Rachel Lindsay wrote: in fact it's very doable to "homestead" at the urban scale. A city lot is all I've got, probably for a long time...
...even if I don't have my "three acres and cow."
I'd argue most people, including folks on permies not just normie people, are mostly oblivious to how much they can do better themselves. The ideal of having a perfect set-up with a huge garden, a tractor, livestock, solar panels, a root cellar, etc. (and a rocket stove, and a fish pond with mini-hydro, and a hydroponic system, and a freeze-dryer, and etc. etc. etc.) takes up too much space in people's imaginations. That's the perfect, 100% effort ideal, and not only is it unattainable, it's mostly fake anyway (what people post on YouTube and Instagram and Facebook and dare I say it Permies is
not how they actually live).
You can get 80% of the results with 20% of the effort anyway. Don't case the impossible perfect world, it's a parasite anyway--dreaming about what you don't have wastes the energy you could spend thinking about how you can do better with what you do have, time included.
The trick is to find compromises that get you good results with minimal inputs--time and effort being the most important inputs to minimize by the way! Think about these examples:
Bread: the ideal is to mill up some gorgeous fresh whole wheat flour, mix and kneed a big batch of dough with your lovingly cared for sourdough starter, rise, rest, rise, shape, rise, score, and bake in that long-preheated cast iron dutch oven until golden, aromatic, and rustic. Bonus points if you grew the grains youself, eh? In reality, all that work takes hours and hours out of your week; you can get better results with 20 minutes of labor. Better meaning healthier, better tasting, more flexible, more useful, more energy efficient, and most importantly more time and effort efficient. Cold fermented with regular baker's yeast and natural cultures high-hydration bread made with fortified high-gluten bread flour with added wheat germ, with a single rise in a parchment-lined bread tin skips virtually every difficult and high-effort step in traditional permie-style breadmaking while preserving every benefit and then some. With a one or two week cold ferment in the fridge and a final rise at room temperature, the pre-biotic content, bacterial and yeast diversity, and complex flavor profile will match or exceed sourdough bread with zero of the fuss and wasted starter. Store-bought fortified bread flower will have better diastic power, leading to better microbial activity and fewer carbs in the final product, better iron and folate content, better shelf life and less risk of oxidative spoilage of whole grains and the resulting cancer risk (I bet the "mill your own grain" guys never said anything about the cancer risks of storing whole grains long term, eh? Rancid whole grains are bad juju. They probably didn't even mention the mold dangers either), and lacking bran fragments, will give a better crumb and stronger gluten structure. The germ is the main healthy part of whole grains anyway, keep it separate, and stored in the fridge, and just add it back when you mix the dough. Using a bread tin isn't rustic and won't get you likes on social media, but it produces a more usable loaf, supports the rise better so you don't have to use fancy and energy-wasting tricks like 500 F dutch ovens, and means you can do two or three loves at once if you have a big family. And the bread is done faster because the thin walls transfer heat faster, saving time and energy. I could go on, but my point is made.
Veggies: the ideal is growing all your own fresh vegetables in that deep, beautiful soil you've built up, using seed you've saved for generations that adapted to your your local climate, picking those beauts daily, enjoying them while the season allows and canning the excess for winter. A lovely idea, one that I've never once seen in real life. You can get better, easier, healthier, more diverse, and more satisfying results by throwing out all that old wisdom (that was actually invented a few decades ago to sell books and isn't old or wise). The truth is, you live in a particular climate, and only certain vegetables will grow well for you, regardless of how many generations you've saved seed. Local adaptation is only effective within the set of genetically possible mutations, you'll never have a chance mutation that makes pineapples grow in Minnesota, or beets worthwhile in Florida, or local tomatoes magically resistant to the five dozen different fungal and bacterial diseases they get in humid climates. With the latter, the genes for resistance actually exist, but getting them all together into a single plant is exceptionally difficult and requires very careful breeding work and the dread h word hybridization. Out of the tens of thousands of heirloom tomato varieties ZERO are VFFNTA resistance. Zero. Another heresy, judiciously adopting some practices from modern conventional agriculture and conservation science (leaving out the details out of respect for forum rules :D ). Again, the whole idea is compromise--if I can more effectively garden by using X or Y practice in careful moderation, I can then afford to plant more beneficial plants that provide ecosystem services or have conservation value, then I'm doing more good then harm. Compromise is how good things happen, and the perfect is the enemy of the good. Moving on: growing only veggies that do well for you means you will be buying more veggies at the store of course. But you shouldn't fight it, learn to accept it and do the best with it. Eating fresh produce all year is healthier than eating canned produce anyway. Raw or lightly steamed store-bought green beans, carrots, or mushrooms taste better and are better for you than six-month old canned stuff. And frozen veggies in the last ten years have gotten vastly better, you wouldn't believe how honestly pretty decent most frozen corn, peas, broccoli, etc. have become. Sure, store bought slicer tomatoes still suck, but store-bought cherry tomatoes are pretty darn good, and again, the healthier option since they have more skin and more concentration and haven't have their nutrients destroyed by canning (it's probably clear by now that I'm a big advocate for not canning stuff, canning is a lot like burning whale fat--an obsolete technology that does more harm than good compared to the alternatives--like freezing). The effort you need to grow cabbage in my climate is intense, and I could do much better putting a fraction of that effort into turning store-bought cabbage into kimchi. Modern Korean-style ferment tubs, with the double lids and dishwasher-safe materials, make fermenting veggies dead simple and extremely low effort, so do that instead of breaking your back weeding baby carrot seedlings that'll produce food for two weeks out of the year and never get bigger than a pencil anyway, you can make a pint of carrot kimchi every week all year long. Besides, growing carrots violates my vegetable gardening rule #1--never have bare soil, bare soil means lost fertility and, more importantly, it means weeds. Weeds mean wasted time and space.
Deli meat: I assume there's a decent number of vegetarians here, so this example is less useful to them. But for the people who enjoy life, consider deli meat. In the typical homesteader mindset, you'd be raising some pigs, and once a year when butchering times comes, you'll have a few bone-in hams to use. Sometimes, you'll take the time and effort to make those into proper cured and smoked hams. That's great, but it's also only a few pounds of meat once a year at best, and it's one of more difficult variations on cured meat, and one of the less healthy since it's probably a honey ham or other sort of sweet American cured meat. The easier, more varied, more plentiful, cheaper, healthier option is to do cures all year round using boneless whole-muscle type cures. There's a slew of options, the easiest is generally equilibrium cured pork loin and chicken breast that's then hot-smoked in a pellet grill. Done right, you end up with a much better version of sandwich meat that's also really affordable and has a better cold shelf life. Another fairly easy one is cured brisket that's again equilibrium cured in a juniper-heavy spice mix, brine simmered past the stall point, and then finished off with a bit of smoking or searing on the grill for some incredible corned beef/Montreal smoked meat type stuff that keeps well in the fridge for sandwiches. With a bit of set up with an old fridge and some thermocouples, dried cured meats become possible, easy even. A dirt cheap shoulder cut from Walmart, equilibrium cured and placed in a curing chamber for six months turns into the most incredible prosciutto-style ham you've ever had.
All three of these examples involve stuff that's totally doable in a city apartment, and all three of them can completely change your diet for the better. Completely, because they're the sort of thing you could realistically do all together, they are intentionally low-effort, low-labor cost, and low-monetary cost, and completely because they can be done year-round. Want to change your diet and lifestyle for the better? You can opt for something that improves your diet a few weeks out of the year for a ton of effort and that requires owning land, or you can do things that are perennial, that improve your diet all year round, and that maximize the good for things you actually consume as the majority of your regular diet.
There are plenty of other examples of easier versions of wholesome but high effort things (homemade quick pickles, hummus from canned chickpeas, imitation fancy soft cheese from blending cream cheese and ricotta with herbs in a food processor, making seed crackers with a tortilla press, beer-in-a-bag brewing, growing herbs in the window or just on the kitchen counter under a really bright LED light mounted to the cabinet bottom, growing jujube instead of apples, etc.), but the overall points are the same: you can do many things well or one thing perfectly, and living in an urban environment in no way prevents you from producing a ton of really good food at home.
15
It probably means no covering up the grass with tarps to kill it. And that I can't fill my yard so full of raised beds and containers that the paths are too narrow for the lawn person to mow 
But there is some wiggle room and I'm going to take it and put in raised beds as I can, now that I have a read on how the sun falls on my yard throughout the year. My husband cooks for us a lot, I am doing my best to make compost, we're mindful about how we choose to spend money, we value connection with others, his goal this winter is to learn to make mead, that project will be happening next month, I've finally found a combination of side hustling formula that really works for me, etc. I'm content with where we are right now and I don't see us making a move to something bigger unless circumstances significantly change in our life. I won't even entertain the idea unless/until I feel we're making the absolute most of the space we're in now.
