Farm City

by Novella Carpenter

  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.

  I couldn’t believe that the cakes actually puffed up like real pancakes. I ate them with a drizzle of honey and some stewed peaches on the side, with the blackened dwarf potatoes. They were the best pancakes I’ve ever eaten. I licked the plate. I counted the remaining corn cobs. Twelve.

  CHAPTER NINETEEN

  July Fourth has always annoyed me. The endless gazing upward at a few flecks of light, the snarled traffic, people blowing off their fingers. But this year was different. This Fourth of July, I would be reaping the benefits of some work I had done months before.

  In a wave of 1970s California nostalgia, my friend Jennifer and I drove up to Mendocino County last fall to pick grapes and make wine. Jennifer was a DIY lesbian who, when Bill and I arrived pale and eager from Seattle, taught us how to power our cars with biodiesel made out of fryer grease. Jennifer and I became friends and now worked together at the biodiesel filling station in Berkeley.

  Jennifer had negotiated to exchange some biodiesel she had made for the grapes. When we drove into the valley, the vineyards were a riot of grapevines whose leaves were just starting to get their fall color. Purple fruit, the color of a bruise, hung amid green-gold leaves. The owner of the vineyard sat in his tractor. He was a tall, bearded hippie who grew biodynamic grapes. Jennifer handed him the jug of biodiesel with a look of triumph—she loved bartering. “The brix is at twenty-six,” he said, referring to the sugar levels, and smiled. Then, in a rush because it was harvest season, he grabbed the jug of fuel and drove off, leaving us to harvest acres of grapes.

  Days before, professional pickers had moved along the neat green rows and selected the best clusters, so we were picking the sloppy seconds. The overripe, the wrinkled, the tattered grapes left on the vine would become our wine.

  It was hot when we picked, but the work wasn’t hard. We snapped off clusters and dropped them into plastic lug boxes. The grapes were sweet and seedy. It only took an hour to pick hundreds of pounds.

  The much harder work would be the crush, but luckily Jennifer and I had invited friends to help. Willow, always interested in gleaning and fermentation projects, had come over. First we pulled off the stems by hand, a circle of us gossiping and telling stories. Though there are crushing machines, we decided to do the crush in the traditional way. We poured the destemmed grapes into a large tub. Jennifer and I washed our feet and climbed in. There was a sickening moment when toes met grapes. Suddenly, it felt like we were standing in a pool of water. But we tromped and stomped. Our legs got sticky. It was kind of like an exercise machine. The party lasted well into the night. The yield: four five-gallon glass jugs full of grape juice.

  Through the following winter and spring the juice bubbled and fermented in the jugs. Now, on the nation’s day of independence, Jennifer and I would make the wine official by placing it in bottles and corking it.

  I arrived at her place with only a slight caffeine headache, and we began bottling, using a tube, gravity, and some used but clean bottles. I’ve never been much of a drinker, but as I filled up bottle after bottle, I was glad that I had planned for the future. Putting up food is, at its heart, an optimistic thing. It’s a bold way to say: I will be sticking around. Our wine had been fermenting for eight months. That’s long-term planning for eating. Well, drinking.

  And, in a way, bottling wine was the perfect way to cele
brate America’s independence. The Alcoholic Republic, by W. J. Rorabaugh, explains that a state of hunger and drunkenness was a way of life for early Americans, most of whom drank four ounces of distilled spirits every day. “The taste for strong drink was no doubt enhanced by the monotony of the American diet, which was dominated by corn,” Rorabaugh writes. In the wild West, families subsisted on corn pone, salt pork, molasses, and whiskey. I, on the other hand, would be living on cornmeal, rabbits, greens, and wine.

  While I happily contemplated spending the rest of July in a boozy torpor, Jennifer’s roommates—amazing cooks—worked in the kitchen, roasting a chicken with new potatoes, pan-searing steaks, tossing salads. When everyone else took a break from bottling to eat real food, I wandered out to Jennifer’s garden.

  I tried to channel Euell Gibbons, the famous forager from the 1960s, whose books had been on the shelves of most ecologically minded folk of that era. His Stalking the Wild Asparagus is a beautifully written guide to harvesting cattails and milkweed pods. Nature provided; you just had to know where to look.

  I knew the book because my dad is a big fan of foraging, and he had given me a faded green paperback version the last time I saw him in Idaho, about seven years ago. I had just reached the age of my parents when they started farming and I felt drawn back to the ranch. Bill, always game for a road trip, packed a spare tire and jugs of water for the ten-hour drive to Orofino, Idaho.