Farm City Read online

  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 e
gg: 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.

  It took me a full five minutes of scrubbing to remove all the slug slime from my hands. Like a low-stakes Lady Macbeth, I couldn’t shake the sensation that they were still soiled. But I wasn’t conflicted: I felt great. I killed so that others might live. Death is all around us, even in an innocent watermelon. You just have to know where to look.

  CHAPTER FIVE

  A visitor used the word “unhygienic” to describe the almost full-grown chickens and turkeys living in our house. She had a point. Our record player was coated with a golden dust I had never seen before. Bill complained about the noise they made—even he, deep sleeper extraordinaire, couldn’t sleep through their crack-of-dawn racket anymore. When I read something about getting chest infections from living in close quarters with chickens, I finally moved them outside.

  I was reluctant for a reason. We already had chickens. Since they are territorial and had an established pecking order, it was going to be a brutal smack-down for the little ones. So I slowly introduced the turkey poults and the new chickens to the big chickens. First I kept the new ones in a large wire pen. The big chickens thought this was some kind of gladiator event and lined up breast to breast to peek through the wire at the newbies and get in a sucker peck whenever possible. After a few days of this, they all knew one another, and I unleashed my chickens and turkeys into the cruel world of urban chickendom.

  They fared well. A few of them got their asses kicked. One of the big chickens, a beautiful, normally docile Buff Orpington, body-slammed one of the poults and mercilessly pecked its head until it yelled uncle in turkey. That’s how chickens do it. They establish dominance, an order, that every bird agrees upon, and then they get back to what they do best: pooping and eating.

  Back in Seattle, our first chicken was an Americauna named Agnes. She was a lesbian chicken who crowed like a rooster but also laid eggs with bluish shells. At the time—the late 1990s—I was working for a company that published a book called The Encyclopedia of Country Living, by Carla Emery, a how-to guide for would-be homesteaders. I laughed as I thumbed through the book in my cubicle in downtown Seattle. How to dig a root cellar, shoot a pig, and castrate a goat—not things that I would be doing anytime soon. But the sections on how to can vegetables, grow pumpkins, and keep chickens—these were things that even a city person with a backyard could do, I realized.

  Keeping backyard chickens was more than socially acceptable then. Martha Stewart had them; PBS aired a documentary about poultry fanciers; and in Seattle, having chickens in the city was a badge of progressive moxie. Finally driven over the edge by Emery’s book, I bought Agnes and three full-grown Golden Laced Wyandottes, beautiful gold- and red-feathered chickens who laid big brown eggs.

  These hens provided more eggs than we knew what to do with. I started to breeze past the egg section in the supermarket. Cold, white eggs were an affront compared to our warm brown- and blue-shelled eggs, so fresh they didn’t even need to be refrigerated.

  After two years of egg-laying service, Agnes was killed by a dear friend’s dog. We held a formal funeral, during which I distinctly remember swooning. A few weeks later the same dog dug up Agnes from her final resting spot and presented horrified backyard picnickers the ossified corpse as a gift. My beloved chickens were pets, almost human; I had never thought of them as meat birds.

  What I didn’t know then is that keeping chickens in Seattle had placed me squarely on the path toward urban farming. Chickens are the gateway urban-farm animal. Because of them, I would soon be learning how to kill and pluck a duck and a turkey. If smoking marijuana led to snorting cocaine, then chickens eventually led to raising meat birds.

  After I released the birds into the backyard, I officially updated our chalkboard tally:

  3 turkeys

  3 ducks

  1 goose

  14 chickens

  50,000 bees (they were doing really well)

  74 flies (ditto)

  2 monkeys

  A few days later, I came outside to find Lana, her sister, and her guinea pig, Maya, in the backyard. They had come over to see the new feathered flock. Lana was in love.

  “Wow, who’s that?” she shouted, pointing at the black turkey as she squatted down to admire his shiny, iridescent feathers. Glad to the get attention, he puffed them all out and made a huffing noise. His black tail feathers stood at attention.

  “That’s one of the turkeys,�
� I answered. “He doesn’t have a name,” I added pointedly—real farmers don’t name their meat animals. Another turkey, a small white and black female, was eating some corn. I couldn’t find the other male. Now that I thought about it, I hadn’t seen him all morning.

  The preening black turkey glided in front of Lana. His head blushed blue. The sunlight made his feathers glow. “I don’t want to hear why,” she said, not looking at me.

  Lana was a strict vegetarian. I understood—I had once lived a meat-free life. Starting in high school with the refusal of a steak, I had forced my sister and mom to go vegetarian with me. I happily ate cheese sandwiches through my first two years of college and dutifully made earnest, bean-heavy meals from the Moosewood Cookbook.

  My fall from grace came in Las Vegas. There with friends over a college spring break, I looked at a Circus Circus breakfast buffet that included a ceiling-high stack of bacon and felt dizzy with desire. My years of resolve floated away, and I ate fifteen pieces in one sitting. I felt simultaneously awful and wonderful. Though the top of my mouth felt as if I had eaten a can of Crisco, all that protein gave me vivid dreams, and I had the energy of one of the Bull Ship Pirates from the hourly Treasure Island show.

  The next day, strolling down the Bellagio’s fake Greek pavilion and thinking about my next meat binge, I started to worry about the origins of the pig meat I’d eaten.

  The PETA videos and the anti-factory farm comic books that had been my vegetarianism’s inspiration weren’t easily forgotten—the wheezing pigs getting slapped around by mean (and probably underpaid) workers; the live baby chicks piled on top of one another in the Dumpster; the turkeys hanging from a conveyor belt as workers slit their throats one after another, as casually as turning a page in a book. In these settings, living beings—animals who love sunshine, fresh food, and taking naps in hay—became meat machines. In meat factories, the animals weren’t allowed to be truly alive, and that was wrong. Lana and I agreed on this point. However, I couldn’t believe, as Lana did, that animals were like little people wearing fur coats.