Farm City: The Education of an Urban Farmer (16 page)

CHAPTER SEVENTEEN

Two months later, Bill and I found ourselves up to our armpits in the green bins of late-night Chinatown. I wore blue nitrile gloves and was scooping handfuls of bok choy into my bucket. The sound of clicking mah-jongg tiles serenaded us from an open second-story window.

Oakland’s Chinatown is less than twenty blocks from our house. It is a second city within a second city. It doesn’t have the elaborate temple-style architecture of San Francisco’s tourist-attracting enclave. No giant tiled animals announce the borders of the place; no strings of Chinese lanterns hang across the streets.

There are restaurants, but Oakland’s Chinatown makes most of its living by selling ingredients: hand-cut noodles, plump dumplings, live seafood, medicinal herbs, and, yes, lots of produce. Giant daikon, a long white type of radish. Pickled turnips sold in rancid-smelling plastic vats. Persimmons. Lychees. Apples, oranges, grapes, bananas.

Amid this abundance, of course, was a lot of waste. Our pilfering from Chinatown’s Dumpsters and green bins became a botanical education. There were so many different kinds of greens. Bok choy and Thai basil and Napa cabbage I could identify without trouble. But what was this long, thin-leaved thing? This giant watery-looking leaf? This oniony-smelling grass? Kangkong (water spinach). Choy sum (Chinese cabbage). Nira grass (a kind of chives).

We were trolling the garbage cans for the rabbits. Sure, they dutifully ate their alfalfa pellets, but I had noticed they were happiest when we gave them scraps from our table (apple cores, damaged lettuce leaves) and our garden (aphidy kale leaves, carrot tops). One night, after a Chinatown meal of wonton soup and too many Tsingtaos, Bill and I boldly flipped open a sidewalk green bin. We were just curious. Bill pawed through the bin. It was filled with fresh-looking greens, some newspaper, moldy oranges, more greens.

“Can we eat those?” he asked me, holding up a rumpled cabbage leaf. I imagined actually cooking food out of a Dumpster, grimaced, and shook my head no. Isn’t that what Charles Manson and his followers did?

Then we both remembered at the same time: the rabbits. It turned out that they loved the bok choy, radishes, apples, and pears from the garbage cans. Anything the rabbits didn’t like (papaya, melons), we gave to the chickens.

Now we were going to Chinatown twice a week to load up on rabbit and chicken food. A few late-night stragglers on Webster Street regarded us—two fairly clean white people wearing headlamps and stuffing leafy greens into buckets—with curiosity. A man approached me and handed me an empty Coca-Cola can. I shook my head at him and resumed sorting through the apples, trying to find unbruised ones for the rabbits. Bill, meanwhile, yelled for me to come over and check out a particularly bountiful bin. We turned the corner and scoped out 10th Street, carrying our swaying buckets like milk maids gone a-milking.

If they could have, I liked to think, the chickens and the rabbits would’ve hopped or flown over here to 10th and Webster just as most of the restaurants closed and stood there, with furry paws and scaly legs, Dumpster diving. They would hear, as we did, the laughter wafting out of the open windows above us, the smell of cigarette smoke mingling with the odor of fetid fruit.

An ancient Chinese lady wearing elbow-high plastic gloves walked by us. She might have been the same woman Bobby had scared off from our recycling bins. She surveyed what we were doing and raised a thin eyebrow. The Oakland Tribune tower, home to the local newspaper, loomed above us, watching. We snickered, packed our car full of goodies for our animals, and left in a puff of vegetable-oil smoke.

Once home, I delivered their share of the harvest to the rabbits, who by now had greatly increased their numbers. Simon had finally figured out which end to approach and had gotten the hang of sex. And I soon discovered that he wasn’t, as I had initially worried, shooting blanks.

A month after her visit to the love cage, the brown and white doe started to act funny. Hoping babies were on the way, I put a nesting box—a double-length milk crate lined with an old wool sweater—in her cage. The doe pulled fur from her underbelly and made a soft nest with it. This behavior is called kindling.

A few days later, Bill pointed to some movement in the airy-hairball nest. When the mama hopped out for a drink of water, we counted the kits. There were eleven rosy pink babies. They looked like worms, eyes closed, squirming blindly around. They grew up to be kittenish, and ranged from pure brown like Simon to pure white to spotted.

One of them didn’t make it. The doe abandoned it outside the warm nesting box. Bill discovered the body, cold and dead, on the floor of the deck. It had such an expression of anguish. Its mouth was wide open in a primal scream; its legs were frozen in the motion of kicking. A few white strands of its mother’s hair clung to it. Unsure what to do with it, I stuck it in the freezer.

Holding the Chinatown bucket now, I distributed the food to the three females, all of whom had by now kindled and given birth. After filling their feeders with green alfalfa pellets, I handed out apples, one in each cage, then added a heap of bok choy. They fell on the food, seated on their haunches, nibbling, ears quivering.

I tossed Simon less food than the females—he didn’t have kits to feed, and I had heard if the males get too fat, they can’t breed. Then I went downstairs to unload the rest of the boxes and buckets of veggies from the car.

The chickens were asleep and would get theirs in the morning. The hens loved it when we dumped out a bucket of greens and split open a too-ripe melon for them. They went straight to work, clucking and pecking at the bok choy and melon flesh. They ignored the pale, powdery chicken food.

Their eggs had started to taste richer and the yolks had turned a darker orange since we began our Chinatown runs. Just as exciting: my paychecks from my various jobs were starting to last much longer.

After I closed the trunk of the car, I went out to check on the garden. Saved from the imaginary bulldozers, it seemed more miraculous than ever. It was early June, and the garden beds were stuffed to the point of spewing produce on contact. The peas I had planted in February had set fruit, the fava beans were flashing their green pods, lettuces and chards wallowed in the spring mud, and the new tomato starts were taking hold. It was a lot of food. I had also cracked through concrete to plant two more apple trees and a Bartlett pear, and I had grafted plum scions to the existing plum trees.

I could hear the rabbits upstairs: a glug from the waterer, their nibbling noises. The sounds of satisfaction floated out from the deck and onto the 2-8. There was a new billboard up just down the street. WE BUY HOUSES.

I felt young and healthy, and nostalgic for the present. If urban farming was a competitive sport, I felt as if I was in the zone, at the top of my game, ready for any challenge. If I turned out like my mom, these would be the days that I would recount to my niece—and perhaps my future children—ad nauseam.

CHAPTER EIGHTEEN

A
pledge to eat exclusively from a July garden in the Bay Area, I reasoned, is a little like a mute person taking the vow of silence at a Vipasana-meditation retreat. I wasn’t worried.

The rules were simple:

1.
Only food from the garden and the farm animals.

2.
Foraged fruit from neighborhood trees OK.

3.
No food from Dumpsters (except to feed the animals).

4.
Items previously grown and preserved allowed.

5.
Bartering allowed, but only for crops grown by other farmers.

In mid-June, I told all my friends about my approaching escapade in eating. This, I felt, was critical to its success—and commencement, for that matter. We giggled about my bravado, my moxie, my mad urban-farming skills. While I knew they would be cheering for me, they would also be keeping tabs. Back in March, when I had conceived of this harebrained idea, July had seemed so far away. Now that it was right around the corner, I was starting to think that my experiment in self-sufficiency wouldn’t be much fun.

The week before it began, I ate everything in sight. In my excess, I pretended that I was A. J. Liebling in Paris. But I was in America, so I gorged from the buffet of cultures this country hosts. Chinese food, relishing that tarlike sweet-and-sour sauce, the pillowlike dumplings. Sushi. Small chile verde tacos from a roach coach in East Oakland, the perfect blend of pork simmered with green chiles. Falafel, creamy baba ghanoush, tabouli. Every morning I had a huge mug of coffee (sometimes two), brimming with half-and-half. I popped vats of popcorn, scoffed at greens (plenty of time for those later), inhaled chocolate bars, and drank lapsong souchong, a smoky tea whose flavor would be impossible to re-create. This weeklong binge left me a little heavier than my usual fighting weight. In a thrift store, I stood on a scale: 142 pounds.

The evening before June turned into July, I walked out into the garden to survey my future. In
Walden,
Henry David Thoreau wrote, “I was determined to know beans.” I too was determined to know beans. I admired their sturdy leaves emerging from the black earth, their raspy stems that wound around whatever kind of pole I could find (currently, a curtain rod), the succulent flowers, and then the emergence of small beans, which could be plucked, blanched, and served plain—because the 100-yard diet didn’t allow olive oil or balsamic vinegar.

While Thoreau, no food snob, was happy to cultivate a monotonous crop of beans on his three acres, I was determined to know other vegetables during my month of self-sufficiency on my tenth of an acre. And so I had planted sweet corn, Stowell’s Evergreen, which was now about four feet tall and just coming into flower. I hoped some tasty niblets would be mine toward the end of the month. Brandywine tomatoes, too, and the green ones on the vine seemed like a good sign. Prodigious amounts of lettuce, collard, kale, and cabbage had sprouted up all over the garden. I had made a second planting of fava beans. More beans. Henry, did you know these lovelies, brought by Italians to this country? The onions were swelling, as were the beets. Potato vines were peeking out from under a mat of straw. The squash plants had a few young fruits, as did the cucumbers. Herbs like marjoram, oregano, rosemary, and thyme were flourishing.

The domesticated-animal kingdom was a realm in which Thoreau never dabbled. He scoffed that farms are “a great grease spot, redolent of buttermilk!” In my beloved grease spot, one of the chickens was laying an egg in what she thought was a clandestine nest under the bougainvillea. Seven ducks and two geese that I had ordered from Murray McMurray that spring were fattening in an open-air pen in the lot. Since they couldn’t be trapped in a pen by an opossum or some other predator, I wagered that they would be safe, and a good source of protein. The young rabbits on the deck had gotten plump.

In my larder, I had jars of jam, stewed peaches, honey from last year’s harvest, and pickles galore. My food-security future was bright. But as I assessed the food growing and thriving on the farm, a dark word crossed my mind, and I couldn’t shake it. I walked upstairs and tried to forget. It felt like a gun to my head.

Carbohydrates.

I would have to ration the potatoes. Another potential problem crossed my mind, then another. Crop failure. Pests that kill plants and animals. Someone could steal all my food, an expansion on the great watermelon theft from the previous year. I peered out at the garden from my window. It was dark, and a wind had picked up. I could make out the cornstalks waving and the plum and apple trees rocking in the breeze. I felt a little queasy. As June evaporated at the stroke of midnight, suddenly my bold experiment, my attempt to prove myself as a farmer, seemed like the mission of an imbecile.

The next morning, as I picked a few apples to eat for breakfast, my first caffeine-withdrawal headache flashed across my temple. I had to go lie down.

Lying on my bed, with the morning sun filtering in and a breeze swirling the curtains into the sickroom, I wondered: How can I get out of this? It felt as if a monster had grabbed me and was going to hold me here for thirty—oh, no, why did I pick July?—thirty-one days. Why hadn’t I weaned myself off coffee? Then another dreadful question: What’s for lunch?

That afternoon Bill and I went to a friend’s barbecue. Though I had eaten a jar of stewed peaches, a green salad, and at least ten ounces of honey, the smell of the grilling meat nearly knocked me down. Two yoga teachers I vaguely knew beckoned me over.

“I have the worst headache,” I explained before they had the chance to read my aura.

“Give me your hand,” Baxter said.

He pinched the area between my thumb and index finger. My headache went away. It was replaced by a growling stomach.

“I’m off coffee,” I said with a sigh.

“You didn’t do it gradually?” Raven asked.

I shook my head. Yoga people have been telling me for years that I should give up coffee, that it’s full of toxins and other bad things. But when they suggest that I should stop drinking coffee, I want to tell them maybe they should saw off their legs.

Baxter gave me back my hand. The headache returned.

I looked around the party. There they were, my friends, standing next to the grill, dishing up salads, drinking beer. I had the sinking realization that social activities all revolve around sharing food. The act of setting up my 100-yard diet had turned me into an alien visiting from planet Weird in the solar system Healthy.

But then again, everyone at the party was on some kind of Bay Area diet kick anyway. The gluten-intolerant munched on ears of corn in the corner. The vegans had their own grill set up with toasting tofu. The raw-food vegans were sipping on freshly macheted green coconuts. The pescatarians were shoving ceviche into their faces. Defining ourselves by what we eat—that’s what we do for fun around here.

I was sure that I could find a freshairian or a locavore to share my pain with but instead decided to leave early. I found Bill, an unapologetic omnivore, moving from grill to grill, stuffing sausages and ribs and veggie burgers into his mouth. I ripped a piece of watermelon out of his hand and insisted that, really, we couldn’t stay another moment.

Later that day, I ordered three tea plants—
Camellia sinensis
—over the phone.

“I want the gallon size,” I gritted out as the perky woman took my order. I needed a quick harvest.

“We’ll include recipes for how to make tea,” she assured me. The rest of the day passed in a painful haze.

On day two, I made several unfortunate discoveries.

With dreams of latkes dancing in my slow-moving, uncaffeinated brain, I made my way out to the garden with a shovel and a bucket. I have a half dozen potato zones in the veggie garden. One sprawled out of a neglected compost pile. I imagined the fat little crusters down below mixing with the dried-up leaves and stalks that had been breaking down over the years. A carbohydrate dream.

In February I had nestled the potatoes, organic blues, bought at the grocery store, at the bottom of the compost bin. Over their round shoulders I dumped fava bean leftovers, hay cleaned out from the chicken area, spent pea vines. As the green potato stalks emerged I bundled them with more straw and green matter. In
Matthew Biggs’s Complete Book of Vegetables,
the British garden writer advised, “New potatoes are harvested when the flowers are blooming; larger ones once the foliage dies back.” (He also mentioned that Marie Antoinette wore potato blossoms in her hair.)

I knew it was early, my potatoes hadn’t yet blossomed, but Mr. Biggs had no idea how carb starved I was. A plate of mashed potatoes. If I could eat that, I would be happy for the rest of the day.

But now that I was digging, the plant, I had to admit, didn’t look very healthy. I peered closer. Oh, no. Potato bugs, hundreds of them, were gnawing on the leaves and stalk. I plunged the shovel into the dirt and brought up a generous scoop. Grappling through the dirt, I found exactly two purple potatoes. Small ones. The size of marbles. The mother potato was deflated from this effort, and a few pale shoots slumped off of her girth.

I surveyed the rest of the potato plants tucked here and there around the garden. Instead of a seeing bountiful plants whose secret underground parts would get me through this experiment, I saw only unproductive freeloaders. What I had hoped was an iceberg of carbohydrates, with plenty down below, was reduced to an ice cube bobbing in a swimming pool. It would be a very small crop indeed. I carefully placed the marbles in my bucket and went upstairs to prepare my feast.

While the spuds fried in a dry cast-iron pan, I paced the living room, wondering what the hell I was supposed to eat for the rest of the month. During the Irish potato boom, people had plenty of food because potatoes grow easily—and, more than that, they make you feel full. Without carbs, satiety would be a distant memory.

Then I noticed our mantel. For the past two years, some corncobs I grew my first year of squat farming had lingered up there, along with a set of deer antlers and a white orchid plant. Indian corn, grown and saved for decoration. Once mere objects—now, as I gazed up at the multicolored cobs, I saw food. Carb food.

And so I did something I’d never done before. I ate an item of home decor. From a yellow-and-blue-checked ear of corn, I carefully pried out the individual kernels from their cobby home and piled them onto the table. As I loosened each kernel I felt like a prairie woman or an Indian squaw. I whispered thanks to my past self, the carbohydrate provider, who had thought to save those ears. One cob yielded a handful of corn. I deeply wanted cornmeal pancakes. But I didn’t have a metate, the traditional stone grinder that Native Americans used, and I wasn’t about to destroy my electric coffee grinder.

But I did have a Spong hand-cranked coffee grinder I’d bought a long time ago, out of nostalgia. It’s made of metal painted black and red, with a little removable pan that catches the grounds. My mom’s artsy friend Barb always hand-ground her coffee. Barb wore bohemian outfits (men’s clothes, flowing dresses with skeleton patterns), had red hair down to her butt, and once had a pet crow. I remember visiting her kitchen in Idaho as a child. Barb and my mom flitted around the kitchen, laughing and glad to see each other again. My sister and I, standing on a chair, took turns grinding the dark beans for their morning coffee.

When, a few years ago, I spotted a similar grinder at a basement sale of an Italian imported-foods shop, I couldn’t resist. And of course, I hadn’t used it since. Who wants to labor, precaffeinated, over a hand-grinder for ten minutes in the morning? Yet now this grinder would be my salvation.

I carefully placed the kernels into the Spong. It was as if I were a kid again, standing on a chair and grinding. Only this time, I had my full weight propped up against the table so it wouldn’t shake as I watched the kernels mill around in the hopper. But instead of the fetching aroma of fresh-ground coffee, I had the powdery residue of almost pure starch.

I’ve made cornmeal pancakes before, a family recipe adapted from
Joy of Cooking:
Add boiling water to cornmeal and let it rest. Add baking powder, salt, milk, an egg, and some melted butter, then mix. Of those ingredients, I had only the hot water and the egg. After letting an eighth of a cup of boiling water soak the yellow grain, I cracked an egg in, whipped it about, and poured the mixture into three blobs on a cast-iron pan.