Farm City: The Education of an Urban Farmer (4 page)

This, I wanted to tell him, is your birthright, too. Your grandmother, like mine, grew her own tomatoes, killed her own chickens, and felt a true connection to her food. Just because we live in the city, we don’t have to give that up.

But then I remembered that most people in our neighborhood have other things on their minds than growing local organic food and starting a revival. I know because when we first started, I knocked on doors to get other people involved with the work in the garden, wide-eyed and bushy-tailed about growing vegetables. I got stock responses: “I don’t have time” or “I buy my food at the grocery store.”

So I was just glad to be a reminder for the carrot picker. I muttered that he should come by and harvest food anytime. He smiled, exposing a glimmering grill of gold.

“Hey, my garden’s your garden,” I said, and patted him on the back. He left with a small bunch of carrots stashed in the pocket of his leather jacket. I never saw him again.

I picked a handful of kale leaves for the chicks and went upstairs. I cut them into a chiffonade and watched the chaos unfold when I tossed the green strands into the brooder boxes. A pure yellow chick grabbed the biggest piece of green and carried it around while making an urgent peeping noise. A few others gave her chase until she dropped it. Then another chick picked it up and ran and peeped. It was all about the having, not the eating. This went on for quite some time until the turkey poults, who had been watching the proceedings heavy-lidded, snatched away the greens from the chickens and gobbled them up. The ducklings and goslings, in their own brooder, inhaled the kale without hesitation. The squat garden would feed my meat birds, too.

CHAPTER THREE

B
obby!” Bill and I yelled toward the end of the dark street, not sure which car he was sleeping in that night. “We need your help!” It was Sunday, late, and we were on a gardening mission.

The door to a Chevy Colt without wheels creaked open. Bobby came out, sighing, and seemed annoyed, but I think he liked that we needed him. Two people weren’t enough to push one of Bill’s project cars out of the way.

Arms sprawled out, I heaved against the back of the marooned red Mercedes. Bill steered and pushed up front. Then Bobby pressed his back against the trunk of the car and leaned his weight in. That’s all it took.

“You gotta use your leg muscles,” he said, casually walking against the car as it rolled. It wasn’t just about technique, though. Bobby was astonishingly strong. I once saw him lift the transmission of a Ford truck from the ground to his shoulder and carry it for a city block, seemingly without effort. Bobby wouldn’t take money for his help; he would mutter, “Life of the Hebrews,” when we offered.

We first encountered Bobby during a 2-8 squabble. We had been living in our apartment for more than a year, long enough to have permanently tuned out the sound of the traffic from the nearby highway. The sirens no longer fazed our cat. We were making friends and had sussed out the best late-night Chinese-food joints. As former Seattleites, we were amazed by and thankful for spring’s sunny arrival in February.

We had also begun collecting stuff, one of our favorite hobbies. Our tables and desks were scrounged from street corners in Berkeley and Oakland. Most of our dishware came from free boxes set out on corners. There was something captivating about making something useful again—resurrecting the abandoned.

So we were in our element in Oakland, with its mammoth piles of junk placed on curbs, clutter dropped under overpasses and, sometimes, in the middle of the street. The junk piles became so bad that at one point there were billboard ads urging people to DUMP BOYFRIENDS, NOT APPLIANCES. It was a strange campaign—stranger when half the lights on the billboard went out, leaving only the illuminated command DUMP BOYFRIENDS.

GhostTown in particular hosted some huge piles. Most appeared near the beginning of the month, when rent was due. Sagging couches, black lacquer nightstands, mattresses, all stacked up on the corner—a surprisingly intimate life-size scrapbook of someone’s existence. Eventually city maintenance workers would mark the pile with a blast of orange spray paint and haul it away. If they weren’t fast about it, the pile would become a sprawling, multihouse, multiblock affair.

These piles were sort of like an ecosystem—a complete community of living organisms and the nonliving materials of their surroundings. Some individuals added to the growing mass, bottom-feeders harvested from the pile, and sometimes the items broke down into dust of their own accord. In this ecosystem, Bill and I played the role of bottom-feeders.

One night, Bill spotted a blue bicycle in a pile of junk on the corner of our street. It was a vintage affair, with three speeds and only slightly messed-up back brakes. He carried it upstairs and spent the evening tinkering with it.

Out for a victory ride the next morning, Bill heard, “That’s my bike!” It’s a common refrain on the streets off Martin Luther King Jr. Way. But the man who yelled it, standing on the porch of his warrenlike apartment building, didn’t mean it in jest. He walked toward Bill. A not quite elderly black man, only slightly grizzled, missing most of his teeth. Name: Bobby.

Seeing that this might get ugly, I walked downstairs to intervene: “Sir, you know the rules around here. If it’s in a pile, it’s up for grabs.” Bobby didn’t say anything. It was apparently a man thing, between Bill and Bobby.

“I fixed it,” Bill pleaded.

Bobby put his hand on the handlebars. “Uh-uh,” he said. Who is this asshole? I thought.

But Bill wasn’t going to fight about it. I could tell he had second thoughts. He looked down, then up. “I’ll give you $20,” Bill said, excited at the possibility of a solution. At that, Bobby took his hand off the handlebars and beamed. Bill passed him the bill. The matter concluded, Bill rode off on his bike. A beautiful friendship had—yes—blossomed.

Now Bobby helped us do things like move cars around.

“OK, stop,” Bill yelled to me and Bobby. We let up. Bill jumped into the Mercedes and braked—Bobby and I had gotten a bit too zealous in our pushing. The red Mercedes barely avoided smashing into our neighbor’s Honda.

B
ill swung open the gates to the garden. The F-250’s wheels spun as I jumped the curb and backed into the lot. Our friend Willy had loaned us his truck for the weekend, so Bill and I had spent Saturday and Sunday making runs to a horse stable fifteen miles away, up in the hills. The free rotted horse manure had been our ticket to gardening success.

Since most of the lot was under a one-foot layer of concrete, Bill came up with the idea of building raised beds. Most vegetables don’t require more than a few feet of topsoil, so it’s entirely possible to grow plants in large containers. We made open-topped boxes, filled them with composted horse manure, and planted the majority of our herbs and vegetables in them.

Bill, the ultimate bottom-feeder, wouldn’t even buy wood to build the beds. In the early days of the lot, Bill would return home, his dark hair mussed, a crooked smile of delight on his face, the borrowed truck filled with sheets of plywood and odd chunks of lumber found along the streets of GhostTown. In the massive abandoned piles, Bill found garden-building materials.

We learned that four chunks of a two-by-four made corners for boxes and connected everything. I got good with an electric handsaw. The only things we bought were screws and an electric drill.

Now in our third spring of gardening, we were still building new beds and topping off the existing ones. Every year, gripped by the fever of spring gardening, our mantra was always “More manure, we need more.”

A series of raised beds, like coffins, scattered the lot. That weekend, we had topped off the three existing beds and begun dumping the rest into new, yawning, empty boxes. I parked near the biggest one, cut the engine, and jumped into the truck bed.

Bill was already there, sinking the shovel into the crumbly black gold. We had only one shovel, so I squatted down, facing away from the bed, and used my hands to bulldoze the manure between my knees over the edge of the truck. Bobby watched us unload the soil with a mix of curiosity and disgust.

In February, Bobby had been kicked out of his apartment. This is why he was living in a car parked in front of his old house. We never asked why he had been evicted, though he was seeming less and less lucid, so we had our suspicions. He had become the unofficial security guard of the 2-8.

That he lived in a series of cars wasn’t the kind of thing that raised eyebrows on our street. One neighbor, after arguments with his girlfriend, regularly retires to his car—a cream-colored BMW with the windows knocked out and replaced with Mexican-soda cardboard boxes. When we see him shouldering a bag of clothes in one hand, headed to the BMW with a defeated slouch, Bill and I look at each other and say, “Someone’s in the doghouse.” So Bobby’s new home seemed perfectly acceptable.

Besides becoming a squatter, Bobby became a farmer, too—only his crops were cans and metal. He hauled them via a shopping cart to the recycling center a few blocks away. Like a pack rat, he also collected other items: backpacks, light fixtures, exercise equipment. Anything that once had value (but now was stained and smelled weird) Bobby would take home with him. And home was that wheelless Chevy Colt.

“So that’s horse poop?” he asked while we unloaded the rest of the manure.

“Yes,” I panted, picking up a bucket and scooping out the corners of the truck bed. When I looked up into our apartment, it was dark except for a warm yellow glow in the living room—the brooder box. The chicks were getting bigger—and louder. They often woke me at dawn with their squabbling.

“And you grow vegetables in it.” Bobby was wearing a pair of antennas he made out of a girl’s headband and some tinfoil.

“Yes, it’s really composted down, though,” I assured Bobby. I stood up to stretch my back but found I couldn’t stand up completely. I hunched over, my shoulders caved in, and gasped, “So there aren’t any bad bacteria or whatever.”

“We used chicken droppings,” Bobby said. “
Whoo,
that stuff stunk. Now, this isn’t too bad.” He took a pinch of the manure and sniffed. Bobby had come from Arkansas as a young man. Many of the black people living in Oakland came from families who had migrated from the South in the 1920s to work as longshoremen for the port, as porters for the railroad, or in manufacturing jobs. Back then, Oakland was known as the Detroit of the West. In the 1940s, in what some historians call the second gold rush, manufacturing and military jobs attracted more immigrants from the South, and the black population grew by 227 percent. Oakland, once a monoculture of whiteness, became diverse when people like Bobby’s parents moved in.

Bill and I surveyed our progress in unloading the horse manure. The truck bed was empty. The raised bed was . . . half empty. I stared at it with contempt. I was exhausted, but this was our last chance to use our friend’s truck. We would have to make another run.

“Can you make sure no one parks here?” Bill asked Bobby. We needed the area in front of the lot clear so we could unload our next load of horseshit. Bobby nodded and went to get a shopping cart to block the parking spot. He waved at our truck as we drove away, back to the hills, back to the stables.

We had to cross the county line to get our horse poo. Oakland’s county, Alameda, gave way to Contra Costa County, land of rolling hills, working cattle ranches, and more recently rich folks with McMansions. Lucky for us, rich people like horses. And horses make a lot of manure. Which piles up and composts away until an enterprising gardener arrives and offers to take away this jackpot of tilth and nutrients.

The horses whinnied when they heard us drive up. I backed the truck as close as possible to the mother lode: a massive mound of composting manure the size of a small barn. The smell—horse sweat, dirt, grass, and that unmistakable odor of cellulose breaking down—was heavenly. It reminded me of growing up on my parents’ property in Idaho. Two of my favorite family photos are one of my father astride a gorgeous pinto in a snowy field and another of me riding a brown pony.

I was only four years old when my parents’ life on the ranch finally unraveled and my mom, my sister, and I moved to town. I had my first existential crisis when I realized that it was not possible to have a pony in the city. I still remember standing in my bedroom, looking out my window, and feeling the utter horror and emptiness of my horseless life in town. Eventually I got some unicorn posters, and all was healed. Or maybe not all, because I still feel a prickle of almost religious ecstasy at the smell of horseshit.

Our buckets clattering, Bill and I marched up to the edge of the pile. My method was to cradle a bucket in my arms and scrape the side of the manure hill until a mini avalanche filled the bucket. Bill used a shovel to scoop from the very bottom of the pile. Red worms came along with the black dirt, which was warm to the touch. It steamed a little in the chilly night air. Bucket after bucket until we filled the back of the truck. It was our third trip of the day, it was night, and our arms were aching from the schlepping.

We paused in our bucket filling and noticed the silence. No highway noise, no car alarms or ambulances. The hills unfolded off to the east, little farms marked by a light or two. We were truly in the country.

Driving away from the stables, the truck’s suspension nearly buckling under the load, I looked back at the massive hill of manure. It looked untouched.

“Man, Willy’s going to be pissed when he finds out how much manure we loaded into this thing!” I said.

“Let’s not tell him,” Bill suggested.

Farther down the road, a fog had rolled in and enveloped the hills that looked out over the East Bay.

“Well, we’ll just give him some tomatoes or—”

“Look out!” Bill cried and grabbed the truck’s Oh Shit handle.

We had almost veered over a cliff. I’m a horrible driver, once almost launching us into the Pacific Ocean while driving along Highway 1. I braked and slowed down and started to really concentrate on the road.

“God,” Bill said.

“Sorry,” I muttered, and we fell silent as the truck rattled down the road. With the low visibility, everything suddenly felt treacherous. A strange loneliness filled my heart, and I thought of my mother.