. Tiny bottles of whiskey shoved into our shrubs, almost on a daily basis (clearly someone in the area has a problem…). The occasional condom has found its way onto our lawn. Our neighbors across the street (they’ve just moved, thankfully) were “ladies of the night,” so to speak. The jerk down the street sells drugs standing right on my curb.
So, yeah. A Utopian vision it’s not. And we won’t be here forever. But while we are, we are, without a doubt, urban homesteaders. My husband, my four children, and I grow vegetables, herbs, fruit trees, berry brambles, and strawberries in our yard. We keep worms for vermicomposting, and have two large compost bins. We grow vegetables in raised beds in the yard, in containers on the porch, and in hanging baskets anywhere we can attach them. This spring, we will have chickens. We have rain barrels and self-watering containers, and use gray water whenever possible. We cook from scratch, build and make as much as we can, and grow food.
But the most important things growing here are our children. We are raising people who will understand that just because you can doesn’t mean you should. Just because you can go out and buy a bunch of crap that will end up in a landfill somewhere doesn’t mean you should. Just because you can eat chemicals disguised as food doesn’t mean you should. Just because you can sit in your house and stare at the TV doesn’t mean you should. Just because you can live a wasteful life, like many people, doesn’t mean you should.
Just because you can trademark a way of life, it doesn’t mean you should.
There are as many ways to be an urban homesteader as there are ways to be a human. Each of us, those who consider ourselves urban homesteaders, bring our own values, our own needs and desires, to the table. I am but one urban homesteader among thousands. I do it in a way that is distinctly mine. That doesn’t mean I own the movement. It is a movement that can’t be owned, and shouldn’t be. There is no “founding father” of urban homesteading. There are, however, passionate people all over the world doing urban homesteading in their own way. I consider myself lucky to be part of this community. So much knowledge, so much passion, such a diverse group of people, living under the label “urban homesteader.”
Yes. I am an urban homesteader. And I cannot be trademarked.
**Join the Urban Home-Steading(s) community on Facebook
**Follow the #DumpTheDervaeses hashtag on Twitter to keep up with today’s Urban Homesteaders Day of Action
Great post, very inspirational. And I think you should get more respect for doing all this in a more hazardous climate than those trademarking folks.
Bravo, Colleen. Bravo! I have been waiting for this post to happen, and you didn’t disappoint. Pity those people wouldn’t clue in…
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Oh I’m so excited to read your post! I am a newbie (suburban)homesteader living on the Warren/Sterling Hts border. Just started last year. Have been gardening, composting, baking bread and learning to sew and knit. My goal this year is to learn to can all that wonderful produce and to add more perrenial herbs/veggies/fruits now that I know we are staying here. I was starting to feel like the only one here in the Detroit area, glad to see I am not alone!
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What you’re doing on your property sounds great! We rented in a similarly bad urban neighborhood, but did quite a lot too. Then we moved to the country, thinking we could do even more. Unfortunately, we’re now doing less than we were before due to zoning issues. At least we don’t have to listen to the police helicopters in the middle of the night anymore…
Great post Colleen! What people like you do deserves to be commended and not trademarked into oblivion!
Great blog! I’m going to post a link to it in my blog.
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Great post. Half a country away, the neighborhood sounds very familiar. Thanks for keeping the Urban, in the Urban Homesteading discussions.
Colleen – what a great way to put it. Just because you can, doesn’t mean you should. The sad thing to me is that I STRIVE to be an urban homesteader but now I don’t know what I’m supposed to call it! lol I expand my garden every year, I preserve as much of my own food as I can. I compost and if it were legal, I might have chickens. I am an urban homesteader in progress.
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bravo.
Colleen, that sounds like where I used to live! Back when I was in an urban area, a number of us homeowners tried to revitalize our part of the city.
I remember one corner house that had a strip of soil elevated from an extremely busy thoroughfare by a raised wall- it couldn’t have been more than three to four feet in depth from the sidewalk- and they had planted the most beautifully espaliered apple trees along the side of the house.
The practice has been around for years, and no one should be getting proprietary about something they didn’t invent. Who is going to claim farm food or something like that, next?