Check out "Path to Freedom"

1. We're not only looking for ways to bring homesteading to our next home, whether that home resides in Santa Barbara, Nashville, Princeton, Boston or Chicago, but also looking for greater balance and harmony in our lives in general. For several months, for instance, we worked very hard at homesteading, perhaps too hard and perhaps somewhat self-righteously, researching and practicing every aspect of homesteading we could reasonably attempt. While helpful in some ways, this ultimately lead to an unbalanced and unsustainable approach, one we could not successfully integrate into the larger matrix of our lives. When I needed to dedicate long hours each day to the phd application process, for example, I found it impossible to reconcile this new work-load with the highly ambitious homesteading plans we'd made (e.g., maintaining a very large garden and blueberry bush grove, building an extensive garden fence from bentwood, planning and building a tool shed, learning to make our own soap, brew our own beer and wine, ordering and using a hand-washer for laundry, researching and planning an underground home, and so on). As a result, when the new work-load appeared, we cold not sustain them both and largely fell away from our homesteading activities, save harvesting from the garden through the Fall months. This was a very sad turn of events, though I suspect that we are not alone in this sort of experience.

2. Towards a far more gradual, incremental, balanced and fully integrated approach to homesteading, we're going back to study carefully those who have been more successful, for example, the Dervaes family from southern California. Their website, pathtofreedom.com, is spectacular! Not only are they highly successful homesteaders in a highly urban environment, harvesting some 5,700 lbs. of organic vegetables from 1/10 of an acre, but they have come to this point via a slow, gradual set of sustainable practices. Many people are talking about ecologically sustainable practices, but it's also worth thinking about psychologically sustainable practices, that is, practices that we can successfully integrate into the larger matrices of our lives, with all of our responsibilities, commitments, goals, and so on.