Farm City Read online

  Lana held the guinea pig up to the turkey. “Harold, meet Maya,” she said.

  “Harold and Maude,” Lana’s sister said, laughing.

  Suddenly my turkeys had names.

  There’s a weed called pellitory that grows all over GhostTown. It can grow in the tiniest crack in the sidewalk and flourish. My chickens loved it. I noticed this fact when we put our first four Oakland chickens in our pellitory-choked backyard and they chewed down every shred of the weed they could find.

  I then picked all the pellitory that grew in our lot, and the birds literally came running toward me, they loved the snack so much. With fourteen chickens, plus the turkeys and the waterfowl, who loved pellitory, too, I desperately needed another source. Luckily, all over our neighborhood, pellitory grew alongside houses, in lawns, and through chain-link fences in abandoned lots. It was there for the taking. But first I would have to get over my fear of walking around our neighborhood.

  When we first moved to GhostTown, I wouldn’t walk around at all. Our landlords lived four blocks away but insisted, for safety’s sake, that we mail the rent checks. Lana had been right that the 2-8 was like Sesame Street, but beyond it, all bets were off. GhostTown was a gauntlet of crackheads, homeless guys, and prostitutes. There were drive-by shootings almost weekly. When venturing out, I either rode my bike or drove my car. I never walked down the streets.

  But I had noticed a patch of pellitory growing along the abandoned brick building on the corner. And I had read in The Encyclopedia of Country Living that meat birds who eat greens will taste better. I became motivated. I stuck a toe in: drifted to the end of our safe street and found myself on the main drag, where the weeds grew and often bullets flew. As I pulled up weeds various bleary-eyed citizens wandered by, stared at me for a minute, and then said hello or good morning. Even people I had written off as totally fucked up—like the scabby blonde who was always spare-changing everyone—were quite friendly. I was a little ashamed that it had taken me two years to finally venture out into our neighborhood on foot.

  On a bike ride the next day, after my successful harvest, I happened to notice the pellitory on 29th Street—a busy thoroughfare that attracted a lot of pot-smoking teens. There was a constant layer of debris on the street, and at night dark-windowed cars idled on all the corners. But 29th also had Durant Park, a little green spot where the pellitory grew lushly. In order to get to these weeds, I had to get over my fear of the guys who presided on that corner.

  One night, drunk at the Blue Wednesday speakeasy, I explained to Lana my problem: wanting the weeds but fearful of the thugs. Lana worked at a local teen drop-in center and had lived in our neighborhood for fifteen years. She knew everyone, even the guys who intimidated me.

  “They’re just babies, Novella,” she said to me. “Imagine growing up and everyone is scared of you. Pretty soon you use that power—you become what everyone is afraid of.”

  Bolstered by Lana’s insight, the next day I gathered two plastic buckets and went out for my maiden voyage to 29th Street. As I rounded the corner of 28th Street I took on my best don’t-fuck-with-me attitude. At least I was trying, though I’m not sure anyone carrying two clattering buckets can be entirely tough. I walked down the sidewalk. A group of ten guys slouched on the corner, blocking my way. “Babies, babies, babies,” I muttered to myself.

  “Excuse me,” I said. “Hello.”

  The group parted, and a few of them said hello back.

  As I walked through the crowd I looked up at the tall teenagers and smiled. Lana had been right. I harvested a shitload of weeds at the park and brought them home for the birds. On my way back, I realized that, carrying the buckets of weeds, I must have appeared just as crazy and eccentric as anyone else on the streets of GhostTown.

  One hot morning in the middle of summer, I grabbed my buckets and headed to the park. As I clattered past Brother’s Market the shopkeeper, Mosed, waved from behind the counter.

  I turned onto 29th Street. None of the teen guys were on the corner. At Durant Park, a circle of candles burned on the sidewalk. Just the day before, the sound of gunshots had echoed through the neighborhood. Bill and I had stopped what we were doing—he was working on a car, I was sowing some lettuce seeds—and peered down MLK. Police cars came, then an ambulance. Now a T-shirt, attached to the park’s gate, “Rest in Peace 1985-2005” written on it with a Sharpie, marked the death. A few teddy bears and empty Jack Daniel’s bottles sat next to the candles.

  I stepped past the altar and began gathering weeds. A little kid in diapers across the street watched me from behind a gate. Pellitory is soft green with red stems. Young and pliable, the stems break off easily, but the plant’s strong root system ensures its survival.

  I worked the area underneath a eucalyptus, pulling up handfuls of the weed. I wondered whether Lana had known the victim. He would have been five when she moved here. She probably saw him riding his bicycle around. And then, with no opportunities, he eked out a living on the corner. Maybe spent some time in jail. Who knows what happened.

  Tiny burrs from the pellitory dusted my sweatshirt sleeves. My hands were slightly wet from pulling up the dewy plants. I had two bucketfuls, plenty. I waved goodbye to the baby at the gate, then turned the corner and walked back past Brother’s. Two loud men paused outside the store to crack open their brown-bagged cans of beer. It was 8:30 a.m. After seeing the altar, I could understand the logic of such a decision.

  I put down the buckets and went in. The store had two aisles. Gum, candy, chips, cans of beans, and plastic bags of pasta were on one shelf; the other was devoted to alcohol: jugs of Gallo wine, Wild Irish Rose, Boone’s Farm. I grabbed a six-pack of Tecate—for later—and placed my purchase on the counter. Two Yemeni men sat there; behind them were batteries, phone cards, and cigarettes.

  Mosed smiled and rang me up. He has dyed red hair—vivid red, not natural at all—and a goatee. His wife, in a head scarf, stood in the doorway that led to their apartment upstairs.

  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 le
aves, 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 an
d 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.