The Urban Farmer's Almanac

A couple weeks ago, Hannah found an egg in the bag of cedar shavings that we keep on the back porch for the rabbit’s cage. We kind of laughed about it and thought it was a good thing she found it in a timely manner. Since then, we’ve found a couple more in there, and today we caught the chicken in the act. Apparently when I let them out to roam in the yard, she much prefers the bag of bedding to the normal nesting box for egg-laying. Maybe it’s a message that I should clean it out more often, or that she prefers the wood shavings to straw. (Though last summer we did find a couple eggs laid on the straw bale in the shed, so I think it might just be fun to have a change of scenery every once in awhile.)

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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

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