Urban self-reliance: homestead in Oakland's small rented lot

[DeSwiss]

Kirsten Dirksen
Published on Apr 13, 2015

Sheila Cassani began farming her rental home while a college student. She started with a small vegetable patch, but it soon spread to keeping chickens and bees and planting produce on nearly every available patch of the small yard not dedicated to the poultry.

Cassani and her partner Matthew wake up at the crack of dawn to let the chickens go free-range, but she says the garden isn’t a lot of work once you’ve put in the initial investment. Since they're renting they've trying to keep their investments low. They focused on reusing found materials, such as old fence to make raised beds, bamboo that grows on the property for trellises and chicken fencing (even indoors, their furniture was mostly found, including a pallet wood sofa).

They’ve dubbed their East Oakland (California) homestead the “Kansas Street Farm” and they try to keep things as closed loop as possible by catching rainwater, composting, using the chickens to prepare the veggie beds and fermenting leftover produce.

Original story: http://faircompanies.com/videos/view/urban-self-reliance-homestead-in-oaklands-small-rented-lot/

- See? We don't need Monsanto!

[appalachiablue]

1. Very nice to see people, esp. the young active in gardening, growing their own food & living a low

carbon lifestyle with resource sharing. Until the last 100 years this was the norm. Thanks for the post.

[DeSwiss]

2. De nada.

[ffr]

3. Inspirational

We had chickens when we were growing up, something my parents asked us if we wanted. We all said yes and did it. We were the only people that I know of, certainly in our suburban subdivision that had chickens, a compost pile and a vegetable garden. For my parents, who both grew up on farms, this was normal for them, but you don't appreciate it when you're a child.

The neighbor kids liked coming over too and seeing if the hens had laid eggs. I was somewhat embarrassed about the compost pile though. It kind of stunk and was just a pile or rot, which turned to worms and bugs, then rich fertilizer. The chickens loved it. They'd go crazy scratching up the insects. We never had to worry about them trying to run off, because the pile was next to their cage. When we thought they'd had enough, we'd just coral them back in and look forward to more fresh eggs. Since no other neighbors had normal residential yards instead of what we had, it made us feel a little out of place, like we were so backward or something.

Pretty awesome childhood now that I look back on it.