Farm City

by Novella Carpenter

  When Lana left, it was as if one of the biggest trees in the rainforest canopy had fallen. She had lived here, in one place, for seventeen years, a record for our block. But this is city life—when someone leaves, another rushes in to take her place. In the vacuum of Lana’s absence, Bobby took over. Within days, the end of the 2-8 resembled a bingo hall, with all manner of tables and chairs set up. His ever-growing collection of tires and shopping carts sprawled across the dead-end street. What had once been Lana’s sidewalk had now become Bobby’s domain.

  CHAPTER SIXTEEN

  A couple of weeks after Lana left and Bobby unfurled like an enthusiastic kudzu vine, I built a rabbit love nest. It was April, so the rains had stopped, but the grass was springtime lush. If I was to be self-sustaining on the urban farm starting in less than three months, I needed my breeding-stock rabbits to actually breed.

  In the squat lot, I erected an enclosure of chicken wire in a half-sun, half-shade spot, then kicked in a red ball as an icebreaker. I placed Simon in the love cage with one of the speckled brown and white does. At first they were shy. Though they had grown up together, they were now living in separate hutches. They sniffed each other, explored a little, and tasted the different varietals of grass and clover within the bounds of the enclosure. I noticed they especially liked Lana’s weed, the Malva parviflora. To achieve the best purchase on the spiky weed, they had to clamber over each other. Then, I hoped, one thing would lead to another.

  Rabbits, I had come to realize after some reading, had provided meat for people hell-bent on survival farming way before the hippie back-to-the-land days. During World War II, “thousands of resourceful Americans raised rabbits in backyards to put meat on the table when ration stamps were not sufficient to do the job,” wrote Raising Rabbits Successfully author Bob Bennett. “In cities and towns, in the best of neighborhoods, rabbits were housed in wood and chicken wire hutches, busily putting meat on their owners’ tables.” In the best of neighborhoods.

  As I weeded and planed near the new lovers, I sensed that they might feel exposed away from their safe pens, suddenly out in the garden with open sky and the whizzing sounds of the highway. I added a bucket to the love cage.

  Just then, the woman Hillbilly walked by with her Chihuahua and beckoned me over to the sidewalk. After Lana had left, I finally found out the Hillbillies’ real names: Peggy and Joe.

  “Are you still doing the community garden?” Peggy asked.

  “Yes,” I said. I tucked my dirty gloves into my back pocket. “Do you want to have a plot?” I asked. So far Mr. Nguyen had been the only person to take over and dutifully tend one of the raised beds.

  “Oh, no, no. We don’t know how to do that!” She laughed.

  The dog took a tiny poo on the parking strip. Then Peggy rustled around in her coat pocket. “But we’d like to make a donation,” she said.

  I started to protest—this operation was essentially free, except for my time—until I saw the seed packets.

  Tomatoes, brussels sprouts, cucumbers. I noted that they were hybrid seeds, Burpee.

  “Can you grow these?” she asked.

  I nodded and took them from her hands, noting that “ $1.49” was written on the corner of each packet. I realized that this was her way of putting in her order for the summer harvest.

  “Sure,” I said. I had become a farmer for hire.

  On a break, I went upstairs and tossed the Hillbillies’ seeds in a box with all the others (expired, free, inappropriate for our area) I planned to discard by randomly throwing them onto vacant properties around our neighborhood. If some of them made it—great. I didn’t want to be a snob, but there’s something unsavory about hybrid seeds. Many of those sold by seed companies are F1 hybrids. This means that the seed is the offspring of two inbred parent plants. Inbreeding tends to weaken seeds, but scientists figured out a long time ago that if you breed two inbreeds, you will get a plant that exhibits “hybrid vigor”—it will grow really fast and strong and uniformly. However, you can’t save the seeds from such plants, because their offspring, referred to as F2, are usually weak and not uniform. To get the strong F1 seeds, you need a professional to breed one.

  Instead of the Burpee tomato seeds, I’d plant some Bill had saved from a Brandywine that had performed particularly well in last year’s garden. He harvested the biggest tomato on the vine, squeezed out the seeds, then set them on the windowsill to rot. After a few days, they had grown mold, which ate away the protective seed coat and ensured better germination. Then Bill had washed them off and squirreled them away for the next year.

  Heirloom varietals come with cool stories. The Brandywine seeds sold by heirloom seed companies today are descendants of those an octogenarian seed saver in Ohio named Ben Quisenberry got in 1980 from a Mrs. Dorris Sudduth Hill, who said they had been in her family since 1900. To muddy the waters a bit, farmers and seed savers over the years have created other strains, like the heart-shaped Brandywine, the yellow Brandywine, and the cherry Brandywine. There’s the Sudduth strain and a pink strain, though the latter is said to be an inferior producer. As confusing as it all can be, the Brandywine is a living example of how messy, how fertile, how diverse heirloom seeds can be.

  Bill and I got our first Brandywine seeds from a seed swap in Berkeley our first year here. They grew up to have leaves as big as those on potato plants and large, slightly misshapen red fruit. It was meaty and juicy, only slightly tart. That same year, just to see what would happen, we also grew, from saved seeds, some Sungold hybrid cherry tomatoes. But instead of producing delicious orange fruits that taste like pineapple, they yielded strangely small, bitter red fruits. If I wanted a true Sungold, then, I’d have to shell out some money to a seed company. It’s not like that with heirlooms, which breed true and can be passed from farmer to farmer, generation to generation, with no middleman. Heirlooms are different from hybrids, too, in that they can adapt to local conditions. That’s why saving seeds from a plant and planting them in the same soil and climate from which they grew will make an even stronger plant.

  I checked the cupboard where I kept the seeds and found Bill’s Brandywine. I had also recently gotten in an order from Seed Savers Exchange, an heirloom-seed company that capitalizes on romantic, old-timey vegetable stories. I usually bought my seeds at cost from the nursery where I worked or through a seed swap at the Ecology Center in Berkeley. But the temptation of a seed catalog—vegetable porn, really—always overwhelmed me, and I usually ordered something truly exciting.

  Peggy wanted cucumbers? How about the Boothby’s Blonde cucumber—pale with black spines—which has been grown in Maine for generations? As for brussels sprouts, I had never had much luck with them, but I would research some heritage varietals, and Peggy and Joe would love them.

  I poured myself a glass of water and walked over to the window. I looked out into the lot to check on the bunnies and saw that they had made it past introductions. Simon was furiously humping the speckled rabbit’s head. His cotton-tailed hindquarters pumped for a minute before he collapsed backward in an exhausted, furry heap. I took a sip of water. Simon might not cut the mustard for my rabbit-breeding program.

  Early the next morning, a cop car, a city car, and a tow truck arrived on 28th Street. A dump truck idled nearby. Bobby was pulled out of his car by the police officers. And then he watched them take his world.

  The umbrella and table, the shopping carts filled with metal, car parts—burly men wearing green city-worker coveralls tossed these items into the dump truck. They threw everything else—the television, the microwave, soggy stuffed animals, pillows, tennis rackets—into the four broken cars Bobby had been sleeping in. Then they towed the cars away. A man with a clipboard took notes of the proceedings. A cop stood next to Bobby, who kept lunging at choice items, trying to save them. “Don’t touch anything,” he said, holding up his arm.

  Then Bobby just slipped away through the schoolyard. I watched, like a coward, from our living room window.

&nbs
p; I wondered who had finally called the city on Bobby. It might have been the owner of Lana’s warehouse. Bobby’s spread wasn’t very attractive to new renters.

  It’s true that Bobby had been a nuisance. Parking had become impossible on the 2-8 with all his cars. The smell of urine was unmistakable near his camp. But he was a lovable nuisance. The city didn’t know, for instance, that Bobby kept the street swept of glass and helped the garbage collectors loft the heavy bins into the trucks every week, that he helped us push our cars and generally monitored the street.

  The city vehicles finally trundled away, leaving an empty, stained street.

  Bill hugged me that night when I told him about what they had done to Bobby. To cheer me up, he told me about a new discovery he had made in our neighborhood. He gave me a handmade sign. CHICKEN WING OR CATFISH DINNER, it read, with an address one block from our house. The sign promised sides like potato salad and peach cobbler.

  Bill and I went over. The house was cute, in the way “cute” really means: A birdbath. Rosebushes. Pots of flowers surrounded by white pebbles. About eight burly black guys stood outside the gates of the house.

  “Is this the . . . ?” I began to stammer.

  “Novella!” It was Bobby, who emerged from around the corner. I gave him a hug.

  “Are you OK?” I asked.

  “Of course,” he said, and smiled. Bill went in for a hug, too, but Bobby pushed him away. “I only hug women!”

  “Hey, are these dinners good?” I asked him.

  “Only the best,” Bobby reported.

  “Do you want one?” I asked.

  “I’ll just take a bite,” Bobby said.

  “For here?” one of the big guys said, overhearing us.

  “Yeah.”

  “Let me go tell Grandma,” he said. He ran up the porch steps, then paused and turned back around. “Chicken or fish?”

  I looked at Bobby. “Fish?”

  “I just want a bite.” Bobby grinned.

  We went into the garden area and sat at a glass table with a flowery umbrella over it. As we waited for our food we watched pimped-out cars careening down Martin Luther King and a homeless woman grooming herself in the mirror of a parked car. I was pretty sure none of this happens in France.

  Bobby had theories about who had called the police. An elderly couple had bought a parcel of land at the end of the street and were planning to build a new house just in front of the area where Bobby was living. Bill and I shook our heads. Development was the bane of our existence.

  The dinners came, a glorious Oakland version of Slow Food. The fish was perfectly golden and fresh. “Grandma,” it turned out, was a fisher-woman. She came outside to see how we liked her cooking.

  “Caught the fish myself,” she said proudly. She was about sixty years old and kept her long gray hair in a ponytail. She and her husband, Carlos, would go fishing near South San Francisco, then cook the catfish, bluegills, and striped bass for these neighborhood meals. The fish came with a side of spicy collard greens, a scoop of tasty homemade macaroni and cheese, and a glop of peach cobbler. The meal represented American thrift at its finest.

  We gladly paid Grandma’s son $10 each for dinner, then Bill, Bobby, and I hunkered over our food in the late spring air. This underground restaurant would never happen in France either.

  “What are you going to do?” Bill finally asked Bobby, after eating the last piece of fish.

  “You’ll see,” he said, and gave us his mischievous smile.

  At home, Bill and I tried to think of something to do for Bobby. We both were furious that the city wouldn’t allow him to live on the street yet didn’t try to find him a new place to live either. While we talked about it, Bill said, “Hey, what’s that?”

  An ancient tow truck backed onto our street. It crawled back, bearing its load—a battered red Taurus. Out sprang Bobby from the passenger seat. The driver eased the car into a parking spot. Bobby unhooked the car from the trailer. He had returned. He grinned to himself. Round one—Bobby.

  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.