Farm City_ The Education Of An Urban Farmer Part 7

I looked at my hands. My nails were ragged and my fingers were lined with dirt from working at the nursery. What if that gun had been real? I allowed myself to think. What if I had been shot for my bicycle? I knew bad s.h.i.t happened in lots of places, but I had a choice: I didn't have to live in this place with so many problems.

But I couldn't imagine any other neighborhood where I could have turkeys and chickens, bees and the squat garden. That lot, that verdant place, destined to become condos. If I lost the lot, if the bulldozers came, that would force us to move on. Maybe Bill and I would relocate to North Oakland, which had less random gunfire and fewer muggings.

If my fate depended on the lot, I had to find out the truth. The next day I called the City of Oakland building-permit office to find out about the soon-to-be condos. In five minutes, I knew everything about the lot. Chan had bought it for $40,000 just before we moved in. His building permit had been rejected.

"Hey, the rainy season is here," the deep-voiced permit officer told me. "There's no way he's going to build this year."

I mentioned that our neighborhood was a bit rough. How could they sell condos here? I asked him, just talking out loud.

"Yeah, no one's going to finance that," he said.

And I hung up the phone, knowing that my garden had a stay of execution.

I also recognized a paradox: As long as our neighborhood stayed messed up, I could have my squat garden and my menagerie. Bobby could keep his improvised home on the 2-8. I might still lose some of my produce, like the coveted watermelon, but maybe that had been an offering in return for all our strange blessings. I made a pledge to grow the garden even bigger, to raise more animals, to keep going as long as we could on this chunk of squatted land.

Even while I plotted for the next spring, I felt a little sorry for Jack Chan. As a real estate developer, he'd had his plan squelched. Though his loss was my gain, I could empathize. A bold plan-in my case, a tenuous garden and a box of live poultry; in his, a lot in the ghetto transformed into luxury condos-tends to bring with it a great deal of heartache.

PART II.

RABBIT.

CHAPTER TWELVE.

I'll admit it: I missed Harold the turkey. At least, the idea of Harold. It had been a delight to have his unapologetic turkeyness strutting all over the neighborhood. I did not, however, miss his incessant gobbling, having to clean up his enormous turkey p.o.o.ps, or the constant uneasy feeling that he might die at the jaws of a junkyard dog or take off for Lake Merritt before I could enjoy him for Thanksgiving dinner.

Having slain that last fear (literally) but still a little exhausted from my meaty experiment, I felt a touch of worry as I climbed into my station wagon and steered it north into the Berkeley hills. It was early spring, and the air, even in the ghetto, was fresh with misty rain and possibility. My wipers didn't work, so I had to rub a rag across the windshield at red lights.

A woman I knew vaguely, Nico, had recently acquired some rabbits. I had met her while working at an alternative-fueling station in (of course) Berkeley. After paying for her vegetable-oil-based fuel, she had handed me a business card, which was a seed packet of sweet peas with her name and number written across it. We had hung out a few times, mostly at her boyfriend's farm in Pescadero.

I turned east on Dwight and began to wind my way up a forested hill-side near the UC Berkeley campus. The sharp mentholated cat-pee odor of a eucalyptus forest wafted into my car and combined with its newly acquired barnyardy reek. Last week, delirious with our annual spring gardening fever, Bill and I hadn't been able to borrow a truck to get our usual loads of manure. So we had improvised: We lined the back of the station wagon with a tarp, drove to the stables, and loaded up. Of course, the tarp could only do so much. Many a clod of horse manure had broken free and now lurked in the car's surprising number of crevices.

Following Nico's directions, I crested a steep hill and pulled into her driveway. She lived in a rustic cabin, a wooden cottage nestled deep in the forest. At her door, I noticed that chaos was clearly unfolding. Stacks of boxes cluttered the stairs. Bottles and jars of various homemade ketchups and jams stood in front of the garage. One cracked jar gently wept out its sticky contents.

"h.e.l.lo?" I called up through the cabin's open door.

Nico clambered into view. "Come in, come in." Her frazzled blond hair looked more disheveled than ever. A few years ago, Nico had relocated from Boston to finally finish college at UC Berkeley. She hadn't been successful so far because she was always getting distracted with some project or other.

Something skittered across her kitchen floor.

"Bunnies!" Nico shouted when she saw my eyes following the shadow.

There were four of them-two with white and brown spots, one pure white, and one solid brown-milling around the couch.

"The woman I bought them from," Nico said, offering me a homemade pickle from a murky mason jar, "lived entirely off a quarter of an acre of land."

"Really?" I said. "Eating rabbits?" I didn't know much about rabbit tending, except that my back-to-the-land parents had once raised them for meat.

Nico's plan was grander than mere survival; she had high-end dining in her sights. Rabbit had recently been showing up on the menus of fancy restaurants, and Nico, always a dabbler looking for a new project, bought three young females and a solid brown buck named Simon with the idea that she would sell their offspring to these restaurants. She couldn't have been doing it for the money. Though her hair was matted and her clothes tattered, she was a trustafarian, a common species of Berkeley resident. Her dad was worth millions. I think she just wanted to be a farmer, even a small-scale one.

Once the rabbits were of breeding age-around eight months old-Nico planned to mate them, and after two months she'd harvest the offspring. It didn't sound like fun to me, but Nico was always trying something different. In the short time I had known her, she had started a landscaping business, then gotten distracted by starting a catering company, and now was getting distracted by the rabbit business. The constant dabbling was a pattern, I had noticed, shared by many a trustafarian.

I reached over to pet a particularly soft-looking female. She made a screeching grunt and hid under the couch.

"These bunnies," Nico said, "are like mini gra.s.s-fed cows!" Gra.s.s-fed beef was all the rage in the Bay Area at the time. Guilty carnivores had realized that the soy and corn fed to beef cattle could feed starving people instead. But if the cows ate pasture gra.s.s, inedible to us and starving people in Africa, then we could have our steak and and the moral high ground. the moral high ground.

"Sounds good, Nic," I said. Yes, her idea was solid. But why had she invited me over? And what was up with the boxes?

It turned out there was one holdup in Nico's rabbit venture.

"I'll be gone for three months at Ballymaloe," she said, slapping a baseball hat on top of her hair. Ballymaloe, she explained, was a cooking school on an organic farm in Ireland. Finishing college, it seemed, could wait another semester. In Ireland Nico hoped to learn the fine arts of preserving food, making cheeses, and, no doubt, cooking a rabbit. She took a bite of pickle. "Six at the max-there's a Swiss goat farm that I might go to. . . ." She got a dreamy expression on her face. Nico loved, almost worshipped, farmers.

Then she informed me that her bunny-sitter had flaked out. So would I . . . ?

I hesitated. It was as if I had found myself at a party and been offered a new drug. It was one that I had never intended to try, but now, with the offer on the table, I started to remember all the good things I had heard about it.

Namely, that rabbit manure is manna for the garden. Their t.u.r.ds are like those of Lana's guinea pig-round, vegetarian, and nutrient rich. Chicken manure has too much nitrogen to apply directly to a garden; it first has to be composted, or it will burn crops with its scorching nitrogen load. Rabbit poo, on the other hand, is almost like compost from the moment it pa.s.ses by the bunny's furry tail. Its nutrient levels are the perfect harmony of nitrogen, pota.s.sium, and phosphate.

I chewed on my pickle and looked out Nico's window. She, sensing that I needed time to process, fiddled with her belongings. I could see the San Francis...o...b..y from her window. Nico had once come to my house and refused to get out of her car, she was so scared of my neighborhood. It's funny, most trust-fund kids would be blowing their wad on fast cars and cocaine, and here was Nico, geeking out on preserving food and raising rabbits.

"You know that whatever you breed, you can eat, too, right?" Nico said, folding a sweater, sweetening the deal.

I nodded my head. She had heard about the turkey and knew about my tendencies. I had actually been researching a miniature breed of beef cattle when she had called. My plan was to put the mini steer out on the abandoned-schoolyard field. Alas, a mini cow was not in my price range. The gra.s.s-fed rabbit concept was definitely more feasible. Besides, the peer pressure was excruciating. I sighed and finally said yes.

Nico let out a whoop and gave me a hug. We packed the bunnies into a cardboard box and loaded them into the horse-manure-scented station wagon.

"This is going to be great," Nico said as she threw a bag of rabbit food into the backseat. Then she dashed back inside to finish packing.

As I drove through Berkeley and into Oakland, I looked down to see that the brown bunny, Simon, had squirmed free of the box and was now perched in the pa.s.senger seat. A cold March wind blew into the car as I dangled my arm outside to wipe off the windshield. I sighed. This-a bunny riding shotgun-had not been part of my urban-farming plan. There were many things that I would have to learn about rabbits. And there was no doubt that they, like Harold, would present their own unique challenges.

The most obvious problem was that in order to get that gra.s.s-fed meat, I was going to have to kill one of Simon's babies. Probably an adorable fluffy baby. Simon found a rip in the car seat and started to paw at the frayed fabric, as if he wanted to burrow into it.

I wasn't sure how I felt about killing a furry mammal. Normally I would not have gone out of my way to start raising rabbits. Yet it wasn't entirely out of my range of experiences. I had eaten a lot of rabbit while growing up on my parents' ranch. Tastes, as they say-and I recall-like chicken.

At home, I put Simon back in the box and carried the rabbits into the backyard.

Bill was tinkering with an engine in the shed.

"What is that?" he asked.

"Nico's rabbits," I said, trying to sound cheerful. I put the box in what had been the chicken run, a wire-enclosed pen connected to the chicken house. The chickens were going to have to learn how to share. The rabbits peered over the cardboard flaps of the box, then hopped out.

"So what are you going to do with them?" Bill asked, warily watching the bunnies sniff their new home.

I shrugged. After the Harold dinner, Bill couldn't stop talking about when we were going to raise another turkey. He loved the taste of the heritage turkey and the rich stock I made from the carca.s.s.

But I, being on the production end of things, was a little less smitten with raising turkeys. Harold and Maude had been expensive. Bill hadn't seen the receipts from the farm store where I bought the meat-bird feed. The feed had been like a new dress on I Love Lucy I Love Lucy-an extravagance that would've set Ricky to yelling and swearing. The rabbits, on the other hand, were going to be relatively cheap.

"Breed them and eat them, I guess," I said.

Bill made a face. Every Thanksgiving for the past thirty-six years of his life, he had eaten a turkey. He hadn't grown up eating rabbits.

But I had. And compared to Harold, the rabbits were going to be very easy. There were no rescue trips over to the neighbors, no turkeys chortling from rooftops. The bunnies hunkered in their pen, meek and skittish.

I poured the alfalfa-pellet feed into a dish and filled the waterers Nico had given me-plastic containers embossed with the word "Lix-it." For bedding, I tossed in some fresh straw, which they immediately pounced on and began to nibble. They seemed quite content.

The next day I rode my bike to the downtown Oakland Public Library. It sits on a busy corner in a nicer part of Oakland, the part with coffee shops and baby-clothing stores and Lake Merritt, a jogger's paradise and a bird-watcher's dream. The library was built in the 1950s and has a modernist feel to it. I walked past the homeless people using the computers and climbed the marble stairs to the third floor, past some framed black-and-white photos of historic Oakland. I paused at one, a shot of five men holding loaves of bread, one with a gla.s.s of wine in his hand. THE SCAVENGERS, a sign on their truck read. These were the famous Italian garbage collectors of Oakland; someone had told me about them at a dinner party. In the 1920s, they scooted around Oakland collecting garbage. They recycled everything-food sc.r.a.ps went to hog-raising operations, paper and metal were separated and reused. Even clothing was cut up and used for sc.r.a.ps. Now, that was American thrift at its finest. Some of them probably raised rabbits, even. I leaned in for a closer look. Their bread looked pretty good.

Down the hall, I entered the musty History Room, a cramped s.p.a.ce filled with books that you can't check out.

"A little young for that, aren't you?" the librarian, a pretty blond lady, asked when I handed her the slip of paper with the call number for the Whole Earth Catalog. Whole Earth Catalog.

"Yeah, my mom always talks about it," I said. The periodical had been one of her main resources for country living on the farm in Idaho.

My parents weren't the only ones in their day to move to rural areas and try to live off the land. By some estimates more than one million young people in the 1970s moved out of cities and tried their hand at farming. The Whole Earth Catalog Whole Earth Catalog had been like the Internet for this generation of wannabe farmers. had been like the Internet for this generation of wannabe farmers.

After a few minutes in a back room, the librarian emerged and hefted a ma.s.sive tome into my hands. It was oversized and featured a photo of the moon. On the back cover the words "Stay Hungry. Stay Foolish" were embossed across a photo of a country road running next to some train tracks.

I sat at a solid wooden table and flipped through the catalog's enormous pages. Reviews of Gregory Bateson and E. F. Schumacher and Th.o.r.eau's Walden Walden ("The prime doc.u.ment of America's 3rd revolution, now in progress"). An ad for a book called ("The prime doc.u.ment of America's 3rd revolution, now in progress"). An ad for a book called Should Trees Have Standing: Toward Legal Rights for Natural Objects, Should Trees Have Standing: Toward Legal Rights for Natural Objects, by Christopher Stone. Whole sections devoted to windmills, composting toilets, and other tools of the hippie revolution. by Christopher Stone. Whole sections devoted to windmills, composting toilets, and other tools of the hippie revolution.

On page 66, I reached the rabbit section. Along with reviews of the Farmers Bulletin No. 2131, Raising Rabbits, Raising Rabbits, it included something called the "Rambling Rabbit Rap," written by Gurney Norman: "Raising rabbits is play, it's fun, a hobby. But it can also be work, good, productive work of the kind that contributes to health and vigor by getting good home-grown food on the table." it included something called the "Rambling Rabbit Rap," written by Gurney Norman: "Raising rabbits is play, it's fun, a hobby. But it can also be work, good, productive work of the kind that contributes to health and vigor by getting good home-grown food on the table."

That had been one of my parents' main goals: to be self-sufficient, to raise their own meat and milk, to build their own house. This desire was a cultural virus, part of the first ecological movement in the United States.

I flipped through the Whole Earth Catalog Whole Earth Catalog with growing interest. One female rabbit, I read, could have up to thirty offspring in a year. They enjoy shady, cool conditions. Don't feed them cabbage. Building rabbit housing is fun and easy. with growing interest. One female rabbit, I read, could have up to thirty offspring in a year. They enjoy shady, cool conditions. Don't feed them cabbage. Building rabbit housing is fun and easy.

The History Room, full of coughing scholars turning dusty pages, suddenly became a vibrating, living place. These old words weren't just memories; they were still useful. I took down notes, pledged to Google the Farmers Bulletin No. 2131, and became increasingly convinced that rabbits might just be the perfect farm animal.

CHAPTER THIRTEEN.

When the weather warmed, I donned my bee veil, set fire to some burlap in my smoker, and went out to the deck to perform a hive inspection. I had noticed there weren't many bees flitting in and out of the bee boxes, but this was normal: when the weather is cold and wet, bees usually don't venture out much.

The hive inspection is a springtime ritual for beekeepers. Mostly we want to see how our queen is performing-by early spring, she should be laying a circular pattern of eggs in the brood chamber. The bees' larder of honey and pollen is checked, too. If there isn't enough, they might need a sugar-water supplement to pull them through. This supplement is delivered through a mason jar with a lid riddled with tiny holes; the jar is filled with equal parts sugar and water and inverted to cover a hole on the top of the hive.

I held the smoker near the entrance of the box and squeezed the bellows to let out a few puffs. The smoke has a calming effect on the bees. It is thought that smoke worries them into eating honey (the hive is on fire!), which distends their bellies, which makes stinging difficult. But I've noticed that the smoke mellows them instantly, so it's hard to know exactly.

I pried open the lid with my hive tool, which looks like a thin metal spatula. The lid creaked open, well coated with propolis to keep drafts out. Inside, there should have been bees-moving across the frames, doing clean-up work, making new honeycomb, trying to sting me, an invader. There were no bees. I heard a faint echo of a buzz at the very bottom of the box.

Frantic and feeling sick to my stomach, I pulled off the uninhabited top super and set it on the floor of the deck. Then I pried up the middle frame from the brood box. The brood box is the bottom-most container and is deeper than the honey super boxes. It gives the queen a larger area in which to lay eggs, of which she can sometimes deposit twelve hundred a day. Down at the bottom of the dark chamber was a fist-sized cl.u.s.ter of bees, huddled together.

Smoke curled into their chambers like a fog. I wrenched off my veil and pulled off my gloves. I prodded the bees with the tip of my hive tool. I wanted the cl.u.s.ter to come to life, to attack me. They were entirely docile-nothing to defend.

I started to look for clues to what had doomed the colony. I tipped up each of the brood frames. The top edges were decorated with concentric circles of mustard yellow, almost pure white, and bright orange-pollen, like pop art. A few of the frames were lined with dark-colored capped honey. But there was no sign of brood, the white larvae of the honeybee; none of the honeycomb contained the chubby yellow cells that indicate pupating larvae. Alas, the queen must have died. I put the frames back into the bottom box over the cl.u.s.ter of survivors. They wouldn't make it.

Just as I snuffed out the smoker, ten black-and-white cruisers careened up MLK. For an instant, I thought they were coming for me. When I lived in Seattle, I had a fairly sizeable marijuana-growing operation in the attic. It had made me very paranoid. So seeing the police, even all these years later, caused my heart to race. But what would they get me for this time? Killing a turkey without a license? Too many chickens? The death of my bee colony?

They squealed past the 2-8 and stopped in front of an anonymous warehouse kitty-corner from the garden. Some of the cars were emblazoned with CANINE UNIT. I had always wondered about that warehouse. No one seemed to live there, but at night a guy with a brand-new SUV would sometimes idle in front of the building. Probably a grow operation.

Two plainclothes police pounded on the building's metal roll door. The other officers crouched behind their cars and slowly moved in. The police inched closer. The door came up cautiously-and then, from the deck, I noticed the peach blossoms.

They were frilly and deep pink. The peach trees, a gift from the monks, grew in the parking strip between my garden and the just-raided pot warehouse. And now they were in bloom. Bobby had helped me plant them, saying, "We're going to have us some peaches!"

Then I noticed the other trees. A weeping Santa Rosa plum, branches like dreadlocks decorated with white blossoms. The three-way-grafted apple, with its girlish pink and white blooms, each promising a fruit, each branch a different variety. Even the eucalyptus across the street, throwing shadows on the police, was adorned with thousands of filamenty flowers.

I looked down at the vacant beehive, sprawled apart, empty, there on my deck. All those blooms but no honeybees. I put the empty hive back together again. The boxes were getting old, I noticed, paint chipping off. They were looking as tattered as some of the houses in GhostTown.

Across the street, there appeared to be quite a few plants behind the doors of the warehouse. The police were prodding them. Growing pot for medicinal use is legal in California. There are some rules for indoor operations, though, including only ninety-nine plants per building. Maybe this warehouse had gotten too ambitious.

It was funny to see so much green behind a metal roll door, framed by so much concrete and city. My squat garden was the same way. Incongruous. The police started to load up the plants in the trunks of their cars, to evacuate the building of its life.

I knew there were other creatures-native bees, flies, ants even-that would pollinate my crops. But the death of a hive left me feeling sour and alone.

When a beekeeper dies, someone has to tell the bees. I learned that at a beekeeping museum in Slovenia years ago. I had been in Europe for my sister Riana's wedding to Benji, her French husband. After the wedding, my mom and I had traveled through the former Yugoslavia. One day, exhausted from sightseeing, we stopped into the beekeeping museum near the town of Bled. We rested our feet and watched a movie in the back of the museum.

The film was shot in golden light. A grandfather showed a lederhosen- wearing boy how to be a beekeeper. It was instructional-how to install a hive, harvest honey, and winterize the bees in snowy Slovenia. Near the end of the film, my mom and I were startled when the grandpa character died.

In the last scene, the boy hunkered near the hive, his lips moving in a whisper. His grandpa had told him that the bees would need to know of his death. The whisperer would feel the heat of the hive, generated by so many thousands of bees. He would smell the wax and propolis. Hear the noise of the bees, as if they were wailing, too. I could see how this act would be consoling in the face of death.

When the lights came up, my mom and I cried a little in each other's arms (we tend to get a bit emotional about things like this) and then proceeded, in the true American response to death, to buy up most of the museum's bee-related merchandise. Posters, honey wine, and folksy hand-painted hive panels.

The movie my mom and I had watched in Slovenia didn't address the tragedy of the death of a hive, though. Maybe the bees never died in Slovenia. I left the empty hive on the deck, another failure. The smell of smoke clung to my clothes the rest of the day.

CHAPTER FOURTEEN.

While I grappled with the death of my hive, my sister, Riana, welcomed a new life-she had given birth to a healthy baby girl. From France she had been sending me adorable photos of her little munchkin, Amaya Madeline, and I had to go see her. I saved my pennies for the flight, and Bill agreed to hold things down at the farm.