Farm City: The Education of an Urban Farmer (25 page)

Willow and I piled into the car and headed north to the chicken farm. We thought this would be more fun than ordering chicks through the mail. She needed birds for her backyard-garden project.

Willow had recently gone to Caracas, Venezuela, a hotbed of urban agriculture. In addition to several massive urban farms in downtown Caracas, Willow learned about a government-sponsored food-growing program for
los ranchos,
the squatter villages in the hills. Along with encouraging some small-animal husbandry, the government provided people with hydroponic grow tables so they could raise their own vegetables and fruit on the decks of their cinderblock houses.

Willow saw parallels between
los ranchos
and our ghetto, so she developed and fund-raised to create a backyard-garden program. In West Oakland, where Willow worked, there were no grocery stores within a two-mile radius, and nary a corner market that sold produce. If you wanted to eat an apple in West Oakland, you were looking at an hour’s journey at the least. It was no surprise, then, that residents ate corner-store food—candy bars, chips, and cookies—instead of fresh produce. Instead of taking a bus to the supermarket for veggies and fruit, Willow proposed that low-income people in Oakland grow and harvest their own food in their backyards.

I had the chance to watch the building of one of the backyard gardens. Willow and crew arrived with supplies—wood, soil, and plants. After some concentrated weeding, the crew placed a wooden raised bed (similar to the ones in our garden), filled it with soil donated from the garden center, and then planted all manner of seedlings (collards, tomatoes, celery) that had been grown in the City Slicker greenhouse. Volunteers would return to show the backyard gardeners how to harvest their bounty and plant new seedlings.

Now Willow wanted to add chickens and eggs to the mix. It would be the same model: the crew would bring in a premade coop and the chickens, and drop off the chicken feed for their clients.

The late-May heat of Vacaville blasted through Willow’s windows. I was just glad to get out of town and not think about the pigs for a few hours. They had quickly taken over most of my mental bandwidth.

“Have you heard of the urban farming system they had in Paris?” Willow asked. I had been telling her about my latest foray into the hills for horse manure. The whole squat lot was filled with raised beds—we had reached full capacity. Bill, always curious, brought the pigs some of the manure, and they gleefully chomped it down. Was there anything they wouldn’t eat?

“No, what is it?” I said.

“In the middle of Paris in the nineteenth century—right in the middle of the city—huge tracts of public land were devoted to market gardens,” Willow said. “They would scoop up the manure from the horse-drawn carriages and use it in these massive urban gardens. They also used cloches to grow stuff during the winter. It provided a huge amount of produce.”

This is why I loved hanging out with Willow. Where did she get this stuff? In this case, she had read about the Parisian gardens in her favorite magazine,
Small Farmer’s Journal
. I later looked it up—the urban farms were mostly two-acre plots, many in an area of the city known as the Marais. At their height, 1,800 of these little plots grew an annual total of 100,000 tons of vegetables. So much produce, they actually exported the excess vegetables to England, Spain, and Portugal.

“This is it!” Willow said as we pulled into an acorn-strewn driveway.

The chicken lady, a mousy woman with a perm, gave us a tour. Hers wasn’t a “real farm,” more of a suburban place that had once been rural. The whole house and yard had been turned into a chicken-breeding operation. The chickens were kept in fairly small runs, sequestered, I guessed, to prevent unwanted breed crossing.

A Jersey cow lingered in the backyard, which you could see had once been rolling countryside but now was being covered with town homes. Next to the woman’s house was one for turkeys, made out of an old shipping container, and five apricot trees. The turkeys—like the chickens, also heritage breeds, a few Royal Palms, some Bourbon Reds—pecked at the fallen fruit.

“How much do you sell those for?” I said, thinking of Harold and my latest batch of turkeys, which I had ordered through Murray McMurray again.

“Fifty dollars,” she said.

“Plucked and cleaned?” I asked.

“Yup.”

What a bargain. I knew how much work that was. She should charge twice that.

The chicken lady explained that she was feeding the chickens and turkeys no commercial feed whatsoever. The turkeys had the run of the farm; the chickens were fed with whole wheat soaked and sprouted in water. Willow and I got very excited—we were always looking for new tricks.

“I won’t feed them any of that soy feed, so it’s the best, healthiest meat and eggs,” she said. “I can’t advertise on Craigslist, though. Animal liberationists,” she whispered. “At first I was worried about you two.”

I laughed, but I knew what she was talking about. I had started blogging about my farm, and my sister had warned me about animal liberationists, too. So far, I had gotten only a few angry comments from a woman from the House Rabbit Society who kept rabbits as pets.

A guy, a vegan, had posted to ask, “Why have you chosen to raise and kill animals on your farm rather than perhaps raise animals as a part of a community petting zoo for children or a home for rescued and abused animals? In both the latter cases you could derive the benefits of domesticated animals for your plants without killing them.” Who, I had responded, would pay for this elaborate petting zoo? I did like the idea of having people meet their meat, though.

“They’re like terrorists,” the chicken lady said. Willow and I looked at each other. Now, that was going a little too far.

“I’ve got two pigs,” I said. I wanted to reassure the lady, but at the same time, I had a sneaking suspicion that she had a Bush-Cheney bumper sticker lurking on one of her cars. She was not my people.

“Potbellies?” She smiled, assuming I must be raising pet pigs.

“Durocs.”

She nodded her head vaguely. “OK,” she said. Even she—a woman with a cow in her backyard and several egg incubators in her carport—thought I was a nutball.

“She feeds them from the Dumpsters in the city!” Willow, my biggest fan, said.

“Uh-huh,” the woman said. I could tell she was ready for us to leave. So were we.

Willow and I picked out some of the rare-breed chicks: some Chanteclers (big golden chickens), Langshans (mixed colors with feathered legs), and a handful of Araucanas (the kind who lay pretty Easter-egg-colored eggs). They were older than the ones Murray McMurray usually sent and looked quite healthy.

I snuck a peek into the woman’s house while Willow wrote her check. Yep, it was as disorganized as mine. Egg cartons piled up on her counters; feathers wafted to the floor. Now that I was part of the farming club, I had come to the conclusion that farming isn’t without its downsides. Like my filthy house, for instance. Between my various real jobs and animal husbandry, there was just no time for cleaning. The floor was dirty from all my tracking in of animal droppings and wood shavings. Hay was strewn all over the front stairs. Sticky beekeeping equipment was piled up around the house. For some reason I thought of Lana when I considered my messy house: it was a sign of a busy, full life.

I had volunteered to house Willow’s chicks until they were ready to be adopted by her low-income backyard farmers. When we returned from Vacaville, we set the new chicks loose in the chicken tractor that Willow had built. A chicken tractor is not a poultry-driven farm vehicle, as the name suggests; it’s a predator-proof chicken-wire pen that has wheels and can be moved to different parts of the farm. Usually it is used postharvest: You wheel the tractor to a recently harvested area, so the chickens will scratch at the leftover crop, stir up the dirt, and drop their nutrient-rich poop everywhere. I set up the tractor under the plum tree, where the chicks could peck at leaf litter and grass.

Figuring that it was warm enough outside, I put my latest batch of Murray McMurray turkey poults, which I had been keeping in a warm brooder, in the tractor with the new Vacaville chicks. There were four poults—one white, three brownish-red—and they had been in the brooder for several weeks. Suddenly released into the world of sunshine and fresh air, the chicks and turkey poults set to work scratching and eating bugs and grass. I smiled. Soon Willow’s chicks would be parsed out all over West Oakland. I felt a little like an animal liberationist.

CHAPTER THIRTY-ONE

The pigs were attracting a fan base. Besides my friends, the kids from the neighborhood had taken to visiting them. I don’t know how the kids heard about the piggies, but word must have spread.

“Can we see the pigs?” a group of five ten-year-olds asked me one morning at the gate.

“Sure,” I said, and led them back to the sty. I had just fed them their breakfast, and the boy pig, whom I had started called Big Guy, was bogarting the trough, eating plums as quickly as he could. His neck, I noticed, was starting to get a ripple of fat underneath. The girl pig, whom I had “named” Little Girl, quietly gnawed on a cantaloupe that had rolled into a corner. She stepped on the melon with a dainty hoof to hold it in place while she sucked up cantaloupe juices.

“Wow!!!” The kids cheered, pressing their faces against the gate.

“I never seen a pig before,” the oldest kid, named Dante, said. He had light brown skin and braided hair.

“Stinks!” one of them stated.

Dante waved his hand in front of Big Guy. Thinking the kid’s arm might be toothsome, the pig sniffed at his fingers, gave a little nibble.

“Hey!! He bit me!” All the kids screamed and ran. But they were laughing. It was summertime, and this is what kids in our neighborhood did all day: wander around looking for something—anything—to do.

“Bill told me you got rabbits,” Dante said when I walked back out front.

“That’s right,” I said. Bill worked at home, so he knew everyone.

“Can we see ’em!! Can we?! Can we?” they all yelled.

“OK, OK,” I said, and I took them upstairs to the deck. I felt a little nervous, because I didn’t want to get sued or accused of anything, but again, these kids were used to just wandering the streets—their parents couldn’t be that worried about them.

Did we have rabbits? We had hella baby rabbits. All three of Nico’s bunnies had given birth, so it was a full house indeed. Nico was back from Ireland, but she was working on making a documentary, so she hadn’t claimed the rabbits yet.

I handed each kid a baby rabbit. The rabbit kits looked like kittens or puppies. They were tiny, with fur as soft as pussy willows, some spotted, others solid brown. The kids did just what I would have done: They held the soft little things up to their checks, snuggled them, and kissed them. A gang of small, scrappy kids from the inner city cuddling with baby rabbits might have been the cutest thing I had ever seen.

“I want one,” said Dante.

“Me too, me too!” the others yelled.

“Well, they are a lot of work,” I said. “You have to feed them and make sure they have water—”

“OK,” Dante said, ready to sign up.

“And you have to ask your mother,” I said. I put the kits back with their mama rabbit, who made grunting noises and started licking the babies. Groans went all around.

Their ten-year-old’s attention spans maxed out, I sent them off to play. I looked outside a bit later and saw that they were sword-fighting in the garden with some bamboo stakes. My friend Max came over and saw them. “If I were a little kid growing up here,” he said, “I’d be over here every day, too.”

In a way, I did have a little petting zoo, just as my vegan blogger had suggested.

That night, Bill and I went to Chinatown to get the next day’s pig food.

“Do they like bitter melon?” Bill asked.

We were going through the green bins like the professionals we had become. “No. Let’s just get the bakery stuff and peaches and greens.” I had become the expert, because I tipped the buckets every day and observed what the pigs left to sink into an ever-growing pile of rotting muck in their yard. I expected that this bounty would cause a rat infestation. Oddly, I hadn’t seen a rat since the day we brought the pigs home.

I had read that pigs are the best converters of food into meat over time. While rabbits efficiently turn grass into meat, they can grow only so large. A whopping 35 percent of what pigs eat becomes stored fat and meat. They just keep growing. Compare that to 11 percent from sheep or cattle. And, I had read, pigs will eat almost anything, with gusto. This I witnessed on a daily basis.

The next morning, I upended two containers of veggies and fish guts, wontons and fruit, into their trough. After a few weeks of fish guts, the pigs didn’t seem quite as excited about the protein slop. Within moments, though, they licked up the last bit and gazed up at me, wanting more.

“Bouf, bouf,”
Big Guy called out. He stood his ground, his red shoulders curving into a perfect half-circle, his floppy ears almost shrouding his eyes. The pigs were growing at a monstrously fast rate. Little Girl, always more polite, nuzzled the chain-link dog gate that kept them contained in our backyard. I touched her nose; it was slimy but somehow muscular. She gave me a little love nibble.

Not only did they want more food; they wanted better food. And I noticed that they preferred cooked food over raw. Lately, if they didn’t like something, they would leave it in the trough to rot in the sun. We were going to have to upgrade.

Driven by the pigs’ desires, that evening Bill and I decided to journey with our station wagon, aka the Slop Bucket, into a new frontier: the tony part of Oakland, where high-end restaurants were springing up like mushrooms. We cruised past the nouveau-Mexi place, the wood-fired-pizza joint. The sidewalks were lit up at night, so different from the dim streets of MLK. The fine diners were, true to Oakland, a melting pot of ethnicities and ages. But it was clear, these folks had money.

We cruised past restaurant row and slipped through a gate in the back where all the restaurants shared Dumpsters. We left the car running and scurried like rats to the yawning maw of waste.

“What the hell?” Bill said, lofting an entire clear garbage bag filled with still-warm Spanish rice. Like idiots, we had brought only three buckets. Bill gently laid the bag in the back of the car. I took the plunge and fished out an entire pizza, only slightly burned. In five minutes we had found a squashed key lime pie, a bag of still-warm beans, and a container of old romaine lettuce.

Even though it was approaching midnight, we felt like Vegas gamblers on a winning streak, and we weren’t going to quit while we were ahead. We continued on, driving to the bread-filled Dumpsters of Life for a suckle. They were filled to the brim, as usual. A few gutter punks sifted through the Dumpsters. One had climbed in. They saw us and started to scatter.

“We come in peace,” I said when we got out of the car. We wandered up to a bin. In order to dissuade Dumpster divers, the bakery had been locking the lids with padlocks. I had figured out that the combination for the locks was the street number of the bakery. But the other scroungers and punks, when they found the locks, promptly cut them. The following night, new locks would appear. These were then broken. Someone scrawled the obvious on the side of the Dumpster in silver pen: THIS IS WAR. It looked like the bakery had finally surrendered; the locks were gone now.

“Looking for something special?” I asked the kid with a mohawk and a nose piercing.

“Cinnamon Twist,” he mumbled, tossing whole baguettes and bags of dinner rolls out of the way.

This was the bakery’s holy grail, an eggy sweet loaf spiked with cinnamon that, best of all, came secured in a plastic bag.

I grabbed whatever loaves were closest. I dropped a few on the dusty pavement, then picked them back up and threw them in the car. I looked back at the punks, who, watching me, seemed a little repulsed, not knowing we were there for the pigs. I waved as Bill snagged a few stale baguettes for the rabbits, and we were on our way. Though it was late, I wanted to hit one more spot.

I had heard through the grapevine about a fancy Italian place on Fourth Street in Berkeley. Fourth Street is a luxury shopping district, complete with a Sur la Table, an Aveda cosmetics store, and bars that sell $20 glasses of wine. “Whole chickens,” my source—a fellow Dumspter diver who mostly scrounged for vegetable oil to power his car—whispered when describing the Dumpster at Eccolo.

The pigs needed protein. Maybe they would prefer roasted free-range chicken carcasses to Chinatown fish guts. I know I would.

We drove, under the cover of night, to Fourth Street. Bill idled the car, and I dashed behind the metal door to the Eccolo Dumpster. The rumor was true: fragrant, whole chicken carcasses. Pawing through the pile, I got so caught up in the bounty—fennel stalks, bread soaked in olive oil—that I didn’t notice when the gate creaked open.

“Please explain to me what you are doing,” a man in a blue Italian suit demanded. I was caught.

I placed the two chicken carcasses I clutched in my hand into the buckets and slowly turned to face him. The headlamp I used for nighttime foraging shined in his eyes. He raised an arm to ward off the beam, squinting angrily. I fumbled with the headlamp to turn it off.

“Well . . . ,” I said, assessing the situation. I could lie, saying that I was a mother of five struggling to make ends meet. Then I decided that the truth is stranger than fiction. “I have two pigs, near downtown Oakland,” I panted. “And they’re really hungry.” Compliments get you everywhere, I knew that: “And this is the best Dumpster in Berkeley.”

The man smirked. I could smell his very subtle cologne. I didn’t want to think about what I smelled like.

“It’s a believable story,” he congratulated me, brushing his hands together. “Proceed.”

I turned my light on and went back to foraging.

“You know,” the manager guy said before shutting the gate, “you should really talk to Chris.”

“Who’s Chris?” I asked, throwing some carrots into the bucket.

“The owner and chef,” the man said as he walked away.

“Why’s that?”

“He might take an interest in your pigs,” he said mysteriously. He sauntered back into the restaurant to help sell more $35 pork chops.

Buckets overwhelmingly full, Bill and I drove away. The Eccolo smells wafted around the car. I suddenly felt very hungry.

“What’d that guy say?” Bill asked.

“That I should talk to some guy named Chris.”

The beans, the chickens, the bread—that was one fine meal for the pigs. And then some, because we got enough food to feed them for two whole days. If we could stockpile like that more often, we wouldn’t have to go Dumpster diving every night. The rabbits and chickens had never been this demanding. We had ventured out only twice a week for them. The pigs were another story. I did the math: assuming 2 meals per day, only about 260 meals left to find.

In June, after almost four months of having no one living in the apartment below us—not even one call or visit from the Craigslist ad—our landlord decided to landscape the backyard.

While the apartment had stood empty—and we had acquired the pigs—our landlords had been in their homeland of Benin. Wilfrid, the husband, often went to Africa on business and was a classic hands-off landlord. That is, until this harebrained landscaping project came up.

They had decided that the backyard, which was a hard pan of compacted dirt, was the reason they weren’t getting any calls from prospective renters, not because the apartment was deep in a violent and crumbling ghetto. And so they wanted to install a lawn, some ornamental grasses and shrubs. I wasn’t sure who they wanted to live below us—some suburbs-loving couple? Not likely.

Our landlords knew I kept chickens and rabbits and the periodic turkey. But I hadn’t informed them about the pigs.

A red-haired landscaper was in the backyard when I got home from work. She was prepping the yard for sod. “You’ve got a little farm going on here!” she said when I rode up on my bike. The pigs grunted when they heard my voice.

“Yeah.”

“I planted some honeysuckle,” she said, and lowered her voice, “to cover up those barnyard smells.”

“Thank you,” I said. I had been pouring a bag of wood shavings scrounged from the furniture company into their pen area every day to reduce odors, but there was still a whiff of swine in the air.

“It’s great that Wilfrid allows this,” she said.

“Well, I guess he just doesn’t know,” I said.

“He saw the pigs yesterday,” she reported.

“Really??” I leaned in, suddenly scared. A hollow fear gripped my heart. What if Wilfrid made me get rid of the pigs? I immediately thought that I would have to have a roasted-pig party. They needed to get bigger if I had any hope of hams and salami. “What did he do?” I asked.