The Urban Farmer’s Almanac

When I was in graduate school I spent an entire semester investigating the idea of urban gardening. At that point Alicia and I had planted a few gardens, but I was really just dabbling in planting seeds and seeing what would grow. It took me an entire semester’s of thinking and experimenting to arrive at the notion that our conception of “nature” as city people is a complicated bag of paradoxes. One of my main conclusions is that nature must be controlled to be pleasurable. Nature in an urban setting left to its own devices will not result in the grandeur of an unspoiled wilderness.

Second Nature by Michael Pollan

Michael Pollan, in his first book from 1991, wrote the book that I should have read first while I was working on that project. It would have saved me a lot of trouble and thinking. His thoughts on the relationship between people and nature, people and plants, and people and land helped me see what it is that I am doing with this “project”.

When we first bought the house a couple years ago, we immediately did some terracing and reworking of the front yard so we could use the space more efficiently (i.e. make more garden beds). At one point I got tired of all the weeds I was removing and decided to leave a “natural garden” – just let whatever was growing, a mix of poppies and weeds, keep on growing. It only lasted a week or two, at which point the entire thing looked terrible, and I gave up on “nature”. Pollan talks about the exact same thing in his book, where he tried to let native plants grow into one of his flower beds, temporarily putting aside the idea that anything you haven’t planted is a weed. He lasted a little bit longer, but ended up realizing that the weeds had completely taken over and eliminated what little order he had set out to establish.

I still let sunflowers pop up wherever they will, and there are these stunning red poppies that show up everywhere in the late spring, but besides that I keep things pretty tame around here. The way Pollan writes about all the functions of our relationship to a garden, from the productivity of vegetables to the beauty of a composed set of plants, I began to realize that plants are one of the primary metaphors I’m looking at my life through these days. In many ways the entire project is out of my control, dependent on so many factors that have nothing do do with my efforts. On the other hand, the deep satisfaction that comes from seeing what happens when I put in a little bit of sweat and set the conditions right for something to grow… it always gives me hope that life isn’t necessarily a zero-sum equation. That in fact you might be able to reap far more from it than you deserve based on what you’ve contributed.

There is a story in the book about a scientist who planted a tree in 100 pounds of dirt, and only watered it for years. At a certain point, after the tree had grown to a significant size, the tree was removed and weighed and the dirt was also weighed. Only 4 oz had been lost from the dirt, and from that, a 120 lb. plant had grown. Water, sun, time. Somehow, these base elements produce far more than they should, year after year, and I in turn am fed and watered in watching it happen.

I got a comment last night from someone saying they saw the blog in the Chinook Book (the Entertainment Book for people who shop at swanky eco-conscious urban stores). That was weird. I told Alicia and she said it must be some kind of spam scam.

But lo and behold, when I swung by Madison Market today, we were indeed mentioned in the Gardening section of the Chinook Book. Right below freaking SEATTLE TILTH! I guess we must do alright if you Google “Seattle + urban + gardening” (actually, I just checked and we don’t. I have no idea how we were found.) Plus there are tons of way better blogs that post way more than we do. But hey, I’ll take it.

Farm City by Novella Carpenter

Jared and Kris got me Farm City by Novella Carpenter for my birthday this year. It has a nice Bay Area connection for us, since the author is writing about her urban farm in the ghetto of Oakland, and we all met while we lived down there. It is fun to hear her talk about Berkeley and Oakland, BART and the bay, and be able to call it all to mind.

It was definitely an inspirational book; she starts off as kind of a hobby gardener taking over a vacant lot, and by the end she’s butchering pigs. The arc of ambition gains momentum, big time, and the farm seems to get away from her quite a bit (which I can identify with). Fortunately, winter comes, animals are butchered, projects completed, and things quiet down for awhile.

Reading this book makes me want to expand our farm into the livestock arena. I’ve been threatening to get some rabbits for awhile now, and Alicia doesn’t quite know what to make of it. Plus, it’s in my family heritage — my grandpa Vern raised rabbits for meat when my  mom was a kid. I love the description of butchering a rabbit in this book — you slit the throat, then pull of his pajamas. I can do that.

There are some real highlights in this book — reading about the author dumpster diving for 15 buckets of food every other day to feed her pigs, the description of pouring a box of bees into a beehive, and plenty of salivating descriptions of food (mostly meat) produced on the farm / vacant lot. Check out her blog… it’s a good read too: www.novellacarpenter.com

Dan and I have discovered a new technique in bread making that may revolutionize our baking lives.  First a little background:  I make our basic sandwich/toast bread and I believe it turns out well and works for sandwiches and everyday stuff.  I also have a good recipe for quick focaccia bread that we often use for dinner.  Both of these are satisfactory, but we also have been searching for the right way to re-create artisan bread loaves (like you buy at the market) at home. Dan spent months refining his technique with sour dough, but eventually decided  he wasn’t really accomplishing what he wanted.

Now we have found this new book (Artisan Bread in Five Minutes a Day by Jeff Hertzberg and Zoe Francois) which may be what we are looking for.  Basically you make a large batch of basic, but really wet dough (a 2:1 ratio of flour to water) and let it rise for a couple of hours and then leave it in the fridge (apparently for up to two weeks — though our first batch only lasted a few days).  When you want to bake a loaf pull off a chunk of whatever size you want, quickly shape a loose loaf on a peel and let it sit for 40 minutes.  Lastly, bake on a stone with steam for 30 minutes.  We’ve had great success.  With other doughs this wet I got very frustrated with the handling and many rises. I once even had to stay up late into the night to bake my bread because I had missed a 3rd rise when reading over the recipe and didn’t leave enough time.  (that bread involved a couple of swear words if I remember correctly).  So far the only tricky part has been baking time since the loaf size varies, but we’ve both been impressed with the crumb and crust and think it may be our best approximation of artisan bread.

I would highly recommend the book.  They have recipes for brioche and other doughs as well, which I may try.  Seattle Public Library has it for those local readers.  And for any aspiring bakers it is a great resource to make artisan baking a little more realistic for the novice.

Animal, Vegetable, Miracle by Barbara Kingsolver

I had high hopes for this book by Barbara Kingsolver, an author who I really enjoy reading. Recently, I’ve been making my way through High Tide In Tucson, a collection of essays that has a nice natural history / personal experience / poetic analysis flavor to it. She’s up there with Annie Dillard and Rebecca Solnit as my one of my favorite authors to read. Plus, with the added bonus of this book being about farming and a year of eating local, it sounded like it would be right up my alley.

In many ways it was — I really enjoyed the stories about the family’s farm, their exploits with an apparently massive garden, and their impressive flock of poultry (chickens and turkeys). I picked up a lot of little tidbits about things I’d been wondering in the back of my mind (there is discussion of root cellaring fall vegetables and braiding up the garlic after it’s been harvested.) I want to try making some cheese after reading about how they do it. The recipes are also inspiring, though I’ve got to say that I aspire to be more of a vegetarian than I can ever pull off. Overall, it was an enjoyable read that had a lot I could identify with and be inspired by.

I guess the problem was that I went into it with really high expectations. I’ve read a couple books over the last year or so that have really affected the way I think about food: Plenty, a book by a Vancouver couple who eat a really strict 100-mile diet for a year, and The Omnivore’s Dilemma, Michael Pollan’s comprehensive look at food systems in the US. I had already read all the arguments and I was convinced, so more information about how bad things really are was a little too much. The narrative walking through the rhythm of the seasons was interesting, but the obligatory facts and arguments got in the way of the thing I was hoping for — the inspiration promised in the title. Animal, Vegetable, Miracle… it’s an amazing title, so ripe with promise; honestly, maybe a little too much for the book to live up to. I guess I was looking for more poetry, more magic, and in the end it was just a lot of normal common sense. Which is kind of Kingsolver’s point, as she looks at the world and wonders why it seems so completely foreign that her family would try to eat only the things they grow or buy locally for a year.

There is nothing like an overdue library book to get me to finish something I’ve been working on 5 pages at a time for the last few weeks. With lots of free time over Thanksgiving, I finally finished it off and I have no regrets. It’s a great book, and I learned a lot (and I wish I could have a turkey raising operation, but there just isn’t room). But maybe I will find room for a root cellar in the basement, and hopefully we will come to understand the ways our lives and our food interact. And we will keep putting things in the ground and watching them come up, slowly at first, then exploding in the miracle of great abundance.

Thanks to Kendall for letting me know about this book on One / Change.