A couple of years ago, Everett Sizemore treated his yard in the customary fashion: as a place to cross, a place to hang out in the summer and a place to mow.

The yard was not a place that invited much contemplation or, heaven forbid, philosophizing.

But now the one-eighth-acre Englewood lot has taken over Sizemore’s life.

Sizemore and his wife, Melissa Blakeslee, 29, are urban homesteaders, treating their little piece of land like a miniature farm.

People in cities and towns across the Front Range, and the nation, are embracing aspects of a lifestyle familiar to people who raise livestock and harvest crops in rural America. But the urban homesteaders are tending their goats, pruning their Nanking cherry shrubs, and growing their alfalfa on one-eighth- acre standard city lots, using chain-link fences for grape trellises and replacing front yards of sod with tomato plants.

At Sizemore and Blakeslee’s homestead, the chickens, Laverne and Shirley, stand on the backs of benches and cluck their way around the property. The rabbits, in a hutch, nibble on things. The wild bees, caught by Sizemore in Lakewood, recently gathered in a sphere the size of a basketball in a horizontal, handmade hive similar to those used in Kenya.

Gardens? Many, including one devoted to clover and wildflowers, a “smorgasbord for the bees,” says Sizemore, 32.

Gardens move out of the backyard

The interest in urban homesteading goes beyond backyard enthusiasts. The Denver Botanic Gardens offers classes in different aspects of urban homesteading. At least two urban-farm outfits have arisen within the city of Denver. One Front Range designer is planning new subdivisions zoned for livestock and agriculture. Ellen Rosenthal, a Denver native, recently started the Living Earth Center, a nonprofit organization dedicated to some of the foundations of urban homesteading.

Sizemore grew so animated about urban homesteading that a few months ago he started an online community called the Greater Denver Urban Homesteading group. More than 200 people have signed up, trading information about raising chickens, making cheese and yogurt, turning grapes into wine and more.

“It’s about regaining some of the skills Americans have lost over the past few generations,” said Sizemore, a search-engine marketing manager with a hoop earring in each earlobe and, on a recent afternoon, wearing a Google T-shirt.

For Sizemore and Blakeslee, a lot of the effort so far has been do-it-yourself. Sizemore said he has so many books on homesteading now he could probably open a library.

Others have different motivation.

For nine people living together in Denver, their adventure in urban homesteading is all about cooperation.

“Two years ago, it was lonely, and now I’m swept up in it. It’s overwhelming, exciting,” said Adam Brock, 23. “It’s not just gardening but what you do the other eight months of the year.”

The homesteaders moved into the big house facing City Park about two months ago. Already, they have transformed a large chunk of the big yard into gardens using tenets of permaculture, an approach to gardening that tries to mimic natural ecosystems. In addition to the usual slate of vegetables and herbs, they are growing things like Siberian pea shrub.

“The peas are super-high in protein,” said Brock, in purple pants and skinny glasses, a fedora liberated from a trash pile on his head. “You can grind them into flour. They are great chicken feed.”

Chickens, needless to say, are in the works.

“I’ll probably do a cover crop of buckwheat to get more organic matter going on in the soil, to break up the compaction,” said Brock, walking across a grassy area of the yard. “For now, this is where we do yoga.”

Inside the house, Seneca Kristjonsdottir, 19, stood before the stove making Mexican, curry and seaweed pickles from cucumbers house members had plucked from a Dumpster.

Brock said the City Park region of Denver supports about a dozen similar houses. One of them, he said, routinely turns off the electricity in the house for a day. The people who live there make a campfire by rubbing sticks together, then hang out in the yard beside it.

“I think the recession is having people ask a lot of questions and setting them on a different path,” he said. “And I applaud the recession for that.”

Many of the questions are answered in classes taught at Denver Botanic Gardens. Courses include raising livestock and learning to identify and prepare edible weeds.

“A lot of the classes fill right up,” said Celia Curtis, public programs manager for the Gardens. “It seems like it’s a newer generation of gardeners. It’s not the same audience we get for the garden-design classes we have been doing for years and years and years.”

Zoning food crops back into the city

It’s not just the young people getting in on the homesteading act.

Quint Redmond, a Golden designer and developer, is working to build subdivisions he calls “agriburbia” around the country, including the Front Range.

“We’re basically putting in the infrastructure for the next generation of farmers,” he said.

Houses in his subdivisions, which are in different stages of development — none of the agriburbia developments yet hold houses — will have lots with built-in drip irrigation. Builders will be required to install root cellars for cool storage. The developments will support orchards, vineyards and livestock.

“The last 100 years we have spent zoning ourselves away from food,” he said.

Interest in bringing agriculture back into the city is strong enough that James Hale, 30, and some partners run a Denver business turning yards into edible landscapes. They also are trying to start an urban farm called Produce Denver, where property owners will donate land to Produce Denver, which will grow food on the yards, share some of the bounty with homeowners, and sell the rest.

“This is something I’ve been thinking about for years,” said Hale, a tall, lanky, bearded guy with round spectacles that make him look like John Lennon. “But people didn’t want to do it, they didn’t like the way (front-yard gardens) looked. So I went to graduate school. I got out of school and thought about continuing on for a Ph.D., but then (a) groundswell was happening in Denver.”

A few blocks from Hale’s Baker-neighborhood house, one of his partners, Meg Caley, 25, worked on turning the front yard of a historic home into a food machine. Name a vegetable, and she probably had planted it. Melons and fruit trees, too. Coming soon, a chicken coop for the backyard. Caley, sporting a braided ponytail that nearly reaches her waist, also pointed out a yucca plant.

“You can dig up the root and make soap out of it,” she said.

When Ann Hall, 34, and Dan Fitzstephens, 47, bought their 100-year-old Lyons home four years ago, the yard held little more than hard-packed earth and weeds. Now, every nook of the lot seems to promise something that will end up in a belly: asparagus, peas, mulberries, rhubarb, chickens.

“For me, it’s this obsession,” said Hall, sipping a Mason jar of berry kombucha tea that she fermented herself. “I would love to have a cow. Goats. Pigs.”

She added: “I’d like to have bees. I don’t know, it’s just part of this obsession.”

For now, the bees are on hold: Too many bears visit the town of Lyons.

Sizemore in Englewood doesn’t have to worry about bears, and his beehive is thriving. But he’s constantly thinking about other skills to add to his homesteading repertoire.

“Three or four years ago I would have thought having a beehive and chicken coop in my backyard in suburban Denver was crazy,” he said. “Now I don’t think it’s enough.”

Douglas Brown: 303-954-1395 or djbrown@denverpost.com

Urban Homesteading Resources

Greater Denver Homesteading Group, meetup.com/Greater-Denver-Urban- Homesteaders

Produce Denver, an urban farm, producedenver.com

Denver Botanic Gardens, botanicgardens.org; class registration; 720-865-3580

R&R Group Home’s blog, ruckusrefinery.wordpress.com

Heirloom Gardens, an urban farm, eatwhereulive.com; 303-956-7203

Agriburbia, subdivisions revolving around agriculture and sustainability, agriburbia.com; 303-458-8554

Living Earth Center, a nonprofit group dedicated to permaculture and sustainable living, livingearthcenter.org; 720-254-4615