Farm City: The Education of an Urban Farmer (7 page)

“I’m just making some improvements,” Bobby explained, then pointed to the cactus.

“There was something there already!” Lana yelled. The wilting
Malva
lay over by the abandoned playfield. Instead of ripping up the cactus—Lana couldn’t hurt another living thing—she had smashed an electrical appliance. The shards of thick glass and wood littered the street.

It was a turf war between two 28th Street impresarios.

Lana had been up all night. I knew because I had left her house only a few hours before, and she looked just as she had when I waved goodbye. Her hair still looked wonderful, and her eyes were painted with theatrical curlicues of black eyeliner.

“Some people don’t listen,” Lana said, glaring at Bobby. He sometimes posted life lessons on his message corkboard. One of his favorites was “Learn to Listen.”

“I’m just trying to help,” Bobby said.

“I don’t want your help!” Lana yelled. Her dog, Oscar, wandered out from the warehouse and gave a loud bark. He liked Bobby, despite Lana’s hatred, because Bobby fed him snacks of old bread and bones. This further infuriated Lana.

“Some people need to learn how to relax,” Bobby said, drawing out the last word.

Bobby had recently started an auto-repair/chop shop—a place to strip cars—at the end of 28th Street. It all started when a neighbor said her car was dead. Bobby opened up her hood, then rummaged around in the back of his car, emerging with a car battery. “I went to Berkeley,” he said to the woman. “Studied biology.” He flipped the battery upside down so the terminals touched. Battery acid flew. Her car started. Word spread: Bobby can fix cars.

When it came to my loyalties, I sat on the fence. On one hand, I was like Bobby in that I was running what some might consider an unsanitary operation (horse manure, chicken shit) on squatted land, and Bobby guarded that land for me. On the other, I was like Lana in that I enjoyed an environment free of antifreeze spilling into the gutters and an endless collection of GhostTown rubbish. (Bobby once found a giant metal shed and placed it in the lot. When I protested—what would Jack Chan say if he saw that?—Bobby took it away, grumbling.)

But now, in the battle between a cactus and a weed, I knew I couldn’t choose. This weed,
Malva parviflora,
was truly awful, and a dime a dozen. As for the cactus, it did require almost no water, but having a spiny plant spiking out next to a sidewalk seemed sadistic. I couldn’t referee this one, and so I shrugged and said, rather lamely, that I wished we could all get along.

A few weeks after my tequila-enhanced discovery that I was indeed an urban farmer, the chicks started to develop real feathers. Worried that they weren’t getting enough vitamin D—an important nutrient for healthy feathers—I took the birds on a field trip to the garden.

I gathered the birds into a cardboard box and then upended it into a garden bed. At first they seemed stunned by the out-of-doors—the shining sun, the blue sky, the dirt at their feet. When a pigeon flew by, without a sound they took cover under the crinkled leaves of a Swiss chard plant. The turkey poults ducked their heads underneath the chicks’ legs, trying to hide—never mind that they were twice the size of the chicks by then. After a few minutes, the instinct to roam trumped fear. The chicks fanned out, scratched at the dirt, and ate rocks. Chickens and turkeys don’t have stomachs. Instead they digest their food with a powerful muscle in their gut called the gizzard. The birds peck up rocks, which travel into the gizzard. Once there, the pebbles are ground against one another by the gizzard’s contractions, which breaks down the grains and greens and bugs.

The birds were beautiful there in the garden. The chickens ranged from dark-reddish to black to yellow-gold. The turkey poults were starting to get some color, too. One had dark black feathers; the other two were mostly white with streaks of black.

As the birds enjoyed the early summer sunshine I did some weeding and checked on my vegetable seedlings.

Not only was I growing meat birds; I had expanded to include some varieties of heirloom fruits and vegetables. I chose heirloom varieties because they are often best suited for a small home garden, because their seeds can be saved and used the following year, and frankly, because I love their names: Amish Paste tomatoes, Golden Bachau peas, Speckles lettuce, Cream of Saskatchewan watermelons. All seemed to be doing fine except for the watermelons.

In early June I had made careful mounds of composted horse manure and dusted the tops with worm casings harvested from the worm bin. Then I sank the watermelon seeds into each mound. I watered them very well, resubmerging two escapees that floated up to the surface.

I anticipated sweet melons that I would eat straight from the garden, juice dripping down my shirt. Since I had moved to California from Seattle, watermelons had held a special cachet for me. They are native to Africa and require heat to develop. The Pacific Northwest just didn’t have it. In Oakland, I had so far mastered hot-weather-loving plants like tomatoes, hot peppers, and corn. This was my chance to do melons.

For a week, I had gone out every day to water and stare at the dirty black piles, to see if anything was emerging. On day three, I thought I saw some green, but it was just a piece of trapped grass. On day five, I sprinkled the mounds with fish kelp fertilizer and suppressed the urge to dig in to see exactly what was going on down there. Eight days had now passed, and I cursed the seed company, birds, bad horse manure, ants, and any other suspects who could be blamed for preventing the watermelons’ germination.

I pawed through the dirt to find some potato bugs for the ducks. In four weeks, the ducks and one of the goslings had made it to full feather. (The other gosling died quietly in the brooder one night for no apparent reason.) Because they had grown so quickly and had such wet, fly-attracting turds, I had moved them outdoors much sooner than the chicks, into a pen I built out of chicken wire and milk crates. I had even made them a small pond—a washtub sunk into the dirt and filled with water.

A few feet from the pen was a chain-link fence, and behind that was a duplex—a cobbled-together adobe affair—where many people lived. My favorite residents there were a woman named Neruda and her nine-year-old daughter, Sophia. When I first put the ducks out into the yard, Sophia watched from behind the fence, too shy to say anything. After a few days, she spent more and more time lurking and watching the birds’ antics. One day I invited Neruda and her daughter over.

The ducks—Pekins, a popular breed of meat duck from China—were almost fully grown by then. They had glossy white feathers and sturdy orange bills. The surviving gosling had turned into a stately gray goose. We sat in the sun and watched the ducks play. Sophia picked up one of the lily-white birds and gently set him in the “pond.” He quacked happily and bobbed his head in and out of the water.

“Is he like a pet dog?” she asked me suddenly.

I glanced at her mom. Cornered.

“Not really,” I said, feeling like a monster. While Sophia had been playing with the ducks, I had been thinking about duck confit and Christmas goose.

In fact, I had been studiously avoiding the thought of killing, focusing instead on the first few sections of
Storey’s Guide to Raising Ducks,
which told me how to install a pond and what to feed the growing flock. I hadn’t gotten to the butchering section of the guide yet. Nor had I yet gone to Willow’s farm to find out how she killed her ducks. Next to
Storey’s Guide
on my nightstand was Elizabeth David’s
French Provincial Cooking.
I read with keen interest her many good ideas for cooking duck livers and making
canard rôti au four
.

But how do you tell a child you’re going to cut off this adorable duck’s head, pluck its white feathers, and roast it in an oven, letting its fat naturally baste the meat? Children, I’ve found, don’t care much about haute cuisine. So I looked into Sophia’s innocent chocolate-colored eyes and mumbled something about eggs and breeding. Yes, I straight-up lied.

After Sophia went home, I sat in the lot and looked at the ducks. There was an unmistakable gap in my knowledge of these creatures, right there in between the raising and the cooking. I knew how to raise them, and I knew how to cook them. How to get from a living duck to a duck ready to go in the oven—that was the trick. Not only did I not have the physical, practical know-how; I didn’t know how to prepare myself mentally, either. I suspected that there wasn’t a single book that could fill the gap between
Storey’s Guide
and Elizabeth David.

While the chickens and turkeys foraged in the garden bed, I leaned into the pen and offered the ducks the potato bugs. They softly prodded my open hand and snarfed them up one by one. Then they looked at me for more.

I went back to the doomed watermelon area to hunt. As the ducks quacked and chortled at me and monitored my movements with great interest, I scratched the soil around the edge of the bed and found a roly-poly paradise, with bugs everywhere, in every size—from tiny ones the size of a speck of dirt to big ones the size of a cockroach.

A faint glimmer of green made me halt my potato-bug harvest. Hidden under the dirt, seedlings had been growing. They looked like most melon sprouts do: rounded, kind of veiny. My watermelons had finally germinated.

I crawled closer to the seedlings and inspected them in worshipful silence. Two were only half unfurled (the seed coat still hung on one of the leaves), another was a bit off to the side of the mound, a fourth was small and runty. One bruiser sat smack-dab in the middle of the pile. I swear I could hear it growing. Seeing the watermelon seedlings felt like finding money in the street: even though I had done the hard work to set the plant in motion, it still seemed like a miracle.

When seeds germinate, an amazing thing happens. A seed is a ripened ovule, like a hen’s egg: it contains an embryo and a stored food supply. I watered the seeds every day because of a process called imbibition. When a seed soaks up water, its cells swell and mitochondria (the power stations of cells) become rehydrated and start to work. A cascade of proteins is made, the food-storage reservoirs are tapped, and slowly the cell wall softens. As cell division begins—set in motion by the rehydration process—a radicle bursts out of the seed coat and becomes the root of the plant. All this had finally happened to my Cream of Saskatchewan watermelon seeds.

After an hour outside, I shooed the chicks and poults back into the cardboard box and took them upstairs. I could see the veiny leaves of the watermelon from our living room window. The process was in motion—all I had to do was give the plants regular water, perhaps side-dress with some compost, and hope my bees were up for pollinating a watermelon flower. I would soon be the proud eater of a homegrown, rare-breed watermelon. Nature had succeeded, despite the odds, again. Even in a plot next to the highway, germination is possible.

The next morning, I stood in my lot and yelped. I threw the hose off to the side—I had been watering—and examined the crime scene. Half my watermelon seedlings were now stubs. My eyes trailed a jellyfish-like slime that ended at what was left of the baby melon plants. Chewed by slugs.

Searching for the culprits in the sunlight, I dug around the moist areas where soil came in contact with wood, a slug’s favorite hiding spot. I found a few small ones. They looked—and felt—like pieces of gray snot. Now that I had them, I weighed my options. Some people suggest tossing slugs; that is, you just hurl them as far away from your garden as possible. I had my doubts that the greedy mollusks deserved a second chance, however slim, to slowly creep back from the street, dodging cars and boots, and snack once again on my delicate watermelon seedlings. Other people suggest drowning them in beer moats crafted out of tunafish cans. The slugs would fall into the moat and die a drunken, Janis Joplin-esque death. This seemed suspiciously close to buying the slugs a beer, which was more generous than I felt. So I dispatched them between my thumb and index finger. I offered their corpses to the ducks and the goose, but they didn’t seem interested.

I knew there were more slugs—bigger slugs, the mothers and fathers of these babies I had just murdered—and I knew when to catch them. Later in the day, as the sun set, I drank a strong cup of tea and strapped on my headlamp. Prepared for hand-to-hand combat, I went slug hunting.

I found them, lit up by the strange blue light of my energy-saving headlamp. Lolling around in the dirt, they approached the supple green shoots of my remaining melon plants with their little horns (which are, in fact, eyes) up. Some people think the horn-eyes are endearing, but if the slugs had their way, I would have exactly zero watermelons. These dirt-inhabiting scum balls are the clear-cutters of the mollusk world. They will leave nothing in their wake. If they exercised restraint, they could have a food source for months instead of hours. But this isn’t how slugs operate. And so I committed slug mass murder in order to save a fruit.

I ripped them in two; then, just to be sure, I squished them between boards. When it was done, I tossed the grotesque, loogie-like pile of dead slugs into the garbage can.

As I scrubbed my murderous hands I wondered if Lana would refuse to eat one of my watermelons if she knew what I had done. No one is really pure, except maybe the Jains, that sect in India whose members sweep a peacock feather on the ground in front of them as they walk in order to prevent injury to, say, an ant. They do drink water, I’m told, and I wonder how they come to terms with eating all the organisms that live in it.