'The Urban Homestead' co-author Erik Knutzen talks city gardening and solar cooking
Erik Knutzen and Kelly Coyne, who write the blog Homegrown Evolution chronicling their adventures as urban gardeners and farmers, recently released their first book, "The Urban Homestead" from Process Media. Last Friday, Erik, who is also a board member of the Los Angeles County Bicycle Coalition, sat down in his garden with Streetsblog's Damien Newton to talk about the new book and sustainable transportation.
DN: So the book's called "The Urban Homestead." How did you come up with the name?
EK: It's a phrase that's been floating around since the '70s. That's the earliest I've seen a reference to an "Urban Homestead." The magazine Mother Earth News, a classic resource for back-to-the-land hippies, and still a wonderful resource, had a bunch of stories in the 1970s that used the expression "Urban Homestead."
There's also a classic example in Berkeley from the early 1970s that was an experiment in self-reliant living in the city called the Integral Urban House. It was a very ambitious project based in Berkeley aimed at setting up a self-reliant urban household. For instance, they had fish ponds with bee hives over the fish ponds. The dead bees would fall into the ponds, providing food for the fish. The goal was to apply principles of the back-to-the-land movement to living in the city.
I'm actually not all that happy with the phrase Urban Homestead because the word homestead suggests a sort of Little House on the Prairie, completely self-sufficient life. Our focus isn't on that kind of extreme living, but on small things that anyone can do. It's about integrating things like growing some of your own food into a normal urban or suburban life. It's not about becoming completely self-sufficient. Community is a good thing, after all, and we still need to work with each other, not focus on running off alone.
DN: Does your family have a history of farming?
EK: Half of my family moved from Germany to Missouri and they are farmers. Some of them are farmers today, but like most family farmers, can't make a living off of it so they have to do other jobs as well. Kelly's family does not have any farmers in it, at least in the last century. But all of us are descended from farmers. In 1900, a majority of people lived on farms. Today, less than 2% of the population feeds the other 98%.
DN: Is that the inspiration to do all this? You have the gardens in the front and back, the chicken coop... Was that all a master plan from earlier in your life, or was it something you came up with as you went along?
EK: It kind of evolved. Like a lot of people we're concerned about where our food comes from.
DN: So you've been at this house...
EK: ...ten years now.
DN: And what was it like when you got here?
EK: The reason we picked this house was because it had everything inside from when it was built in the 1920s. Unfortunately, that also meant it was incredibly dilapidated. But there were also a lot of charming details. This is a modest house, it's a small house. But we prefer a small, nicely detailed house rather than a large dry-wall pup tent.
DN: But when you got here there was no chicken coop.
EK: No chicken coop. We did some vegetable growing when we still lived in an apartment, but we didn't start doing all this stuff until maybe 2000 or 2001. Originally we were spending all our time on fixing the house.
DN: When you began to convert it from the traditional urban yards, full of green grass, to the style of garden we see now, what was the first step? Put another way, if my apartment in New Jersey ever sells and I buy a place out here and want to convert a grass yard into this type of garden, what should I do?
EK: The first thing I tell people is to start small. The mistake that a lot of people make is trying to transform the entire house and yard all at once. There are all these examples of people doing these really heroic projects to try and maximize the space all at once. The easiest thing you can do if you have a yard is to build something like a small raised bed to grow a few vegetables in. The one we have is 4x8 feet made out of wood, but it could be made out of other stuff like broken concrete or whatever you have at hand. You make a box with no bottom, then you buy soil or make compost, and then start vegetable gardening because you know the soil is good.
Do you know the expression, "you don't grow plants, you grow the soil?" The first thing you really need is the right soil, and in most places the soil you'll start out with is really bad. Using a raised bed is a way to jump-start growing while you amend the existing soil, which can take years.
If you want to take over the lawn or do something more ambitious, the first step is to really grow the soil. Make compost, but most people won't be able to make enough to fertilize a whole yard so you might have to import compost. We get horse bedding material. Did you know L.A. has more horses per capita than any other large city in the country? There is tons of compost around here...
We don't believe in tilling the soil. We believe you should amend it from above. Soil has a symbiotic system of fungus and worms that work with the roots of plants. If you till it you're going to destroy that relationship. The way to build it is to add organic matter as mulch. You might have to gently break the soil up a little bit, with a tool called a broadfork, but do it gently. You definitely shouldn't till it. Tilling isn't just bad for the soil, it contributes to pollution because it releases CO2 into the atmosphere.
If you're just moving into a place, another thing to think about is the tree situation since it takes awhile for a fruit tree to mature. You may have to take out some existing trees and put in some new ones, making sure to plant them carefully so that they provide shade where you want it -- say to cool the house, while at the same time not shading out areas where you want to grow sun-loving vegetables.
Overall we're guided by permaculture, which can be a difficult thing to explain. Permaculture came out of Australia, from the work of Bill Mollison and David Holmgren and mimics nature. Rather than industrial agriculture, which has a lot of artificial inputs such as fertilizer ... with permaculture the plants work with each other in a mutually beneficial relationship.
The best example of this is the "three sisters" that the Native Americans used to plant: corn, squash and beans. The idea being that beans are nitrogen-fixing plants, they pump nitrogen into the soil to fertilize the ground for the corn and the squash. The corn grows up as a trellis for the beans. The squash serves as a mulch for the other plants. And together these three plants provide an ideal diet for humans.
DN: I noticed out front you're growing clover to nitrogen-fix the soil a little.
EK: This sort of gardening is the opposite of American agriculture. Too often they're putting in petro-chemicals temporarily into the soil to try and grow plants. With permaculture you use nature to do that and create a beneficial feedback cycle. It also simply requires less labor.
And that's an important part of gardening from home. I mean, you have a 9 to 5 job...
DN: Or you blog from your living room...
EK: (laughs) Right, or you blog. Or worse, you garden then you have to blog about the gardening, which takes twice as long.
Anyway, in permaculture you try to use plants that thrive in your region. If you think of gardening as a whole system, such as the "three sisters," you end up with what we see here. You see those artichokes there. The nearby fennel flowers attracts the kind of insects that deal with the bad insects on the things that we eat. You try to mix things in here such as Mexican sage, which attracts birds that also eat the insects we don't want.
One of the main goals of permaculture is to require as few human inputs as possible. There's a phrase local permaculture expert David Khan taught me that I really like, "work makes work..." If you plant a grass lawn you have to mow it every week, you have to fertilize it. I just don't have time for that kind of work. I don't want that kind of work. I also don't want to pay someone else to do it.
If you work with nature rather than against her, you don't have to do as much work. Nature doesn't need humans to make it go.
DN: So let's talk about apartments for a moment. What can the apartment dwellers do?
EK: If you happen to have a sunny balcony, what I would recommend most people do is make their own self-watering containers. There are really great directions for self-watering containers on the Internet by Josh Mandel. (Writer's note: here's a cool You Tube video from Homegrown Evolution.)
A self-watering container has a reservoir of water at the bottom, and really only requires watering about once a week. Vegetables need moist soil, not soggy, and self-watering containers do that perfectly.
You can also grow herbs. You don't need a self-watering container for herbs. Just grow them in a regular pot. If you don't have a balcony that's sunny, there are community gardens where you can rent space. There's not enough of them, and that's a real problem.
Or you can forage for food. Foraging is something for people that don't have land or access to a community garden. Especially in L.A. where there are a lot of wilderness areas close by you can go out and find plenty of plants you can eat. They're quite good. There are many cultures that still forage for food. Italians still forage regularly. Armenian people forage as well.
I can literally walk two blocks away in the spring and there are fields full of mustard seeds. Dandelions, you can eat the leaves or use the flowers to make dandelion wine. There's also a group -- Fallen Fruit --that makes maps of where the public fruit trees of Silver Lake are.
There's a whole world of mushrooms to forage if you know what you are doing, but you, of course, need to be very careful. Go to the free lectures the Los Angeles Mycological Society puts on.
The book is about a lot more than gardening and foraging. It's also a home economics book. Stuff our grandparents used to do that we forgot somehow. Lots of immigrants still do this stuff, but they don't have blogs so nobody knows about it, I guess (writer's note, he was either picking on me or being self-deprecating here). There's a whole world of fermentation you can do right in your kitchen. You can ferment stuff from the farmer's market, you can make your own beer...
...the reason to do your own fermentation is you can't buy this stuff. There's a type of fermentation called lacto-fermentation, and you may have heard of probiotics. It's a type of health food that has living organisms in it. Yogurt is the most obvious example -- yogurt with active cultures in them. These yogurts are important for our health.
Our environment is too clean for our own health because we're missing these organisms from our bodies. Lacto-fermentation method can replace some of those essential organisms. Kimchi is an example of this, but most pickles you buy in the supermarket are pickled in vinegar instead of the traditional lacto-fermentation method.
People in apartments can also make wild yeast (sourdough) bread. It's important to use wild yeast...
EK: I'm glad you asked that because it's very simple. To make sourdough bread all you have to do is mix flour and water together and every day throw out half the mixture (or make bread with it) and add more flour. The wild yeast is contained in the flour itself, and the air in smaller concentrations. It's there naturally. It's very easy to make good bread without commercial yeast.
Bread without commercial yeast lasts longer, tastes better and some say is better for you.
DN: Talking about energy, is there anything easy one can do to take better advantage of solar energy without buying solar panels?
EK: There's lot of fun things you can do, if you like to tinker. That's the excitement I get from these kind of projects, that I can make them myself. For example, a solar cooker. You can make one out of cardboard, aluminum foil and a black pot.
DN: I saw a woman at the bike expo in Pasadena the other week pulling an oven baking cookies with solar power on her bike. I thought that was cool.
EK: That's nice. It's amazing how easy these things work. We cook our rice in a solar cooker now and it's easier than cooking on the stove. We just throw it in the solar cooker and two hours later you have perfectly cooked rice and you can't burn it. That's the kind of thing we show how to do in the book and the kind of thing that someone in an apartment or someone who can't afford solar panels can easily do.
There's also the solar dehydrator, which we showed you earlier. It's a little more involved, it's made out of wood, but it's a lot easier than installing solar panels. Nothing against solar panels, but it's not possible for everyone. Solar cooking is for everyone. Even if you don't have a balcony in your apartment you can always use your solar cooker for a picnic.
EK: I was talking about the tragedy of modern agriculture. You and I can see the impact of our failed transportation policies. I think more and more people are beginning to see the tragedy of our agriculture policy, which is equally appalling in this country. The power of industrial monocultural agriculture, i.e. growing tons and tons of corn for corn syrup and the resulting health crisis is something people are starting to be aware of.
In our supermarkets you can get all kinds of vegetables all year round but they taste out of season all year round. And so as we come to grow more things ourselves, and you can see that this garden isn't that ambitious, it's small and modest. This is not Versailles obviously. But, just growing a few flavorful unique varieties of vegetables and fruits opens a whole new world of flavor. Especially in the winter, because the winter here is the best time to grow food in Southern California. But, we grow all kinds of food, mostly Italian styles of vegetables and they are much more powerfully flavorful then anything you can get in the supermarket. Bitterness as part of our flavor palate alone is something that's been lost in North American cuisine.
The U.S. palate has tilted towards the sweet. And when we started growing these Italian varieties we were like, 'Wow, this is so powerfully bitter.' But we eventually realized that this is a different part of the palate of food that we're missing and it's really wonderful. These bitter foods also tend to be highly nutritious. That's the real motivation for us, to have flavorful, unique food that's in season.
When you're growing food it ties you to nature. No, you don't have oranges year-round, you have it at one time of the year. You have avocados another and artichokes another. It depends on where we are in the sun's course in the heavens through the seasons. Growing food ties you to the real world rather than the virtual world ... the blogging world where you and I are for a lot of our lives.
I don't want to come across as a technophobe either because I think technology is really important and can do wonderful things. I like having a computer and blogging and all that. I think that's really important. I'm not a Luddite at all. I don't like Luddites. I don't like that rejection of technology.
The important thing is to have a balance. To know how to grow your own food. To know how to take care of chickens and that sort of thing. To know how to make beer and bread. The important thing is balance.
The transportation portion of this interview appears at Streetsblog. "The Urban Homestead" is available through Homegrown Evolution.
Photos by Damien Newton
