Farm City: The Education of an Urban Farmer (9 page)

As I handed Mosed my money the irony of buying alcohol from a Muslim man wasn’t lost on me. He nodded and passed me my change—he had stopped judging his customers years ago. The bills were worn ghetto dollars, as thin as Kleenex. I nestled the beer in one of the weed buckets.

At home, the chickens and Harold and Maude had fanned out in the backyard; they kicked up mulch, took dust baths, and fought over unearthed bugs. When they saw me, they came running. I know it’s pathetic, but to be loved, even by poultry, felt great that morning. I threw the weeds into the chicken house. When the hens and turkeys enthusiastically followed their favorite treat, I shut the door behind them. Then I lumbered upstairs with my six-pack and went back to bed. I locked the front door with all three locks. And the chain.

Ten blocks from my house, I found Willow’s farm and garden. An orange sign read CITY SLICKER FARM in purple. The Center Street garden, just off 16th Street, burst with vegetables and fruit. A pen of ducks and chickens straddled the back of the property. A chayote, a vining squash, covered the entire front fence. Tall columns of peas stood guard near the gate, with strawberry plants at their feet. Tomatoes had been staked and supported.

Willow had her head in a giant outdoor oven made of adobe. I hadn’t seen her since the night of Lana’s speakeasy, but she had been on my mind as the ideal urban farmer. As I tried on that identity, Willow was my model.

“Hey, Willow,” I said, feeling a little shy.

She jumped, pulled her head out of the oven, and said hi. She gave me a hug (“Sorry, I’m a Californian, I hug everyone”), then took me on a tour of the garden.

“This soil was full of lead,” Willow explained, showing me the raised beds. Her garden looked very much like a mature version of what I hoped mine would eventually resemble.

“But what about the fruit trees?” I asked, pointing at the fig and mulberry trees.

“We had the fruit sent to the lab,” she said, “and the fruiting bodies don’t contain lead. The leaves do, though.” The leaves, which pulled the lead out of the ground, were hauled to the dump. Every year, the soil was getting cleaner. The garden, then, was a giant remediation project.

After she showed me the bees, the chicken house, and the toolshed, Willow went back to making a fire in the oven. She was going to make pizza for the neighborhood. Somehow she had gotten all the fixings—the dough, the cheese, the tomato sauce—donated for the event.

One of Willow’s volunteers set up the produce stand with a colorful display of beets, chard, and carrots. A small basket of lemons and figs. A few live plants for sale. Customers stopped by to buy vegetables and were invited to eat some pizza. One man only spoke Spanish, and Willow came out to the stand to talk to him. He wanted to buy some ducks for a duck roast. They made arrangements.

I wandered through Willow’s garden, admiring the construction of the chicken pen, the beehives. Outside the gates of her farm were crumbling industrial buildings. A man pushing a shopping cart onto a nearby lot paused to take a piss on one of the buildings. I couldn’t help but think of Wendell Berry, the strident agrarian. Not that he would pee on a building, but what would he—all rural values and fan of sweet-smelling fields—make of this farm? Berry clearly hates cities. “No longer does human life rise from the earth like a pyramid, broadly and considerately founded upon its sources,” he wrote in
The Unsettling of America
. “Now it scatters itself out in a reckless horizontal sprawl, like a disorderly city whose suburbs and pavements destroy the fields.” Cities destroyed fields. The soil under my favorite bar could be growing corn. That art museum? Just a platform of concrete.

But not all of us can live in the country like Wendell Berry. Of course he knows this. In perhaps his most famous essay, “The Pleasures of Eating,” Berry advises city people, “If you have a yard or even just a porch box or a pot in a sunny window, grow something to eat in it. Make a little compost of your kitchen scraps and use it for fertilizer.”

Or, if you’re Willow, you might do a little bit more than that: Create a farm in a city lot, sell produce on a corner, show urban kids where eggs come from. Plant in the cracks of the city.

This idea isn’t a new one. Most of us have forgotten about the depression of 1893. It hit Detroit hard. Because of a bank panic, industry in the city came to a standstill. Ten percent of workers were unemployed. Food shortages threatened. A plump, balding, bearded shoemaker turned mayor came to the rescue. Hazen Pingree looked around Detroit and saw abandoned lots. Lots of them. He wondered why the unemployed should not be allowed to cultivate food on them. On his travels in Europe, Pingree had seen allotment gardens, plots of land set aside for city folk to grow vegetables and flowers. These became his inspiration. By 1896, there were Pingree Potato Patch farms all over the city. As Laura Lawson, in
City Bountiful: A Century of Community Gardening in America,
reports, in one year, “the program served 46.8 percent of families seeking public relief and the gardeners grew $30,998 worth of food.” Word of the success spread, and soon New York City and Philadelphia had their own vacant-lot farming programs.

They didn’t last forever. Once the depression was over, the programs ended, for the most part. But they sprang up again during the First World War, then again in the form of victory gardens during the Second World War. Flourishing, then disappearing—this has been a way of life for urban farmers in America.

Willow assigned me the job of riding my bike around and yelling, “Pizza! Pizza! At 16th and Center!” West Oakland looked as bad as GhostTown, I thought as I pedaled around. Fenced-up parks, abandoned buildings, charred cars. Bored kids with nothing to do but follow this crazy lady on a bike to get some free pizza.

These kids would have few chances to experience the rural places described in Wendell Berry’s books. Because of Willow, they could harvest a tomato or see a chicken lay an egg, and on a summer day they could watch the mulberry tree ripening. To be a farmer, Willow pointed out, was to share. Unlike a rural farm, a secret place where only a few lucky people may visit, an urban farm makes what seems impossible possible.

The pizzas, fresh from the wood-fired oven, had crispy crusts like those you find in Italy. Many of the toppings—basil, garlic, onions—came from the garden. It was the best pizza I had ever eaten. And when the kids on the corners followed me to this dazzling place of greenery, this place of goodness, and ate the best pizza on the planet, I fairly burst with happiness.

While the neighborhood kids swarmed around eating pizza and looking at the beehives, Willow and I discussed killing ducks. It was getting close to their time to go. I saw them as good practice before I had to do the big kill: Harold and Maude. Willow recommended using pruners. We made plans for a hands-on demonstration.

CHAPTER SIX

I had tool envy. Mr. Nguyen had a thing that looked like a hoe but with a shorter handle and a deeper blade than on any other hoe I’d ever seen. We were both in the garden. He was clearing out his patch, where in years past he had grown taro, a root vegetable with enormous elephant-ear leaves; yellow chrysanthemums, whose leaves the Nguyens used for cooking; and an orange tiger lily.

I was jury-rigging the raised beds so they would be protected from the onslaught of the chickens smart enough to make their way (walking, flying, sneaking through a fence) from the backyard into the lot. Some friends who had recently moved to Portland had given me their layers, so my hen population had swelled to more than twenty and was a force to be reckoned with. The hens had recently laid into my garden with a ferocity I hadn’t seen since my slug-murdering session. They kicked up my tiny, defenseless seedlings. They pecked the chard down to nubbins. They uprooted a newly transplanted tomato. It was pure chance that they didn’t uproot my prized watermelon seedlings. People always say chickens in the garden keep the bugs down, but as far as I could tell, they were hell-bent on destroying everything
but
the bugs.

So I had gone on the defensive. This involved wrapping each of the raised beds with chicken wire and stapling it into place. It wasn’t attractive, but it would keep the upstart marauders out.

Mr. Nguyen was busy whacking back mint and making room for more red perilla. The strange tool had a sharp edge that turned inward, so he could hack with it to dig trenches and smooth out a planting area. I went over to where he was working. He wore a pair of dress pants and a tucked-in white shirt. I asked him what the tool was called.

“What?”

“The hoe, what do you call it in your country?” I asked, and pointed down.

He said something in Vietnamese. I still hadn’t mastered “good morning” or “thank you” in Vietnamese; I’m a complete moron when it comes to languages. I could tell he felt sorry for me. He smiled and said, “Hoe.”

He was a natural urban farmer. Before Bill and I cleared out the lot and planted it, Mr. Nguyen had tended an herb garden in the backyard, but it never got much sun. We persuaded him to move it out to the lot.

Strolling down MLK on my weed-gathering missions, I had started to notice several places where other Vietnamese gardeners had reclaimed a patch of land in their front yard or along the side of the house next to the driveway. In one little corner of a yard a few blocks from ours, red-leaf mustard greens grew alongside cilantro,
rau ram
(Vietnamese cilantro), and lemongrass. Maybe it wasn’t enough food to feed a family, but it was a taste of home.

In his delightful memoir
The Unprejudiced Palate,
Italian immigrant Angelo Pellegrini describes the newly arrived Americans of the last century: “He subsidizes his fluctuating income by wringing from his environment all that it will yield. . . . Regardless of his means, he will garden his plot of ground because he knows the vital difference between cold storage or tinned peas and those plucked from the vine an hour before they are eaten. Furthermore, challenging the soil for its produce is in his bones; the pleasure of eating what he raises is inseparably fused with the pleasure of raising what he eats.” So it went for most immigrants to America: Pellegrini grew his cardoons and basil in the 1950s; the Vietnamese and El Salvadorans of this century sow cilantro and lemongrass.

As I feared, a few of the new chickens wandered into the lot. They scratched about, hit their heads repeatedly on the chicken-wire fences, and then gave up. Mostly they ignored me. Harold and Maude rounded the corner and came into the lot, chirping and barking. Harold was getting mature and had developed a major wattle. It looked as if melted red plastic had been poured over his head and solidified midpour. His snood, a fleshy piece of skin, now hung over his beak. When they saw me, they rushed over and pecked at my fingers until I had to hide my hands in my pockets. Then the birds pecked at my pant leg.

The turkeys weren’t growing up to resemble the white turkeys that most American farmers raise, and they definitely looked different from my mom’s turkey, Tommy. Harold was a deep black, with some white on his tail; Maude had alternating white and black feathers, like an exquisite houndstooth jacket. McMurray Hatchery, bless them, had sent me heritage turkeys.

I discovered this while working a booth at a book festival in San Francisco. I was browsing through some of our food porn: Slow Food International’s
A World of Presidia
. The book featured hundreds of endangered heirloom plants, animals, and food products with close-up photos and centerfolds. Delicious vittles like Hungarian Mangalica sausage, made from a curly-haired pig; Tibetan Plateau Yak Cheese; and a Chilean Calbuco Black-Bordered Oyster.

I turned to page 90 and was delighted to see Harold. He was, according to the book, a Heritage Standard Bronze. Maude was apparently a Royal Palm. The book listed other heritage turkey breeds, like the Bourbon Red, the Narragansett, and the Jersey Buff. These breeds can be traced back to wild turkeys taken from North America, sent to Europe, domesticated into breed categories, and then sent back to the States in the late 1700s.

These heritage breeds aren’t eaten much anymore. Slow Food blamed my turkeys’ distant cousin twice removed, the Standard White. Turkey breeders in the 1950s wanted a standardized bird, one that grew quickly and finished with a uniform size that would mesh perfectly with new mechanical pluckers that had been developed. With careful breeding of heritage stock, they arrived at the Standard White. Over the years, the breed has been further engineered to do well indoors, and the breasts have plumped up enormously. On a strict feeding regimen, a Standard White takes just two months before he’s ready to eat. He’s a meat-growing machine on two legs.

My heritage turkeys, on the other hand, were growing slowly—it would take six months for them to develop fully. The difference in taste, according to the Slow Food book, makes it worth the wait. Firm, extraordinarily dark meat. More delicious breasts and thighs. They might be happier, too: The Slow Food book reported that heritage turkeys, unlike Standard Whites, can indeed mate naturally.

My turkeys were heritage as hell, I told myself as I slobbered over the book. And the fact that they could have sex was somehow wonderful news. I was going to have the most amazing Thanksgiving feast of all time. Only three more months to go.

Mr. Nguyen’s wife, Lee, pulled up in their battered silver car and tooted the horn, then began to unload bright pink plastic bags from Chinatown. Mr. Nguyen finished his hoeing and unloaded crates of oysters from the trunk. The night before, the Nguyens’ son had erected a giant white tent in the lot, and he was now setting up tables.

By noon, the flimsy plastic card tables were threatening to collapse under the bounty of rice-noodle salad, prawns, steamed rice, sliced cucumbers and tomatoes, and, of course, cold Heinekens. Bill and I were beckoned down from our apartment. It was the first-year birthday party for the Nguyens’ grandson Andrew.

Giddily, Mr. Nguyen led me to three smoking barbecues. He pulled a giant oyster from the grill with a hot pad and pried off the top shell. While we waited for the grayish piece of protein to cool down, Mr. Nguyen demonstrated in pantomime that I would first dip it into a bowl of pepper and salt, then squeeze a bit of lime over the whole thing. It was an epiphany. The rough grit of the pepper, the sweet oyster, the sour lime—perfection. I looked over at Bill, who was wolfing down oysters with Mr. Nguyen’s son, Danny, and drinking a Heineken. I noticed that none of the Vietnamese women drank beer. The birthday boy slowly shoved rice and birthday cake into his mouth.

Once Mr. Nguyen saw how much I enjoyed the oyster delicacy, he deemed me ready for the grand treat. He handed me a largish egg, still hot from the grill, and a spoon. Sensing my confusion (hard-boiled eggs?), he demonstrated that I should tap off the top of the egg. I did so, and a yellowish fluid came out, revealing a duck embryo floating in the yolky orb. While Mr. Nguyen watched and encouraged, I scooped out some embryo, which somehow had feathers, and gave it a taste. It was like a salty Jell-O banana pudding topped with bonito flakes.

I faked delight, thanked Mr. Nguyen, and wandered off to deposit the thing under a cabbage leaf.

“Novella, what are you doing?” Mr. Nguyen’s ten-year-old granddaughter, Tammy, said as she caught me burying the culinary monstrosity.

She laughed when she saw the uneaten egg. “Don’t tell your grandpa,” I begged.

“They’re pretty gross,” she said, like a teenager, then flitted away.

Other people at the party followed my lead, except their embryos were eaten. By the end of the day, the garden was heaped with empty duck eggs and oyster shells, some of which I later used as impromptu digging tools.

After the party was over, I herded the turkeys back to their roost.

“What’s that?” our neighbor the Hillbilly asked. We called him the Hillbilly (behind his back, of course) because he regularly “borrowed” packs of cigarettes from Lana, wore a camo/American flag baseball cap, and worked the night shift as a security guard at Wal-Mart. And he had an aggressive pet Chihuahua. Which was lunging mightily at Harold.

“My turkeys,” I said. Harold gallantly protected Lady Maude by puffing up to the size of a Rottweiler and standing in front of her.

Maybe Ben Franklin had been onto something when he proposed that the turkey should be the symbol of America instead of the eagle. These turkeys truly embodied the concept of American independence. They did their own thing and refused to sleep shut in the henhouse with the chickens. Instead, they perched on top of the chicken house, out in the cold. They could—and did—fly around the neighborhood. The third turkey, a Royal Palm like Maude, had winged off and was never seen again. I like to believe he ended up at the nature preserve at Lake Merritt, a few miles away, instead of as roadkill on the nearby freeway. There was an odd assortment at the sanctuary—a pelican with a goiter, a skinny chicken, and now, hopefully, a black-and-white-checked turkey strutting around, trying to mate with a duck.

Harold and Maude commonly took afternoon strolls down Martin Luther King Jr. Way. Though this is a regular thoroughfare for drug dealers, sex workers, and homeless men, the sight of two turkeys strutting down MLK nearly caused car accidents. The turkeys, on the other hand, didn’t seem to mind the cars, the pigeons, or the sketchy pedestrians.

The turkeys were displaying a form of youthful behavior biologists call behavioral neoteny. Dogs, the animals that have been domesticated the longest by man, are considered neotenates: They don’t have a species-specific sense of recognition, which means they will play with cats, goats, chickens, humans, or their own species. Dogs are also very curious, and they exhibit “juvenile care-soliciting behaviors” like begging for food. Other domesticated animals do the same thing.

It’s thought that this is precisely how certain wild animals became domesticated. It wasn’t human will, as many people believe, or that a baby animal of the domesticated species was found and thereafter raised among humans. According to Stephen Budiansky’s argument in his influential book
The Covenant of the Wild: Why Animals Chose Domestication,
animals decided to be domesticated. Neotenates’ behaviors, Budiansky argues, “would all have been powerful factors in inducing wolves, sheep, cattle, horses . . . to approach human encampments and to allow humans to approach them.”

And turkeys probably did the same. Wild turkeys, native to the Americas, were most likely domesticated 2,500 years ago. Like most domesticated species, these birds chose to associate with humans—perhaps begging or following human encampments in South America. The ones who displayed the most curiosity, had the most open minds about different species, and could ask for help—like Harold and Maude—were the most successful. Eventually they were invited to live in human settlements. Their offspring were reared in captivity, fed and sheltered, ensuring an evolutionary future tied to man. It was a good bet.

As I explained my heritage-turkey pursuit the Hillbilly slowly nodded his head. When I started to babble on about how the turkeys were a product of thousands of years of domestication and how I was trying to reconnect to man’s ancient contract with domesticated animals in order to rediscover my place in the natural world, he seemed to be looking at me in a different way. I realized the Hillbilly now had a name for me: the Hippie.