By Jeanne Storck

They’re trading lawns for lettuce, bringing hens into the family fold and harvesting honey just steps from their back door. They’re the new urban farmers, and they’re coming soon to a yard near you (if they’re not already there).

As climates change, fuel prices rise and food shortages loom, a growing number of city dwellers are realizing that converting a home into a homestead makes ecological and economic sense. At San Francisco’s Garden for the Environment, organic gardening classes sold out two months in advance. Landscape architect Colin McCrate of Seattle Urban Farm Company reports Seattlites are clamoring for backyard vegetable plots. The movement even has its own campus — earlier this year the Institute of Urban Homesteading opened its doors in Oakland, California, offering city slickers the chance to train in the rural arts of gardening, beekeeping and food preservation.

Urban farming isn’t an entirely new concept. During World War II, Americans produced almost forty percent of the nation’s food in backyard Victory Gardens. This summer, San Francisco is resurrecting the idea, replacing the manicured lawn in front of City Hall with vegetable beds and encouraging residents to do the same.

Good food guru Michael Pollan only fed the plant-it-yourself fervor in an Earth Day essay for the New York Times magazine. “Rip out your lawn, if you have one, and if you don’t — if you live in a high-rise, or have a yard shrouded in shade — look into getting a plot in a community garden,” Pollan implored. “Measured against the Problem We Face, planting a garden sounds pretty benign, I know, but in fact it’s one of the most powerful things an individual can do — to reduce your carbon footprint, sure, but more important, to reduce your sense of dependence and dividedness: to change the cheap-energy mind.”

So when your neighbors suddenly decide to landscape their front yard with fava beans or put a beehive out back, don’t look askance. They’re the vanguard of a new American food movement — one that is easy enough to join. For inspiration, check out five urban homesteaders leading the way.

Radical Home Ec in Seattle

^{Jessica Dally gets down with her city chickens, Ginger and Marilyn. Photo: Ritzy Ryciak}

When Jessica Dally offers a piece of her homemade cheese to someone who’s used to grocery store fare she always tells them: “This is the best cheese you’ll ever taste.” It’s her way of coaxing people to try something fresh and handmade — and she gets a kick out of watching their faces light up when they realize how good it is.

Cheesemaking is one of the many kitchen arts Dally has mastered, along with gardening, soapmaking, canning, tending chickens and keeping bees. She recently joined forces with Slow is Beautiful author Cecile Andrews (New Society Publishers, 2006) to form Seattle Free School, where she’s now teaching an updated, more radical version of home ec.

Dally picked up cheesemaking skills while working at Samish Bay Cheese, a small organic dairy farm in Skagit Valley, Washington. She can rattle off a mouth-watering list of cheeses she’s since learned to make at home — mascarpone, cheddars washed in red wine, Gouda and chèvre. The tools, Dally explains, are simple and inexpensive: a quality cheesecloth from a kitchen supply store, starters, rennet and a cheese mold. She encourages beginners to improvise equipment from what’s at hand. Pots for pasta can do double duty for cheese or soap making, and there’s no need to buy an expensive cheese press when some round weights and a colander will do.

Spending time in the kitchen and tending her plants and poultry have given Dally a sense of confidence and community. When she started her vegetable garden, she was doubtful tea plants would grow in the Seattle climate, but she tried it anyway and the plants flourished. When she took on a brood of chickens, they sparked conversations with the neighbors. “At first they found it curious and thought I was weird, but when they finally heard more about it, they were excited.” And she’s become a hit at dinner parties and family gatherings. “If I don’t give gifts of handmade cheese now, people are disappointed.”