Inner City Farmer

The hardest part about running a farm is that you are effectively married to it. And, as those who know me well can attest, I’m not a very big fan of marriage. You have to put in a little work every single day. Somebody has to feed the chickens just as somebody has to water the garden. And if not me, who? This isn’t such a big deal when I’m in my normal routine but whenever I need to go out of town for any length of time it is. Tomorrow morning I leave for N’Awlins, and once again panic struck: who will be minding the Quikee Mart?

Luckily, my neighbors, for the most part, are cool as cucumbers—the exception being those who allowed someone to steal my chainsaw out of my garage (inner city!). I honestly couldn’t have accomplished half of what I’ve done without their assistance. The one who has deserves the biggest prize is Jenny the Archaeologist. She’s looked after my chickens just about every time I’ve gone out of town. In fact, it was because of her that I started referring to my chicken house not as a coop but a co-op, an egg co-op to be exact. In exchange for feeding the chickens she gets to collect all the fresh brown eggs she can eat. Not such a bad deal.

Jenny lives three houses down on the opposite side of the street, and many of her projects have proved very inspirational for me. She’s got a really cool backyard pond with a healthy school of fish, so guess what I’m planning to build one of these days? Of course, mine will be even cooler. She also has a pair of funky fences/trellises in her front yard, built out of tree limbs. I’d like to think she might have been inspired to make those after seeing the gazebo I made out of tree trunks and bamboo in my back yard.

Is it contradictory to say that I am striving to be self-sufficient but am at the same time so reliant on my neighbors? Not at all. The king and queen of the American self-sufficient movement, Helen and Scott Nearing, relied heavily on their neighbors in both Vermont and Maine. They swapped tools and traded labor, and by doing so they created a better sense of community and made themselves that much more independent from the system, the global economy, the Man. I’d like to think we’re doing a bit of the same here on Franklin Boulevard.

Yesterday morning it rained so hard I thought my house was going to get swept down the street. As happy as the storm made me, it also highlighted one of the main deficiencies of my little urban farm—I don’t have any sort of rainwater harvesting system installed… yet. Seeing all that water fall from the sky and then disappear just as quickly was hard to take. Capturing rainwater has just jumped up about ten places on my to-do list.

In the absence of such a system Zephyr and I do are best to conserve the water we take from the city. We water our garden at night and only when the plants really need it. We remember to turn the faucet off when we’re brushing our teeth. We have a makeshift greywater system in place, a hose that dumps the discharge from our washing machine into the back yard. And we habitually bathe together and save the water to use on our plants outside. Check out this sterling footage of us collecting our dirty bath water.

We do all this because we believe water is precious and undervalued in our society and we’re preparing for a future where we will surely not be able to use it the way we do now. I’ll admit that our water consumption has skyrocketed in the past few months in conjunction with the start of our garden. There’s a reason our plants look so good—they get watered just about everyday. We are using about 40 percent more water now than we did five months ago, but our monthly water bill has only increased… by less than three dollars! To me, that’s fucked up.

Sorry if I’ve depressed anyone with my bleak, the-world-is-coming-to-an-end talk. The hardest part about researching the environmental problems our society is currently facing is that it can be incredibly disheartening. The remedy, for me, is to concentrate on the present moment, and right now as I stare out my picture window into a backyard full of life things aren’t so bad. Just look at that garden!

The best part about this project is that it forces you to engage in fun and meaningful activities like building an earth oven. Or digging a hole in your backyard and calling it a pond. Or planting a garden. I can’t tell you how enjoyable it’s been to watch the seeds I planted in the ground last month turn into bushy green plants. My garden is going off right now, and, besides its actual creation, I really haven’t put that much work into it. On the far left side of the picture is a berm I created along the fence line with excess top soil. I call it Wildflower Hill, and that’s exactly what that mass of bushy green stuff is in the foreground, a clump of wildflowers. I also planted some carrots and watermelon on top of the hill, which only recently sprouted.

The vegetables in the garden proper are much farther along. Most of my tomato plants, eight varieties of heirlooms, are over three feet tall, and many already have green tomatoes hanging on the vine. To the right of the tomatoes in the picture is a row of arugula, which I started harvesting this week, along with spinach and chard. I’ve never had a garden before so all this bounty has taken me by surprise. If it all works according to plan, I’ll be eating fresh vegetables all summer long.

My boy Zephyr has been diligently helping me to water the garden and pick it free of weeds each evening. While so many of his peers are home staring at television screens, my boy is playing in dirt and making bridges and doing his chores a la Little House on the Prairie. Z’s principal responsibility is collecting the chickens’ eggs, a duty he always performs with a big smile on his face. Every day is like Easter on the Inner City Farm.

While stuccoing the back of my house, I found myself marveling at the miracle that is cement. It truly is an incredible product, sticky enough to bond to a vertical surface, impervious to water, and, once dry, hard as stone. Working with it made me reconsider my whole cement-is-the-devil stance. What I’ve determined is that humans were blessed when we figured out how to make this stuff in the same way that we were blessed when we came up with a way to convert crude oil to gasoline to power our cars. Beware: my good cheer ends there.

Comparing these materials is apt because they both suffer from the same problem. The materials themselves aren’t necessarily bad; it’s our overuse of them. If we had valued gasoline properly as a nonrenewable resource from the very beginning, charging consumers, say, $10 a gallon, or used it only to power our public transportation, we wouldn’t have done irreparable damage to the natural environment and could continue to use it for hundreds, perhaps even thousands, of years. Instead, greedy, rapacious, and stupid, we’re going to blow through the whole supply in less than a couple centuries.

It’s the same with cement. If we only used it sparingly on projects where there were no other alternatives like the piers on pier-and-beam foundations and, yes, stuccoing a house, we could go on using the stuff forever with only minor damage done to the environment. While stuccoing the entire back side of my house, I’m not even going to use a whole 80-pound bag of cement. The main ingredient of stucco is sand, a plentiful natural resource—the cement merely holds the sand together. But instead of being content to use it in moderation we insist upon using it everywhere: sidewalks, parking garages, patios, garish modernist houses.

I haven’t figured out if people don’t know about the dangers involved in the excessive use of these products, or if they simply don’t care. In Michael Pollan’s article in the New York Times this past Sunday he asks the pointed question: Why Bother? As in, why bother bringing your own canvas bag to the grocery store and walking to work if your neighbors aren’t doing the same? He tried to deliver a hopeful message, saying that if enough people bother it will set off “a chain reaction of behavioral change.” He went on to say that this change would create new markets for green products and he used hybrid cars as an example. This depressed me because while it might very well be the most realistic path to environmental salvation it’s also the most short-sighted. Why? Because it’s our economic policies, our need for perpetual economic growth in a world of limited natural resources, that got us into this mess. Buying a hybrid car is not a solution. Quickly phasing out the use of gasoline-powered cars is. Yes, this sounds radical and extreme, but so are the environmental problems we’re facing.

I’m doing my best to stay positive during this election year, but throughout this interminable presidential campaign I’ve only heard any of the three remaining candidates mention the environment once, and that was in passing. I don’t blame the politicians. They’re only saying what people want to hear, and evidently all people want to hear about is the economy. People in this country all seem to believe they’re just one step away from being as rich as the lucky few they see on television. All they have to do is sell a screenplay or play in the NBA or write a bestselling book or win the World Series of Poker. Meanwhile, our economy continues to drag us into environmental hell. The American Dream is killing us all.

If you’re looking for any more proof that raising chickens is the way to go, look no further than what I ate for dinner last night. An omelet? No, you can only eat so many eggs. A couple of months ago, I sent an email to my neighborhood’s listserv, asking if anyone wanted to barter their vegetables for my eggs. Chad and Lindsay, who live a five-minute walk away, responded by bringing over a satchel full of beautiful and tasty vegetables, which Lindsay got through a program at her office called Farm to Work. For $25 a week employees of the Texas Department of State Health Services get fresh vegetables delivered to them from Naegelin Farm, which is located just south of San Antonio. Yahoo Maps says that’s 103.67 miles away so if I were a hardcore locavore doing the 100-mile diet I guess I would have to abstain. But I’m not so I didn’t.

How could I pass up real lettuce that’s got actual texture and taste (as opposed to the limp bland stuff grocery stores dump on you) and kohlrabi? For those not hip to the latter vegetable (and I wasn’t until last night) kohlrabi is kind of a cross between cabbage and a turnip—in fact in German “kohl” means “cabbage” and “rube” means “turnip.” I ate half of it raw in a salad and the other half cooked a little with pasta and some other veggies, and as of now it might be my favorite vegetable.

I spent a little more time than usual working outside today. Just like a “real” farmer I tend to let the weather dictate the course of my day. It rained last night… hard. It rains almost as much in Austin as it does in Seattle; the difference is that in Seattle it sprinkles nearly every day of the winter and then gets bright and sunny during the summer while in Austin all our rain comes during about 15-20 storms spread throughout the year. It will be dry for weeks, and then suddenly in one night we’ll get two inches of rain, which is what happened just after midnight last night.

I woke to a soggy world this morning, which meant the soil in my backyard, a clay that dries as hard as cement, was nice and soft, perfect for digging. I’m embarrassed to say that for the past year and a half the entire bottom portion of the back side of my house has been exposed to the elements. The guys who fixed my foundation ripped it off, and, after paying them a ridiculous amount of money to bring my house to level, I wasn’t in the mood to pay them $750 more to fix the mess they’d made. Aspiring to be self-sufficient, I vowed I would do it myself. And then I never did.

You see, such a job requires traditional construction work, and ever since I discovered the wonders of natural building I’ve given up on the conventional way of doing things. The problem is that I couldn’t imagine any other way to do it. I’ve fallen in love with cob, but the most important thing with cob is protecting it from the elements, something I would not be able to do in this situation. I also considered using a lime plaster, which I’ve been teaching myself how to do, but from what I’ve read it too needs to be shielded from the rain. So I threw up my arms and went to get some stucco. This was a major violation of my building code of ethics—I try to avoid using cement at all costs. Cement plants account for 5 percent of global emissions of carbon dioxide, and its production requires a ridiculous amount of energy to boot. But what other material could I have used? That’s not a rhetorical question. Any feedback is welcomed.

I spent the entire afternoon digging a long trench, hammering pieces of wood to the beam running the length of the house, and stapling roofing felt (it also pained me to use this stuff because I have no idea what it’s made of) to the wood. I also added a nice little door that will allow me to get under the house to check the plumbing whenever that becomes necessary. By that point the sun was going down so I put off adding the wire mesh and the first layer of stucco. I’ll save that fun for later.

As I was cleaning up (you can see in the picture what a fine mess I made), I couldn’t stop finding new projects to do. This is what happens when you own a house and the weather is nice. So I added some mulch to the garden. I’ve got some cucumbers and pumpkins that just sprouted and I want to keep the soil around them moist and weed-free. The mulch was actually a box of shavings from a pecan tree that I debarked with a hatchet. I thought I’d use them in my earth oven but staring at the box I realized it would work better as mulch. This made me very happy as I’m trying to find a use for everything on this little farm so that nothing gets ever wasted. Today was trash day, and while I did take my garbage can out to the side of the road it hardly had anything in it. One of my main goals is for it to remain perpetually empty so I can give it back to the city.