Urban homesteaders find ideal ground in Altadena

For Gloria Putnam and Steve Rudicel, goats, eggs and produce make a winning enterprise. Photo by Mel Melcon/Los Angeles Times.

Neighbors swap produce, honey, eggs and much more in Altadena, where the urban homesteading movement has produced much more than sustenance.

By Veronique de Turenne,
Los Angeles Times
March 10, 2011

Excerpt:

Sometimes, the peach on a backyard tree is just a peach, a sweet, home-grown bonus. In certain circles of Altadena, though, that peach is a gateway fruit.

One tree becomes three, which becomes an orchard. The quest for organic fertilizer leads to a flock of chickens, which beget a garden. Before you know it, there’s a herd of goats out front, heritage turkeys in back, a beehive, a rabbit hutch and a guard llama.

This isn’t just growing your own, a few clay pots on a condo balcony, say, or a tomato patch next to the rose bed. It’s full-on urban homesteading, people raising fruit, produce and livestock in the city, and nowhere in Southern California has it taken off like in Altadena.

“There’s a lot of hot air about urban homesteading right now,” says Erik Knutzen, a Silver Lake resident who co-wrote the paperback guide “The Urban Homestead” with his partner, Kelly Coyne, and blogs on the subject. “But in Altadena, they really are doing something.”

Read the complete article here.