I have a Google alert set up for the phrase “urban homestead”. Lately I’ve noticed more real estate and apartment listings using this phrase. Our neighbors Anne and Bill even used it to rent out their duplex. A rental listing that includes the photos in this post came from a real estate concern renting out an apartment in Edmonton, Canada. For $1,600 Canadian dollars a month you get:

•  hot water on demand system. 
• sunroom has a high efficiency wood burning fireplace that helps keep house warm and cozy in the winter.
• fenced back yard is an urban oasis with three apple trees, three plum trees, eight choke cherry bushes, a grape vine, covered deck, and enclosed fire pit with a private seating area. A perennial flower garden lines the path to the front yard. Three rain barrels provide ample water for large vegetable and flower gardens.
• get to know your neighbours at the nearby community hall and rink. The hall holds a variety of children, youth, and adult-focussed classes, programs, and events, such as free dog training; playgroups; skating, yoga, and dance classes; children’s Halloween and Christmas parties; community bbqs; collective kitchen; and more! 
• trained dogs welcome; absolutely no cats.

Other than that last bit (Dogs but not cats? Someone please explain the logic.) I’m happy to see fruit trees, rain barrels and community activities listed as an asset. Maybe that common sense thing is catching on.

Image from the beautiful book, Haunted Air by Ossian Brown

 Mrs. Homegrown here:

I celebrate Samhain on November 1st because I enjoy marking the changing seasons of the year by making these old festivals my own. It’s so easy to lose track of time in an electronic culture. It’s even easier to lose track when you live in Los Angeles, land of the perpetual sunshine.

Samhain marks the last harvest of the year. The weather is cold enough to keep meat, so it is also the time when all non-breeding livestock was slaughtered and cured–otherwise they’d have to be fed through the winter. It also is the start of the dark half of the year, a time of long nights and introspection.

This is a time of transition, and the air is alive with the excitement of it. The leaves are bright, the branches bare and stark against the sky. The days are blue, but the nights are cold and black. The wind kicks up. Dead leaves skitter and bolt across the asphalt. The crows come back to our neighborhood around this time of year and caw in the palms: southern California Gothic. It’s my favorite season here.

The Celts believed places and times of transition–dawn, dusk, midnight, crossroads, lakes and streams, caves, etc.–held supernatural energy. These were places and times where the boundaries between our world and the other world was very thin. Samhain was one of those transition periods, and coming as it did at the last harvest, at the beginning of winter, it was associated with the dead.

And of course, within the Catholic Church November 1st is also marked as All Saint’s Day and the 2nd as All Soul’s Day, both of which honor the dead, the sainted dead and the faithful departed, respectively. And All Soul’s Day is better known around here as Dia de los Muertos (and celebrated in style).

Face it, this is the time of year to deal with mortality and memory.

Halloween is lots of fun. (I love the genial anarchy of both Halloween and Fourth of July–they’re my favorite holidays.) So I save Oct. 31st for trick o’ treaters and parties and celebrate Samhain on the 1st, quietly, with a just a few simple gestures. I don’t plan on slaughtering any animals (Did I just hear our chickens breath a sigh of relief?) so I clean the house instead, and attack one drawer or closet, and shed things I don’t need anymore, both as sort of a psychological purge and in preparation for the busy holiday season to come. I like to make a nice meal, too, something celebratory, and burn candles on the table against the darkness. Then I round up Erik and we toast our dead.

Do you do anything special this time of year?

Robert Heinlein, in his book Time Enough For Love, suggests a list of skills everyone should know,

“A human being should be able to change a diaper, plan an invasion, butcher a hog, conn a ship, design a building, write a sonnet, balance accounts, build a wall, set a bone, comfort the dying, take orders, give orders, cooperate, act alone, solve equations, analyze a new problem, pitch manure, program a computer, cook a tasty meal, fight efficiently, die gallantly. Specialization is for insects.”

In the planning process for our first book The Urban Homestead we used a big piece of taped together paper to come up with our version of Heinlein’s skill set. Most of the subjects on that paper, everything from vegetable gardening to cargo bikes, ended up in the book or in our second book Making It. Now, we don’t expect everyone to master all the things in our books, but it doesn’t hurt to have a cursory knowledge of, say, greywater plumbing or compost pile construction, even if you live in a Manhattan apartment. You never know when you might have to roast a pig in a pit (that will be in our next book!).

One of my favorite list of things one should know is contained in the old Whole Earth Catalog. A few weeks ago I was leafing through my copy of the WEC and realized that I had done most of the things in it (not necessarily well, mind you). Well, everything except natural child birth, large puppets and mime.

I believe we’re entering the time of the self-taught generalist. But, looking at Heinlein’s list, I’ve got a lot of things I have yet to master. Which leads me to ask you, our dear readers, what topics and skills you’re interested in learning. What’s on that skill to-do list? Leave some comments!

Thanks to the Urban Survival Podcast for that Heinlein quote.