Farm City: The Education of an Urban Farmer (3 page)

“Well, he was mean as hell, and he would chase you guys. . . .”

I looked out the window while my mom described the smokehouse she and my dad had built. Bill had made it downstairs, where he was out front tinkering with our car. His legs peeked out from underneath our dilapidated Mercedes as he rolled around amid the street’s numerous Swisher Sweet cigar butts. I had warned him about my meat-bird purchase, and he had been excited about the prospect of homegrown meat, but now that he saw the baby birds—fragile, tiny—he seemed a bit skeptical.

Tommy grew to be an enormous size, my mom said, and as back-to-the-land hippies, she and my dad had been very pleased. They didn’t encounter any predator problems that year, and butchering him was a cinch. But disaster did hit: the smokehouse burned to the ground while they were smoking the turkey.

“Oh, no,” I groaned.

“Life was like that,” she said glumly. I felt sorry for her. My mom’s stories usually involve some heroic hippie farm action. I hadn’t heard this part of the story before, but I knew bad things had happened. My parents’ marriage had dissolved on the ranch in Idaho, after all—my dad too much the mountain man, an uncompromising nonconformist; my mom isolated and bored.

Her voice brightened. “Even though the smokehouse burned down, we did manage to salvage the turkey.”

“What do you mean?” I asked.

“We dug through the charred wood, and there it was, a perfectly cooked turkey. I brushed off all the cinders and served him for dinner.” She paused and smacked her lips, a noise that was repellent to me as a teenager but now filled me with hope. “It was the best turkey I’ve ever had,” she declared. We said our goodbyes, and I hung up the phone.

I glanced into the cozy chick brooder. The chicks slept on their mattress of shredded pages from the
New York Times
. Their fuzzy bodies slumbered on snatches of color ads for watches, a stern op-ed about pollution in China, the eyebrows of a politician. I had to remind myself that though they were cute, these baby birds would eventually become my dinner. Thanksgiving, in particular, was going to be intense. I imagined the killing scene: a butcher block, an ax, three giant Tommy turkeys I had known since poulthood. I wasn’t sure if I could bring myself to do it.

But the conversation with my mom left me emboldened for my foray into killing and eating animals I had raised myself—this urge was clearly part of my cultural DNA. I wondered if this would prove that I could have it both ways: to sop up the cultural delights of the city while simultaneously raising my own food. In retrospect, though, I wonder why I thought my experience would be any less disastrous than my parents’.

The next day, following the suggestions of a homesteading book from the 1970s, I swabbed the baby birds’ butts with Q-tips. The long flight in a box can cause digestion problems for the chicks—namely, pasted vents. Which is a fancy way of saying blocked buttholes. So I dutifully wetted them down, plucked dried matter from their bottoms, and felt terrible when I had to tug off whole chunks of downy feathers. I wasn’t satisfied until all their parts looked pink and healthy.

After morning chicken-butt detail, I sat in my kitchen and surveyed our squat garden. All the east-facing windows of our apartment overlook the lot, which after the past few years had been transformed into a vegetable and fruit-tree garden. I could see that the collards were getting large and that the spring’s lettuce harvest promised to be a good one. Even from inside, I could see some mildew forming on the pea vines.

It was going to be a remarkable year; I could sense it. If my life in Oakland was a developing embryo, with this meat-bird addition, it was as if a fishlike creature had suddenly sprouted wings.

CHAPTER TWO

The garden—squat, verdant—started small, and in fits and starts. When we moved into the apartment on 28th Street, Bill and I halfheartedly painted our walls and hung some curtains. Then we started in on the lot, the real reason we had picked the apartment. We spent days hacking back the four-foot-tall weeds that had taken over, revealing a cracked concrete foundation where a house had once been and a large, circular patch of dirt.

Before we planted anything, just to be safe, I had the soil tested by a friend with an environmental-services lab. The lot being so close to the freeway, the lead from years of gas exhaust might have drifted down. Or other toxins from the house could have leached into the ground. Our friend called with good news: the soil was, miraculously, heavy-metal free.

The day after getting the green light, I stood in the lot, trying to get my nerve up to garden. I was having a tough time getting used to the idea of cultivating land that was not my own. Cutting down weeds was one thing, but planting seeds?

As I stood immobilized, our new neighbor Lana, dressed in patent-leather combat boots and a miniskirt, stomped into the now cleared-out lot. Everything about Lana was theatrical: expressive hazel eyes, a gap-toothed smile, and a platinum crew cut that matched the color of the fallen weeds. “Look at this!” she shouted. She held two shovels in her strong arms.

“There’s a patch of dirt here,” I said, showing her where the yard to the house may have been. Even though she had never gardened before, Lana set to work with enthusiasm. I was glad to follow along. Her dog, Oscar, sniffed at the piles of dead weeds and did a little digging himself. Gentle for such a large dog. We dug out a small area, unearthing rusty toy cars, submerged bricks, and glass bottles.

“Do you remember He-Man?” Lana asked, wagging an action figure in front of my face. The toy had big muscles and a bowl haircut but had been drained entirely of any color. Lana put He-Man and all the other toys she found in a small section of the garden.

I had been reading a book from the library called
Gaia’s Garden
. It was a permaculture guide to gardening that promised I could create an easy-to-maintain, no-work food forest if I just followed the instructions. Plans were included for something called a keyhole garden: a series of pathways cut into a circular bed—which is what we happened to have. So Lana and I set to work.

After a few hours, we had finally cleared enough space to plant some seeds. Just before I ripped open the packet of corn, Lana alerted me to a problem. “Ah, Novella,” she said, wiping sweat from her brow, “is this supposed to be in the shape of . . . ?” She trailed off.

“What?” I said, still unsure about Lana. My fingernails were caked with soil.

Lana laughed a big, booming cackle. “It’s like a crop circle,” she said.

Then I saw what she was talking about: following the ditzy plan, I hadn’t realized that we had built a garden in the shape of an enormous peace sign, which, viewed from the heavens, might be some kind of hippie signal to the aliens.

I was horrified.

“Oh my god,” I said. “Glad you pointed that out.” I erased one of the pathways with a few shovelfuls of dirt so that the peace sign became more like a Mercedes-Benz emblem. Leave the peace sign to followers of the Dead and wearers of tie dye, to my hippie parents’ generation. Even though Lana and I were vegetable gardening, we wanted to be clear with each other—especially so early in our friendship—that we were
not,
in fact, hippies.

As Lana watched I tucked a few kernels of corn into the dark clay soil, feeling strangely shy. I wasn’t used to being a squat-garden rebel, though on an intellectual level the idea of squatting, of taking possession of something unused and living rent free, had always held a certain appeal for me. In college I read about the Diggers (also called the True Levellers) in seventeenth-century England, who squatted in houses and planted vegetables on public land. In 1649, a scroungy group of men gathered at a small town southwest of London to plant corn and wheat on the commons. In the declaration they submitted—mostly a bunch of Bible talk—explaining why they were “beginning to plant and manure the waste land of George-Hill,” they expressed their belief that the earth was “a Common Treasury for All, both Rich and Poor, That every one that is born in the Land, may be fed by the Earth his Mother that brought him forth.” Almost 350 years later, the idea of planting food crops in common areas still makes a great deal of sense.

In America, squatting dates back to the very beginning of white settlement. Seeking religious freedom, the Puritans, let’s face it, squatted on Indian land. Pioneers in the 1800s continued the process by squatting on more Indian land during the Westward Expansion. In the 1980s, the tradition continued when abandoned buildings in New York City were taken over by squatters like crazy. In 1995, I was befriended by a squatter who lived in a building on Avenue B in New York. Though I was game to join and move in, in the end I wasn’t deemed punk-rock enough—maybe because I didn’t have tattoos or spikes on my clothing.

And then there was the famous bean sower Henry David Thoreau. He didn’t own that land near Walden Pond or even rent it. “I enhanced the value of the land by squatting on it,” he wrote in
Walden
.

That was my plan, too. I took a deep breath and plunged the little yellow seeds into the ground that was not mine. I snaked the hose around from our backyard and sprinkled water onto the bare patch of soil. Lana and I stood and watched the water soak in. What I was doing reminded me a little of shoplifting, except instead of taking, I was leaving something. But I was worried. Couldn’t these plants be used as evidence against me?

Within a few weeks of that first sowing, I grew more accustomed to the idea that the lot was temporarily mine. I transplanted a few tomato and basil starts. Sowed the lettuce seeds I had carried, pioneer-like, with me from Seattle. Planted a few cucumber seeds.

It wasn’t long before the vegetables grew and thrived in the blazing, all-day sun. Their success had nothing to do with my skill as a gardener—in California, it’s just-add-water gardening. The cukes scrambled; the corn lumbered toward the sky.

Lana told me that the lot had been, over the fifteen years she had lived on 28th Street, first a parking lot for the monks; then a storage space for a construction company, replete with shipping containers and Bobcats; and finally, for the last five years, the weed-filled, garbage-strewn dump we found when we moved in. The garden, by comparison, did seem like an improvement. But in the back of my mind I wondered what the owner of the property would think of all the new plants.

Upstairs in the kitchen a few days after the chicks arrived, I poured myself a cup of coffee, then went to the back stairs to throw some day-old bread to the big backyard chickens (a Buff Orpington, a Black Australorp, and two Red Stars), who had come, full-grown, from a nearby feed store.

A word about my backyard: Don’t entertain some bucolic fantasy. In the middle of it, Mrs. Nguyen’s exercise bike sat on a bare patch of dirt. The landlord had installed a rusty metal shed at the foot of the stairs a few years earlier, and it now held all the things we and the Nguyens wished we could get rid of. A shattered mirror lay between the fence and the shed.

In the very back of the yard was the chicken coop Bill had built from pallets in what had been a large dog run made with sturdy chain-link fencing now overgrown with weeds and volunteer trees. Abutting this chicken area was an auto-repair shop/junkyard, which hosted two dogs: a pale brown pit bull and a dark-eyed Rottweiler mix. A forklift often zoomed around the repair shop, dodging rusting transmissions and barrels of god knows what. A little beyond the auto shop, you could see downtown Oakland’s nondescript skyline. Not exactly a country idyll.

After feeding the backyard hens and checking (again) on the baby chicks in their brooders, I sat down to read the paper. After a few minutes I looked up and noticed a man entering the garden, wearing a black skullcap and a leather jacket. He wandered over to one of the beds and tugged on the green top of a carrot. An orange root appeared, streaked with dirt. The carrot, I could see, was small but edible. Throwing my paper down, I rushed to the garden.

People from the neighborhood harvesting food from my garden is a common sight. There’s Lou, a stooped man who helps himself to the lush crop of greens in the winter; a mute lady who carries a plastic sack into the garden and doesn’t stop harvesting lettuce until that bag is swollen—or until I open the window and call down at her, “OK! That’s enough! Leave some for everyone else!”

Some of the harvesters are annoying. One year, an unidentified person stopped by for what he thought was onions and picked some of my young garlic instead, then abandoned the small bulbs on the ground. In response, I made a little handwritten sign that said GARLIC, NOT ONIONS. READY IN JULY! and another, near a collard-greens patch, saying DON’T PICK ALL THE LEAVES OFF THE PLANT. These signs aren’t necessarily effective. They just fade and get buried by a pile of wood chips in the fall. But I feel the need to instruct nonetheless.

A simple solution would be to snap a padlock on the gate. Then again, I’m a trespasser myself—I don’t lease or rent the verdant lot, so I’d feel like a hypocrite telling others to stay away. But I did at least get approval for the garden project from the owner of the property, a man named Jack Chan. I met him when our first tomato ripened in the lot that first year. A wizened Chinese man walked into the garden. I could tell he was the property owner by the way he walked past the gate and looked at the plants—quizzically, as if they were a magic trick he couldn’t quite figure out. My heart pounding, I went down to talk to him. “Garden OK,” he said after we made introductions. Then he pointed to a few nongarden items that had made it onto the lot, like some old doors and a biodiesel reactor Bill had built. “Only garden.” I nodded, and that was the end of our exchange.

If I was trying to be Thoreau, I liked to think of Chan as a modern-day version of Ralph Waldo Emerson, the owner of Walden Pond and its surrounding fields. My fellow squatter Thoreau
did
have permission from the landowner, but he still liked to call what he was doing—just as I did—squatting.

Once I got Jack Chan’s terse seal of approval, I began enhancing the land big-time. The next year the whole lot sprawled with giant orange Rouge Vif d’Estampes pumpkins. I had a customer-service job at a plant nursery and got discounts on fruit trees, so in went an apple tree, a pineapple guava, a lemon, a fig, and an orange tree. I bought bees to pollinate the ancient plum tree that stood guard in the lot. I acquired my four egg-laying chickens and grew dinosaur kale, a crinkly, dark green variety, especially for them. I planted carrots, which this guy was now harvesting.

I pushed open the gate and called out a hello to the carrot picker. He waved, holding the carrots in his hand. I know about the pleasure of pulling up root vegetables. They are solvable mysteries. I once pulled up a carrot unlike any I had seen before. It was a deep purple variety called Dragon, and it had wound itself around a regular orange carrot, so they looked like a gaudy strand of DNA.

Just as I was about to tell the carrot picker that he should come back to harvest the carrots when they were bigger, he said, “This place reminds me of my grandma.” His eyes filled with tears. “Everything’s so growing,” he said.

In our neighborhood, there was some greenery, mostly in the form of weeds. But when you walked through the gates into what I had started calling the GhostTown Garden, it was like walking into a different world. There was a lime tree near the fence, sending out a perfume of citrus blossoms from its dark green leaves. Stalks of salvia and mint, artemesia and penstemon. The thistlelike leaves of artichokes glowed silver. Strawberry runners snaked underneath raspberry canes. Beds bristled with rows of fava beans, whose pea-like blossoms attracted chubby black bumblebees to their plunder. An apple tree sent out girlish pink blossoms. A passionfruit vine curled and weaved through the chain-link fence that surrounded the garden.

I restrained myself from hugging the carrot picker for feeling exactly as I did about the garden, but I did get a little misty. I wanted to grab this man’s arm and give him a tour, show him what’s edible, what will be at its peak next week, which part of the mint to snip off for tea. Pull up a few of the French breakfast radishes. Explain that carrots are native to Afghanistan and used to be tough and yellow before the orange-loving Dutch got hold of them. Then I’d take him to the backyard and show him my four prized chickens, their straw-lined nesting boxes, the four eggs from that day—brown and still warm. Maybe I’d take him upstairs to admire the brooder box of baby chicks, the waterfowl, the turkey poults.