Farm City: The Education of an Urban Farmer (15 page)

In France, I noticed that I had even come to pick up some of the patois of the rough-and-tumble streets of Oakland. At dinner, I found myself saying “How you?” and “Hella cool.” My clothes were stained and starting to disintegrate—part and parcel, I suppose, of being an urban farmer.

However, even that identity, viewed from a distance, was starting to seem rather . . . thin. When I explained to my sister and mom that I was an urban farmer now, I could see that they had concerns about that self-definition. Because whom was I really feeding? Yes, I had successfully raised a perfect heritage-breed turkey, and it had been delicious. But was there any evidence that I could actually feed myself on a day-to-day basis? I was young and healthy, in my prime, I could do anything, and I was ready for a challenge.

Around 2 a.m., a reckless thought about self-sufficiency came into my head. It niggled at my brain while I tossed, wide awake, on the couch. It made me do some math involving rabbit-breeding cycles. In the morning, over the first of many cafés noir, the idea hatched: for the month of July, when the first of my so-far unborn rabbits would be ready to harvest, I would feed myself exclusively off my urban farm.

“Hey, Riana, can I get that rabbit recipe?” I asked, rocking Amaya in my arms.

CHAPTER FIFTEEN

I
arrived home from France on a Wednesday night in April. Bill picked me up in our jalopy. Though it was late, I was wide awake. I also had a smuggler’s high from successfully getting contraband stinky cheese and cured duck breast from Les Halles past customs, wrapped in my dirty underwear and socks. I waved a Ste. Maure goat cheese in Bill’s face as he drove.

“Vella, I got bad news,” he said.

My stomach dropped. I immediately thought of the rabbits, the chickens, our cat. Dead. Or that Jack Chan had reared his real-estate-developing head again.

“What?”

“Lana’s moving away.”

“Oh, no.”

Bill took the overland route instead of the highway. As we cruised up MLK, I reacquainted myself with the sprawling garbage, the guys pulling shopping carts, the drug dealers on the corners. I had only been gone for ten days, but GhostTown looked grittier than I remembered. I wondered what Benji would think of this place.

When we pulled up to our house, I suddenly had a fear: Was my diamond in the rough actually a cubic zirconia in a pile of shit? Had I been deluding myself? I pushed past the gate to the garden. The air that greeted me smelled fresh and clean. Even though it was dark, I knelt to examine the lettuces growing in the raised beds; they were sturdy and vibrant. I sniffed at the sweet peas that sprawled up a trellis. The garlic shoots, I was pleased to see, had grown a few inches. Yes, yes, this was a worthwhile project.

While Bill carried my backpack upstairs, I went around to the chicken house with his flashlight. “Hello, hello,” I said at the door, preparing them for my intrusion. They clucked and made a high-pitched trilling noise. Chickens are immobilized by the dark. I shined the light across the perch, catching glints of their feathers, a chicken eye, the cocked comb of another—all huddled together. They were fine. I shined the light down to the rabbits. They ran around in circles, biting each other. I squatted down closer and saw that they were—yes, that’s what they’re doing—humping. Does on does, a doe humping Simon the buck. I would have to separate them tomorrow. The humping was good news, though. It meant they were ready to start breeding.

After checking on the animals and reassuring myself that the farm was worthwhile, I went over to Lana’s. A sign posted on the metal door of the warehouse said the speakeasy had closed. Years ago, Lana had given me the key with permission to enter at will, so I let myself in.

Inside, Lana and her sister were sitting near the faux fireplace, the clutter of fifteen years billowing around them.

“Everyone just gets drunk,” Lana said when I asked why she was calling it quits.

“No one performs anymore,” I agreed. I had stopped going months and months ago.

We heard some frantic knocking at the door. Lana ignored it.

“Let’s burn the couch,” Lana’s sister said to cheer her up. “Under the overpass.” Lana shook her head no.

Lana told me she was moving to Mexico. I nodded—I had seen it coming. She had recently lost Maya and had been devastated. I helped bury the guinea pig in the garden. We interred her next to Maude and the duck and goose. Lana placed a large pair of praying hands on the grave to mark it. While we buried the little brown and black guinea pig, I couldn’t help but think that people in South America eat guinea pigs. I was terrible.

Sitting at the bar talking with Lana and her sister, I had a horrible thought: Were my animal-killing ways causing her to move away?

“I’m sorry about killing Harold,” I told her. Not that I had killed him, but that she was upset by this act.

“It’s better than most meat eaters,” said Lana’s sister. “At least you faced it.”

Lana shook her head. But I knew I had bummed her out. She was like a child in her love of animals. The day after I killed Harold, Joel called to say Jackson woke up in the morning, pulled a turkey feather from underneath his pillow, and cried, “I miss Harold!” Jackson pledged to never eat an animal that he had known personally. Joel and I sighed. Another plan had backfired—did this mean he would insist on factory-farmed meat exclusively? I had hoped, in the back of my mind, that I would become for Jackson like one of my mom’s friends whom I fondly remembered from my childhood. Now I was afraid his only memory of me would be a ghoulish, frightening one.

Lana and I looked through photos, and I helped her pack. She ordered a pizza, and Oscar barked at us until we fed him a slice. She found one picture of us standing in the clearing of the lot before any of the beds or plants had gone in. Because of the angle of the photo, we looked like homesteaders on the prairie. The grass and weeds were a tawny gold.

I didn’t know how to thank her. She was a big reason we came to live on 28th Street. She had been directly and indirectly responsible for so much of my happiness.

“Lana, I’m going to miss you,” I said, unable to think of anything better.

But as I walked back to my apartment I knew that with Lana gone, as much as I would miss her, my experiment in self-sufficiency—in proving to myself that I was a real farmer capable of feeding myself—was going to be so much easier.

Rising at dawn because of jet lag the next morning, I went out to our seventy-five-square-foot deck, where the defunct beehive still sat, and created a rabbitry: a series of tunnels and boxes, hutches and cages. I threw hay and tossed sawdust onto the deck floor, which was made of rough roofing material. To add a festive air, I hung a clattering bamboo and coconut-shell wind chime over the whole thing.

Then I got the rabbits.

Adult rabbits, I had read in the
Whole Earth Catalog,
need to live in their own private quarters. They are considered adults when they start humping each other. If I didn’t separate my rabbits, Simon would relentlessly try to breed with the females, and the females might kill each other’s babies, maybe each other.

At the chicken-run door, I held out a stalk of celery. Simon hopped over. His nose was just like one in a children’s tale—remarkably dislocated from his body, and fuzzy. Like cats, rabbits have a flabby layer of skin along their necks and backs that makes a great place to hold on to. I just had to get close enough for a grab. I petted Simon, but he seemed uneasy. Tentatively, he pulled the celery out of my hand. Then I collared him.

Instead of running, Simon tensed up every muscle in his body so I couldn’t get a handle. Buying that critical second, he heaved to the far side of the hutch. The females cowered in the corner.

I had to go in after him. By turning my shoulders, I crammed my five-foot-eight frame through the small doorway of the rabbit run so half my body was inside the cage, half out, and managed to grab Simon. As I shimmied out, for a second I had the irrational fear that I would be stuck inside this cage, my legs dangling out. The chickens would eventually start pecking me, the ingrates. But luckily, my hips cleared the door with no problem, and Simon and I left the cage together, farmer and bunny.

His legs drew up and his body curved into a C shape. His fur was impossibly soft. Wading my way through the chickens, I cradled Simon close to my body. He, in true rabbit style, tucked his head under my armpit. If he can’t see what’s happening, nothing bad will happen. Fuzzy logic.

When I opened the door to his very own cage (feathered with timothy hay, straw, wood chips, one of my old wool sweaters, and his personal water bottle), he arched his back and pushed both his hind legs off my body to leap into his new home. His feet have claws—remember those ’80s rabbit’s-foot keychains?—and I winced as they ripped into soft flesh.

“Hi, Novella!” Lana yelled from across the street. I waved back, standing in front of the rabbit cage so she wouldn’t see the newest meat on the farm. She had a box in her arms and added it to a growing pile on the sidewalk, then disappeared back into her warehouse.

I looked down at my Simon-inflicted wound. Two parallel scratches, four inches long, puckered my forearm. A bit of blood oozed out. A man in a truck with an enormous MICHOACÁN bumper sticker pulled up in front of Lana’s.

I went downstairs to say goodbye. Lana seemed calm, determined even. Her hazel eyes were a bit red when we hugged. She eyed the scratch on my arm but didn’t say anything. I made plans to pour some hydrogen peroxide on my wound.

Lana gave us some stuff from her house: a giant puppet hand, a cracked salad bowl from Italy that had been glued back together, some espresso cups. The guy with the truck attached her bike to the truck bed with a bungee cord, then Lana climbed into the vehicle with Oscar the dog and was gone forever. I saw her in profile as she left, looking forward, her chin jutting out a bit. Oscar stuck his head out the window.

One by one I relocated the female rabbits. They each got their own box (to hide in), water bottle, and food dish. I put the cages close together so the rabbits could smell one another. The deck was utterly transformed. The straw on the floor glowed gold. The rabbits scurried around in their private cages, smearing their noses against the new surfaces. Simon thoughtfully chewed a piece of celery clutched between his paws. My deck looked like a third world country. And I liked it.

Downstairs, while I was watering the garden, I heard a commotion on the street. It was Bobby going through the boxes of stuff Lana had left in front of her house. It looked like he was rearranging his living situation, moving the television over to a table he had set up directly in front of Lana’s former gate.

We Americans relocate with impunity, most of us on a regular basis. I thought about Benji, my sister’s husband. He still lived in the town where he was born. His great-great-grandfather lived there. But in the States, an idea strikes and we’re gone.

When Lana left, it was as if one of the biggest trees in the rainforest canopy had fallen. She had lived here, in one place, for seventeen years, a record for our block. But this is city life—when someone leaves, another rushes in to take her place. In the vacuum of Lana’s absence, Bobby took over. Within days, the end of the 2-8 resembled a bingo hall, with all manner of tables and chairs set up. His ever-growing collection of tires and shopping carts sprawled across the dead-end street. What had once been Lana’s sidewalk had now become Bobby’s domain.

CHAPTER SIXTEEN

A
couple of weeks after Lana left and Bobby unfurled like an enthusiastic kudzu vine, I built a rabbit love nest. It was April, so the rains had stopped, but the grass was springtime lush. If I was to be self-sustaining on the urban farm starting in less than three months, I needed my breeding-stock rabbits to actually breed.

In the squat lot, I erected an enclosure of chicken wire in a half-sun, half-shade spot, then kicked in a red ball as an icebreaker. I placed Simon in the love cage with one of the speckled brown and white does. At first they were shy. Though they had grown up together, they were now living in separate hutches. They sniffed each other, explored a little, and tasted the different varietals of grass and clover within the bounds of the enclosure. I noticed they especially liked Lana’s weed, the
Malva parviflora
. To achieve the best purchase on the spiky weed, they had to clamber over each other. Then, I hoped, one thing would lead to another.

Rabbits, I had come to realize after some reading, had provided meat for people hell-bent on survival farming way before the hippie back-to-the-land days. During World War II, “thousands of resourceful Americans raised rabbits in backyards to put meat on the table when ration stamps were not sufficient to do the job,” wrote
Raising Rabbits Successfully
author Bob Bennett. “In cities and towns, in the best of neighborhoods, rabbits were housed in wood and chicken wire hutches, busily putting meat on their owners’ tables.” In the best of neighborhoods.

As I weeded and planed near the new lovers, I sensed that they might feel exposed away from their safe pens, suddenly out in the garden with open sky and the whizzing sounds of the highway. I added a bucket to the love cage.

Just then, the woman Hillbilly walked by with her Chihuahua and beckoned me over to the sidewalk. After Lana had left, I finally found out the Hillbillies’ real names: Peggy and Joe.

“Are you still doing the community garden?” Peggy asked.

“Yes,” I said. I tucked my dirty gloves into my back pocket. “Do you want to have a plot?” I asked. So far Mr. Nguyen had been the only person to take over and dutifully tend one of the raised beds.

“Oh, no, no. We don’t know how to do that!” She laughed.

The dog took a tiny poo on the parking strip. Then Peggy rustled around in her coat pocket. “But we’d like to make a donation,” she said.

I started to protest—this operation was essentially free, except for my time—until I saw the seed packets.

Tomatoes, brussels sprouts, cucumbers. I noted that they were hybrid seeds, Burpee.

“Can you grow these?” she asked.

I nodded and took them from her hands, noting that “ $1.49” was written on the corner of each packet. I realized that this was her way of putting in her order for the summer harvest.

“Sure,” I said. I had become a farmer for hire.

On a break, I went upstairs and tossed the Hillbillies’ seeds in a box with all the others (expired, free, inappropriate for our area) I planned to discard by randomly throwing them onto vacant properties around our neighborhood. If some of them made it—great. I didn’t want to be a snob, but there’s something unsavory about hybrid seeds. Many of those sold by seed companies are F1 hybrids. This means that the seed is the offspring of two inbred parent plants. Inbreeding tends to weaken seeds, but scientists figured out a long time ago that if you breed two inbreeds, you will get a plant that exhibits “hybrid vigor”—it will grow really fast and strong and uniformly. However, you can’t save the seeds from such plants, because their offspring, referred to as F2, are usually weak and not uniform. To get the strong F1 seeds, you need a professional to breed one.

Instead of the Burpee tomato seeds, I’d plant some Bill had saved from a Brandywine that had performed particularly well in last year’s garden. He harvested the biggest tomato on the vine, squeezed out the seeds, then set them on the windowsill to rot. After a few days, they had grown mold, which ate away the protective seed coat and ensured better germination. Then Bill had washed them off and squirreled them away for the next year.

Heirloom varietals come with cool stories. The Brandywine seeds sold by heirloom seed companies today are descendants of those an octogenarian seed saver in Ohio named Ben Quisenberry got in 1980 from a Mrs. Dorris Sudduth Hill, who said they had been in her family since 1900. To muddy the waters a bit, farmers and seed savers over the years have created other strains, like the heart-shaped Brandywine, the yellow Brandywine, and the cherry Brandywine. There’s the Sudduth strain and a pink strain, though the latter is said to be an inferior producer. As confusing as it all can be, the Brandywine is a living example of how messy, how fertile, how diverse heirloom seeds can be.

Bill and I got our first Brandywine seeds from a seed swap in Berkeley our first year here. They grew up to have leaves as big as those on potato plants and large, slightly misshapen red fruit. It was meaty and juicy, only slightly tart. That same year, just to see what would happen, we also grew, from saved seeds, some Sungold hybrid cherry tomatoes. But instead of producing delicious orange fruits that taste like pineapple, they yielded strangely small, bitter red fruits. If I wanted a true Sungold, then, I’d have to shell out some money to a seed company. It’s not like that with heirlooms, which breed true and can be passed from farmer to farmer, generation to generation, with no middleman. Heirlooms are different from hybrids, too, in that they can adapt to local conditions. That’s why saving seeds from a plant and planting them in the same soil and climate from which they grew will make an even stronger plant.

I checked the cupboard where I kept the seeds and found Bill’s Brandywine. I had also recently gotten in an order from Seed Savers Exchange, an heirloom-seed company that capitalizes on romantic, old-timey vegetable stories. I usually bought my seeds at cost from the nursery where I worked or through a seed swap at the Ecology Center in Berkeley. But the temptation of a seed catalog—vegetable porn, really—always overwhelmed me, and I usually ordered something truly exciting.

Peggy wanted cucumbers? How about the Boothby’s Blonde cucumber—pale with black spines—which has been grown in Maine for generations? As for brussels sprouts, I had never had much luck with them, but I would research some heritage varietals, and Peggy and Joe would love them.

I poured myself a glass of water and walked over to the window. I looked out into the lot to check on the bunnies and saw that they had made it past introductions. Simon was furiously humping the speckled rabbit’s head. His cotton-tailed hindquarters pumped for a minute before he collapsed backward in an exhausted, furry heap. I took a sip of water. Simon might not cut the mustard for my rabbit-breeding program.

Early the next morning, a cop car, a city car, and a tow truck arrived on 28th Street. A dump truck idled nearby. Bobby was pulled out of his car by the police officers. And then he watched them take his world.

The umbrella and table, the shopping carts filled with metal, car parts—burly men wearing green city-worker coveralls tossed these items into the dump truck. They threw everything else—the television, the microwave, soggy stuffed animals, pillows, tennis rackets—into the four broken cars Bobby had been sleeping in. Then they towed the cars away. A man with a clipboard took notes of the proceedings. A cop stood next to Bobby, who kept lunging at choice items, trying to save them. “Don’t touch anything,” he said, holding up his arm.

Then Bobby just slipped away through the schoolyard. I watched, like a coward, from our living room window.

I wondered who had finally called the city on Bobby. It might have been the owner of Lana’s warehouse. Bobby’s spread wasn’t very attractive to new renters.

It’s true that Bobby had been a nuisance. Parking had become impossible on the 2-8 with all his cars. The smell of urine was unmistakable near his camp. But he was a lovable nuisance. The city didn’t know, for instance, that Bobby kept the street swept of glass and helped the garbage collectors loft the heavy bins into the trucks every week, that he helped us push our cars and generally monitored the street.

The city vehicles finally trundled away, leaving an empty, stained street.

Bill hugged me that night when I told him about what they had done to Bobby. To cheer me up, he told me about a new discovery he had made in our neighborhood. He gave me a handmade sign. CHICKEN WING OR CATFISH DINNER, it read, with an address one block from our house. The sign promised sides like potato salad and peach cobbler.

Bill and I went over. The house was cute, in the way “cute” really means: A birdbath. Rosebushes. Pots of flowers surrounded by white pebbles. About eight burly black guys stood outside the gates of the house.

“Is this the . . . ?” I began to stammer.

“Novella!” It was Bobby, who emerged from around the corner. I gave him a hug.

“Are you OK?” I asked.

“Of course,” he said, and smiled. Bill went in for a hug, too, but Bobby pushed him away. “I only hug women!”

“Hey, are these dinners good?” I asked him.

“Only the best,” Bobby reported.

“Do you want one?” I asked.

“I’ll just take a bite,” Bobby said.

“For here?” one of the big guys said, overhearing us.

“Yeah.”

“Let me go tell Grandma,” he said. He ran up the porch steps, then paused and turned back around. “Chicken or fish?”

I looked at Bobby. “Fish?”

“I just want a bite.” Bobby grinned.

We went into the garden area and sat at a glass table with a flowery umbrella over it. As we waited for our food we watched pimped-out cars careening down Martin Luther King and a homeless woman grooming herself in the mirror of a parked car. I was pretty sure none of this happens in France.

Bobby had theories about who had called the police. An elderly couple had bought a parcel of land at the end of the street and were planning to build a new house just in front of the area where Bobby was living. Bill and I shook our heads. Development was the bane of our existence.

The dinners came, a glorious Oakland version of Slow Food. The fish was perfectly golden and fresh. “Grandma,” it turned out, was a fisher-woman. She came outside to see how we liked her cooking.

“Caught the fish myself,” she said proudly. She was about sixty years old and kept her long gray hair in a ponytail. She and her husband, Carlos, would go fishing near South San Francisco, then cook the catfish, bluegills, and striped bass for these neighborhood meals. The fish came with a side of spicy collard greens, a scoop of tasty homemade macaroni and cheese, and a glop of peach cobbler. The meal represented American thrift at its finest.

We gladly paid Grandma’s son $10 each for dinner, then Bill, Bobby, and I hunkered over our food in the late spring air. This underground restaurant would never happen in France either.

“What are you going to do?” Bill finally asked Bobby, after eating the last piece of fish.

“You’ll see,” he said, and gave us his mischievous smile.

At home, Bill and I tried to think of something to do for Bobby. We both were furious that the city wouldn’t allow him to live on the street yet didn’t try to find him a new place to live either. While we talked about it, Bill said, “Hey, what’s that?”

An ancient tow truck backed onto our street. It crawled back, bearing its load—a battered red Taurus. Out sprang Bobby from the passenger seat. The driver eased the car into a parking spot. Bobby unhooked the car from the trailer. He had returned. He grinned to himself. Round one—Bobby.