Eli Manning could throw a football from the intersection of the 134 and 210 freeways to the front porch farmstand at the Urban Homestead. It’s a sliver of Southern California land with a Craftsman-style house that the Dervaes family has been running as a self-sustaining micro-farm since 1985. It’s farm box pick-up day — swiss chard, arugula, citrus, avocado, eggs, chicken, and duck meat are on offer — the goats are at the vet, and the phone won’t stop ringing.
“We’re not Luddites,” Anais Dervaes, the oldest of the siblings who grew up in the house, said. “We have TV, we have a computer. It’s not like we’re isolated in any sense of the word.” The Dervaes may have Laura Ingalls Wilder aspirations — the family line-dries their clothes, makes beeswax candles, and grows 6,000 pounds of produce on their 1/5th of an acre lot — but this is modern-style homesteading. This is Pasadena, after all. Twelve solar panels meet the majority of their power needs, and the house is equipped with an energy-efficient laundry machine and a composting toilet. Read more…
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