[Lapg] FARM CITY The Education of an Urban Farmer By Novella Carpenter

Fri Feb 12 06:28:39 PST 2010

Books of The Times

Living Off the Land, Surrounded by Asphalt

  http://www.nytimes.com/2009/06/12/books/12book.html

By 
<http://topics.nytimes.com/top/reference/timestopics/people/g/dwight_garner/index.html?inline=nyt-per>DWIGHT 
GARNER
Published: June 11, 2009

I had a feeling I might like this memoir when I 
came upon on its first sentence, a gentle twist 
on the opening of 
<http://topics.nytimes.com/top/reference/timestopics/people/d/isak_dinesen/index.html?inline=nyt-per>Isak 
Dinesen’s “Out of Africa.” Here is Novella 
Carpenter: “I have a farm on a dead-end street in 
the ghetto.”
\

Julia Landau

Novella Carpenter

FARM CITY

The Education of an Urban Farmer

By Novella Carpenter

276 pages. The Penguin Press. $25.95.

<http://ghosttownfarm.wordpress.com/>Novella 
<http://ghosttownfarm.wordpress.com/> Carpenter’s 
Blog

But I didn’t truly fall in love with “Farm City: 
The Education of an Urban Farmer” until I hit 
Page 38. That’s when the 
<http://topics.nytimes.com/top/news/science/topics/bees/index.html?inline=nyt-classifier>bees 
that Ms. Carpenter has purchased from a mail 
order company arrive at her post office in 
Oakland, Calif. A panicked postal employee calls, 
begging her to pick them up because they’re 
attracting other bees and “freaking everyone out.”

So Ms. Carpenter hurries over, picks up the 
humming box, and casually plops it into the front 
basket of her bicycle. Then she has a parade. “I 
proceeded to ride down Telegraph Avenue, laughing 
out loud at the bees who tried to follow us amid 
the traffic,” she writes. “At stoplights I looked 
down at the mesh box, the bees churning around, 
and told them to get ready for” - and here she 
gives her neighborhood’s nickname - “GhostTown.” 
Fresh, fearless and jagged around the edges, Ms. 
Carpenter’s book, an account of how she raised 
not only fruit and vegetables but also livestock 
on a small, scrubby abandoned lot in Oakland, 
puts me in mind of Julie Powell’s “Julie & Julia” 
and Elizabeth Gilbert’s “Eat, Pray, Love.”

Like those writers Ms. Carpenter is not a 
pampered girl or a trustafarian; in fact she has 
a beautifully cranky side and can drink and swear 
like a sailor. Like them too she is 
hyper-literate. The whole beekeeping business is 
preceded by a bit of 
<http://topics.nytimes.com/top/reference/timestopics/people/p/sylvia_plath/index.html?inline=nyt-per>Sylvia 
Plath’s poem “The Arrival of the Bee Box,” 
including these excellent lines: “I lay my ear to 
furious Latin./I am not Caesar./I have simply 
ordered a box of maniacs.”

And finally, like Ms. Powell and Ms. Gilbert, Ms. 
Carpenter is very, very funny. She won’t kill the 
slugs that have wrecked her garden, as some 
people propose, by drowning them in Budweiser, 
because “this seemed suspiciously close to buying 
the slugs a beer, which was more generous than I 
felt.” When 
“<http://topics.nytimes.com/top/reference/timestopics/subjects/y/yoga/index.html?inline=nyt-classifier>yoga 
people” suggest she stop drinking coffee, she 
thinks: “I want to tell them maybe they should 
saw off their legs.”

“Farm City” begins as Ms. Carpenter and Bill, her 
auto-mechanic boyfriend, move from Seattle to a 
small apartment in Oakland. They steer clear of 
San Francisco, she writes, because they are 
misfits and because San Francisco “is filled with 
successful, polished people.” Oakland, on the 
other hand, “is scruffy, loud, unkempt.” They fit 
right in. They fill their apartment, at least 
partly, with furniture they’ve scavenged from the 
street.

It is a rough neighborhood, “a postcard of urban 
decay.” There are gunfights and drug dealers; 
homeless men wander about, muttering. Oakland has 
the highest murder rate in the country, she 
notes. She and Bill take it all in and begin 
referring to the lost hairpieces that flutter 
down the street - they have fallen off the heads 
of hookers - as “tumbleweaves.”

The garden Ms. Carpenter begins to create, at 
first squatting and then getting the owner’s 
permission, is anything but bucolic. A loud 
freeway runs nearby; the place borders on a 
repair shop and junkyard; a billboard overlooking 
the lot warns against sexual predators.

Before long, however, she transforms this lot 
into a small slice of paradise. “There was a lime 
tree near the fence, sending out a perfume of 
citrus blossoms from its dark green leaves. 
Stalks of salvias and mint, artemisia and 
penstemon. The thistlelike leaves of artichokes 
glowed silver. Strawberry runners snaked 
underneath raspberry canes.” She begins to add 
animals - the bees, turkeys, ducks, a goose, 
rabbits and finally pigs - to the mix.

“Farm City” is filled with terrific stories. But 
as it strides artfully along, you begin to see 
that Ms. Carpenter has other things, even a 
larger argument, on her mind. Her own parents 
were back-to-the-landers whose marriage went bust 
when she was only 4. She blames rural solitude. 
And by gardening in a bustling urban space she 
wants to have it all: ducks and heirloom 
artichokes and, well, friends.

“I still regard the country as a place of 
isolation, full of beauty - maybe - but mostly 
loneliness,” she observes. “So when friends plan 
their escape to the country (after they save 
enough money to buy rural property), where they 
imagine they’ll split wood, milk goats and become 
one with nature, I shake my head. Don’t we ever 
learn anything from the past?”

At heart “Farm City” is more about Ms. 
Carpenter’s experiences with livestock than it is 
about growing plump 
<http://topics.nytimes.com/top/reference/timestopics/subjects/t/tomatoes/index.html?inline=nyt-classifier>tomatoes. 
In fact “Farm City” is a serious, if tragicomic, 
meditation on raising and then killing your own 
animals. She wants to have “a dialogue with 
life,” she writes, and she realizes she can do 
that only by also having a dialogue with death.

Animals run through this book like messy toddlers 
at a busy playground, and Ms. Carpenter names and 
adores just about all of them. The bustle is 
invigorating. But she is raising most of them as 
meat animals and sees no contradiction in loving 
them and, ultimately, seeing them - as painlessly 
and humanely as possible -to their ends. There is 
gallows humor here. She dispatches a duck in her 
bathtub and notes that it “went from being a 
happy camper to a being a headless camper.”

The two pigs, Red Durocs, are the biggest job. 
They eat so much that by the end Ms. Carpenter 
and Bill are forced to spend hours foraging 
through Dumpsters to feed them. These pigs once 
ate pellets. “Now they were eating Chinese,” she 
proudly writes, “like good urban pigs.”

On one of her Dumpster-diving missions, for which 
she often wears a headlamp, Ms. Carpenter meets a 
local chef, Chris Lee, who was for many years a 
farm produce buyer for 
<http://topics.nytimes.com/top/reference/timestopics/people/w/alice_waters/index.html?inline=nyt-per>Alice 
Waters’s restaurant, Chez Panisse. He allows her 
to feed her pigs from the glorious dumpster 
behind his own restaurant, Eccolo.

Once her pigs are killed (and badly, to her 
horror, by a woman she’d hired to do the job), 
Mr. Lee helps her carefully make prosciutto and 
salami and soppressata out of them. “We had used 
all the parts of the pig,” she writes, “the 
ultimate show of respect.”

“Farm City” is a consistently involving book that 
includes one of the purest expressions of 
happiness I’ve read in a while, so I’ll end with 
that: “I felt young and healthy,” Ms. Carpenter 
writes, “and nostalgic for the present.”

Santa Barbara Permaculture Network
    an educational non-profit since 2000
(805) 962-2571
P.O. Box 92156, Santa Barbara, CA 93190
margie at sbpermaculture.org
  www.sbpermaculture.org

"We are like trees, we must create new leaves, in 
new directions, in order to grow." - Anonymous

First Annual Southern California Permaculture Convergence August 2008
  http://socalifornia.permacultureconvergence.org

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