What is Homesteading?:

While the San Francisco Bay Area triggers global revolutions in information technology and social interaction, it is also heading the opposite direction, back to the homestead. Homesteading is about self sufficiency and living in a sustainable manner, similar to how Laura Ingalls Wilder’s family did in Little House on the Prairie.

San Francisco as a Homestead Hotbed:

What makes San Francisco a leader on the homestead front?

For starters, San Francisco is the country’s recycling and composting champion. We divert 77 percent of our waste from landfill, the highest rate among US cities. (Of course it helps that recycling and composting are required by San Francisco law). The Bay Area is also home to Alice Waters, who ignited the nation’s fresh and organic food movement, and to environmentally and socially responsible producers of everything from chocolate to sausage.

How to Homestead:

You've mastered composting; now what? How-to Homestead, a San Francisco organization devoted to spreading homesteading, helps individuals channel their inner farmers by creating, collecting and distributing how-to videos. While you can’t raise cows or shoot deer for dinner in San Francisco, you can do more than compost, even if you live in the city.

The homesteading videos cover activities that are easy to fathom and do (e.g., foraging for mushrooms; making planter beds and soup stock) and some that are relatively daunting and unappetizing (e.g., making a worm bed; setting up a composting toilet to produce “humanure”).

How-to Homestead is devoting 2011 to a road show that stops in each of San Francisco’s 11 supervisorial districts. The 11 in 11 Tour starts on Feb. 26 in District 2, with a workshop on plant growing, a potluck and some videos accompanied by live music. Folk dancing wraps up the night.

The homestead tour ends in District 6 in November.

A kick-off party for the homesteading tour is on Jan. 29 at the Exploratorium. Two of the latest How-to Homestead films, one about making chevre and the other titled What I Learned the Year I Made My Own Linen Underwear, will be shown and accompanied by live music. Homemade soda will be served.

Before you know it, you’ll be sewing your own clothes and keeping bees.

How-to Homestead Kick-Off Party
January 29, 2011, at 2 pm
Exploratorium, at the Palace of Fine Arts, 3601 Lyon St. Free with Exploratorium admission.

11 in 11 Tour
Feb. 26-Nov. 19, 2011, various dates
Various locations throughout San Francisco. Suggested donation $5; free with potluck dish.