Farm City: The Education of an Urban Farmer (11 page)

Thoreau, my fellow squat farmer, eventually ceded his bean field to the woodchucks. I would soon have to cede my garden to an urban farmer’s most dreaded pest, the real estate developer.

From my window I would be able to watch the rewilding before the destruction. The tomatoes would turn red, burst open, ooze down their seeds in a slurry. The carrots would swell and split, send out a flower stalk, become fibrous. Armies of slugs and snails would slide across the wooden beds, tuck into the soil, and reproduce deliriously. The corn, neglected and unharvested, would crumple into the earth.

The Bermuda grass, my enemy, would creep over the whole lot in a ragged green mat. The oxalis would run rampant, and its flowers would light up the street with their lurid yellow. Eventually, fennel would sow itself in the raised beds. Then the boards would break apart. The propagation table would become covered with small sprouts, water glasses filling with rain. My garden would become feral, transforming back to what it had been three years earlier: a weed-choked, unloved, abandoned lot.

Imagining this place doomed, I wondered, Why hadn’t I done more? Why hadn’t I subsisted off this piece of verdant land? Why hadn’t I sowed more, harvested more, given more to this piece of earth that I had grown to love?

Nature had been so good to me. The sun shone down. The rains came—and when they didn’t, my socialist landlord paid the water bill. The worms and horses exuded nutrients. And the plants, which did all the work catching and using these gifts from nature, then produced a harvest. As a squat farmer, I had been a freeloader on many levels.

And yet, by doing this work, wasn’t I simply repeating what humans have been doing for thousands of years? The seeds, these seeds that I had so carefully selected, were tangible proof of man’s culture, of my culture, a continuation of a line. Even in this ghetto squat lot, I was cultivating human history. Watermelons from Africa. Squash from the Americas. Potatoes with a history in Peru. Radishes native to Asia but domesticated in Egypt. All now growing here in Oakland.

Standing near the fence, I realized that not only did I make the garden; it made me. I ate out of this place every day. I had become this garden—its air, water, soil. If I abandoned the lot, I would abandon myself. When Jack Chan told me no building—no permanent structures—only garden, did he realize that by building the soil, perhaps I was making something more permanent than he could have ever imagined?

I stared at the red letters: NO TRESPASSING. What does a sign in GhostTown mean anyway? Just as much as my signs urging people not to pick the garlic. In this forsaken place, NO TRESPASSING is merely a suggestion, a doomed hope. It might even be an invitation. I looked around for Chan and his sidekick. Then I pulled down the signs. I pretended that I was the wind and threw them into the street, and they became another piece of garbage blowing around the neighborhood.

CHAPTER NINE

It was time to rob the bees.

I walked out to the deck. The smell around the hives this time of year was both divine and fetid. Divine near the two top boxes, full of honey and pollen. The bees seal the cracks in the stacked boxes with a kind of yellow caulk called propolis—a sticky substance collected from tree sap and leaf buds—to keep out ants, drafts, and moisture. In the brood box, the deeper container through which the bees enter the hive after a day of foraging, the queen quietly lays all the eggs for the colony. In the fall, her production slows. The colony spends cold nights huddled in a ball in order to keep one another, but mostly the queen, warm. The smell from these stacked boxes is ambrosial—earthy pine, beeswax, and sweetness.

Not so sweet smelling is the quagmire of dead bees piled up outside the hive at the end of a season. During prime nectar-gathering time, up to one hundred bees a day die inside a nest,
The ABC and XYZ of Bee Culture
told me. The corpses are “carried away from the colony in the mandibles” of a caste of bees known as the undertakers, which recognize the dead by a chemical odor. It looked as if my undertaker bees just tossed the dead over the edge of the hive. Since it was on a deck in the middle of a city, the corpses didn’t gently rot into the soil or get blown away by the wind. They simply rotted on the hot roof—and the resultant reek was piercing.

On a sunny October day, Bill and I stood on the deck, taking in these odors. After cracking the propolis caulk around the bee boxes, he hefted the uppermost box, or super, and I slipped the bee escape—a beekeeping tool that consists of a wooden box with a pattern of openings—underneath it.

The bees in the now-sequestered honey super could leave through the bee escape’s little tunnels, but they couldn’t get back up. It would take about twenty-four hours for all the bees to empty out of the hive’s honey storehouse. Most commercial operations use blowers or noxious fumes to drive the bees out. The bee escape seemed less offensive, and sort of fun, like a practical joke played on the bees.

The next day, my friend Joel, an Oakland public school teacher and former Deadhead, came over with his children, Jackson, ten, and Margaret, eight. They spilled out of the car, and Joel bounded up the stairs of our apartment. Joel and kids were interested in keeping bees and wanted to get the full experience before they got their own hives.

Margaret couldn’t believe how cramped our apartment was.

“There’s something everywhere!” she said.

It was true that, over the year, things had gotten pretty messy. We had bee boxes stacked up against one wall. The extractor had arrived in the mail a few days earlier and dominated one corner. I had acquired various farm implements—shovels, rakes, pruners—which hung in our laundry room. The pantry was overflowing with canned tomatoes and pickles. The kitchen table was so stacked with books about building cob ovens and keeping goats that there wasn’t much room for anything else. The fall crop of lettuces was germinating on the windowsills. I had acquired more fly strips to battle the increasing numbers. The two survivor ducks were living on the back stairs.

The house where Margaret lived was very neat and orderly, and there were rules about what belonged inside and what belonged outside. I gave that up when I started urban farming. There’s a principle in intensive urban farming called stacking functions. I told Margaret about the concept.

“See, these extra bee supers are also our coffee table,” I said as I showed her around. “And the deck is a garden and a bee yard.” I felt like Pippi Long-stocking giving a tour of Villa Villekulla.

Joel and Bill lifted the honey super off the bee escape and ran into the house before the bees could figure out what had happened. The super was heavy with honey. Inside the fragrant, beeless box were ten frames, crammed in like library books. When we pulled one up, it was revealed to be a big chunk of sealed honeycomb, like a slab of gold within the frame.

We lifted out each frame, scraped off the wax-capped honey with a serrated knife, and spun it in our shiny new stainless-steel honey extractor. Before the invention of the extractor, in 1865 by a beekeeper named Major Hruschka, people mashed the entire honeycomb and strained the honey from the wax, which took many days and attracted pests. Hruschka realized that it would be easy to remove the honey from the sturdy frames by using centrifugal force. He concocted a spinning device in which the frames could be mounted and the honey would fly out.

We made the kids give the hand-cranked extractor a spin. Centrifugal force launched the honey out of the comb and onto the stainless-steel wall of the extractor. Then the honey dripped down and collected at the bottom, where a spigot opened to let it pour out. Commercial beekeepers use plug-in knives, automated de-cappers, and motorized extractors, and they heat and filter their honey. Instead, Joel and family steadied our extractor, which had a tendency to keel over, cranked it as hard as they could, then let the honey drizzle out into a few quart-size mason jars.

We were all sticky with honey and buzzed from licking our fingers and chewing on the leftover wax, which reminded Margaret of chewing gum. We extracted eight quarts of honey in less than an hour. When we lived in Seattle, it took days to get the honey out. Our new machine was impressive indeed.

“If you get bees, you’re welcome to borrow this,” I told Joel.

I could see it in his eyes. Hear it in the giddy laughter of his children. Smell it in the heady liquor splattering on the sides of the steel tank as we spun, the scent wafting up into the nostrils of the person cranking the handle. Soon, I predicted, Joel’s house would be as big a disaster as mine.

He and the kids took home jars of honey. I brought one to the chubby elder monk who lived across the street in the monastery. When I handed it to him and pointed at the beehive on our deck by way of explanation, he gazed up at the hive, eyebrows furrowed. After a moment, he seemed to understand. He smiled and snuck the jar deep into his yellow robes. Without a sound, he turned back into the temple and disappeared.

After cleaning up, we returned the now-empty honey super to the hive on the deck. The bees simply went to work salvaging any remaining honey and wax and cleaned up the mostly empty frames. I felt a little niggle of guilt. Bees have never been truly domesticated—they are not tame and didn’t really depend on me to live, as Harold and the chickens did. My bees, in fact, were of the same genetic stock as wild bees, bees who make their homes in trees. All we could do was offer them a home and hope it was enough to convince them to stay.

I couldn’t help but relate to the bees. Their box, like our lot, was a temporary thing—a home for the moment. At any time, the bees could decide to leave, and wherever they relocated, they would make wax and store honey. I realized that that would be our fate, too: wherever we ended up going after the lot was bulldozed, we would build a garden, keep chickens, set up beehives. It’s just what we do.

As for raising meat birds, Bill was still unconvinced. I was too attached to the survivor ducks to ever kill and eat them. Harold was my last chance to prove my box of poultry hadn’t been a dismal failure.

B
obby started going barefoot most of the time, which is dangerous in our neighborhood, where the streets and sidewalks almost uniformly glitter with broken glass. When I told him about Jack Chan’s plans, he said, “Condos?” and looked dazed. “Here?” He looked at the abandoned brick building across the street. Then he shuffled off to sweep the street, which he did nightly.

I picked my third—and presumably last—crop of tomatoes. The lettuce started to taste bitter. I expected to see bulldozers any day now. My watermelon, coveted thing, was growing despite the setback. It hadn’t heard the news of the impending destruction. Worried that I might harvest it too late or, worse, too soon, I asked around for advice on how to tell if a watermelon is ripe. No one in the city could help us.

Bill and I went to see some farmer friends who live in Mendocino County, about three hours north of Oakland. They had draft horses and forty gorgeous acres of row crops, and I felt a little self-conscious when I told them I was an urban farmer. I was micro-scale compared to what they were doing. I knew that they resented having to drive into the city to sell their vegetables, but they had to go where the population center was. Growing food in the city cut out that step.

Over a dinner of their farm’s roast beef and potatoes, the youngest son of our farmer friends—a strapping boy of seventeen who already knew how to build a barn and castrate a pig—told us how to tell if a watermelon is ripe. You look at the spot where the melon has been lying on the ground, he told me. If it’s a pale, pale yellow, it’s ready.

After a restful day, we drove back to Oakland, the watermelon on my mind. Coming back to the city from the country takes a few hours of adjustment for me. I’ll wander off and not lock the car door, for instance. A farmer once said that the only time you have to lock your car in the country is during zucchini season. If you don’t, you’ll wind up with a passenger seat full of oversized vegetables. But if you value your car battery in the ghetto, you better lock your door.

Feeling relaxed and open, ready to apply the farmer-approved method on my melon, I walked toward the scrambling watermelon vine. It was Indian summer, still warm during the day, but the nights had become chilly, and it was getting dark sooner. I wondered why construction on the condos in the lot hadn’t started. It would be rainy season soon.

I had to look under a few leaves before my brain could accept the truth: The watermelon had vanished. Wrong bed? No, there’s the vine. I gingerly traced the splay of the plant, from the mound where it had first emerged to the tip where the fruit had been. Had been. Where the watermelon had been lying, its weight (five pounds?) had pressed down into the soil and made a depression. The divot was the only thing left. I crept upstairs and cried.

Motherfuckers.

There were suspects, of course. Lou, the collards harvester, being number 1. But there were so many. Some of the corn had gone missing recently, too. I wondered if people in the neighborhood could sense that the garden was doomed. That the yellow spray-painted property lines had marked the garden as weak or crippled. As when wolves take down a weak member of a herd, the garden became a target. But the callousness, to take my one and only watermelon, even if it was doomed, boggled my mind.

And I wailed when I remembered that I wouldn’t be able to save the seed, pass it on to someone else’s garden once mine was bulldozed. Worst of all, I would never know how the Cream of Saskatchewan tasted. I couldn’t just go buy one.

I wanted to find the culprit, strap him in a chair, and ask him a few questions. Like: Did it shatter when you cut into it? Was it creamy on the inside? Sweet tasting? The best goddamn watermelon in the world? This fucked-up neighborhood. Bobby? Did he do it? That son of a bitch. I looked out my window. Bobby was sitting barefoot in his lawn chair in the middle of the street.

I burst out laughing. Let them build condos here. I dare them. Lunatic Landing. Crackhead Townhouses. Broken Window Live/Work Lofts.