Inner City Farmer

It’s spreading. Whatever I’m doing to my backyard—call it urban sustainability, call it permaculture—seems to be acquiring popularity as well as new territory. I took the photograph above of the trellis my neighbor, Jenny the Archaeologist, recently built in her front yard. I take no particular credit for inspiring her. She’s been doing these sorts of projects for years. In fact, her lot is a tapestry of well managed microclimates: a small pond full of fish surrounded by lilies, ferns growing in the shady north-facing side of her house, an unmanaged forest in the very back, and now this, a trellis made of natural materials (except for those four by fours, of course) for vines to climb.

Two houses down from Jenny’s house lives an old couple who have been there over fifty years. I’d never met them before Sunday night when someone in our neighborhood smelled smoke in his house and called the fire department. No less than four fire trucks and an ambulance showed up, creating enough noise that half my block simply had to walk down there and take a look. Luckily, there was no fire. Even better, the occasion provided a nice excuse for us all to get out of our houses and meet our neighbors. That’s when I met Ernest. He was loitering outside his home in close proximity to his garden, which is generally acknowledged to be the finest on the block. Why? Because that sucker produces and has for years.

I took the opportunity to quiz Ernest about his methods and was surprised to hear him talk about composting because I’d pegged him as the slash-and-burn type (although, admittedly, he did mention later in the conversation applying liberal doses of that junk Miracle-Gro to his soil). I was even more surprised to hear that his staple crop is okra, which I’ve never even considered putting in my garden. In an odd coincidence okra was on my mind since I had just obtained a basket of it while making my weekly egg exchange with Chad and Lindsay.

Okra’s not the only theme running through my life these days. Another is bees. First, an old man about a mile from here got stung to death in his yard by a swarm, then another swarm descended upon the office building where my sometime cobbing assistant Ms. N works. In both instances I believe the “solution” was to kill the bees. Meanwhile, the world’s bee population continues to plummet, and—oh, that’s right—bees are responsible for pollinating a third of all the food we eat. I don’t even want to get into the fact that I just rented Jerry Seinfeld’s “The Bee Movie” for Zephyr.

So where am I going with all this? What am I trying to say? Just this: that we’re all connected. That Jenny influences me, and I influence her. That, while separated by a hundred feet and fifty years, Ernest and I are trying to do the same thing, grow food in our backyards. That we need to stop killing bees because they sustain our lives far more often than they end them. At this juncture in our history the slogan “Think globally, Act locally” has never rung more true. We’re all in this together, people.

I haven’t emptied my garbage can in three weeks. Yes, it’s nearly full. But it doesn’t stink—I have been dumping all organic matter into my new compost bin. So what is in there? Mostly packaging. According to a 2006 Environmental Protection Agency report, 28% of our municipal waste, by weight, is packaging and containers. How stupid is that? Such a high number speaks to our gullibility and lack of foresight as a species. Packaging is the place where major corporations make their greatest pitch. They stamp “New and Improved” on the box, and we fall for it every time.

Even the better companies pull this move. One of my favorite breakfast cereals is the cheesily named Optimum Zen made by Nature’s Path. The company’s slogan is “Nurturing People, Nature & Spirit,” and it goes out of its way on the packaging it uses to trumpet how great they are for being organic: “No synthetic pesticides, no synthetic herbicides, no preservatives and additives, no genetically engineered seeds or ingredients, no irradiation.” It also boasts that the cereal comes in something called an Envirobox, which as far as I can tell is just a smaller box: “Reducing our package size by 10% lessens our yearly impact upon the earth by saving over 1,300,000 gal. of water, 942,128 KWH of energy, and 144 tons of paperboard.” These are astonishing figures, but it saddens me to think that, knowing all this, this ultra environmentally friendly company only reduced its impact by 10%. To me, this comes off as a token gesture. Why not eliminate the packaging altogether?

The answer: because no one would buy its products. In the end this isn’t the fault of the companies as much as it is the consumers. We should know better. We should demand better. Stop bringing trash into your household. Find a canvas bag, and don’t let any businesses foist their plastic bags upon you. Start buying your dry goods in bulk. No, I can’t buy Optimum Zen that way, but I can get—cliché alert—good crunchy granola in bulk at my local food co-op, Wheatsville. I’ll admit to occasionally using new plastic bags to do this, but I’m trying I swear to only reusing old ones.

There’s an even better solution than that, which I learned while shopping at Wheatsville the other day and observing this beautiful sight: a woman filling containers she’d brought from home with flour, oats, and sugar. It was a jarring sight at first because you never see such forethought practiced in stores. People tend to just let the stores dictate their actions, but we need to realize that in our culture our power as shoppers is just about the only true power we have.

For those looking to explore this issue a little deeper I recommend checking out what CarrotMob is up to. One Saturday not too long ago this radical nonprofit organization in San Francisco held an event where everyone in the neighborhood agreed to shop at the same liquor store, which they picked by asking all the liquor stores what percentage of the proceeds from sales would they put towards increasing the store’s energy efficiency. The store that bid the highest won as did the environment. Now if only those people had refused to buy anything that came in plastic bags stuffed inside paper boxes and plastic containers. Perhaps someday soon.

My love affair with cob continues. Not only did my growing adeptness at building with it empower me to rip my garage door off and construct a wall in its place, it encouraged me, last fall, to completely transform the façade of my house by turning the concrete slab leading to my front door into a porch-like chamber with an arch over the entrance. Unfortunately, one of the (very minor) drawbacks of cob is that it shrinks quite a bit as it’s drying, and while I was working on the wall of the garage on Sunday I was informed by my most dedicated cobbing assistant, Ms. N, that a large crack had formed in the arch, one big enough to put its structural integrity into doubt.

Once again, I was forced to alter my plans in response to events beyond my control. I immediately switched gears and start plastering the arch, a project I’d been putting off for months. It went fairly quickly. Evidently, I’m getting better at it, but it’s still a chore compared to cobbing. The biggest difference is the materials you use. Cob is a mixture of sand, clay, and straw, three of the most user-friendly materials you’re ever going to see, while plaster involves the use of lime, the stuff Mobsters sprinkle over dead bodies to hasten their decomposition. The stuff bubbles when you add water to it and can burn your skin so you need to wear thick rubber gloves when slapping it on. And you need to beware of getting it in your eyes. And it’s not good to breathe in the powder when you’re mixing up a batch either. All of this adds just enough stress to the process to make it a lot less fun than cobbing. The worst thing that can happen when you’re cobbing is you might step on a pebble and hurt your foot.

You’ll notice in the picture that the arch is far from being perfectly round. I actually embrace such imperfections. It shows that a real human constructed it. I find the perfect straight lines found in most modern architecture to be boring. In the cob wall that supports the arch I added a screen window, several oddly shaped glass windows, and a couple niches. The ability to add these sorts of design elements is what makes cob so thrilling to me. That the process of making it emits almost no greenhouse gases into the atmosphere is an added bonus.

Until just a few years ago, few people realized that our buildings, not our cars, were one of the main causes of global warning. Then in 2004, Edward Mazria, an architect from Santa Fe best known for his 1979 book, The Passive Solar Energy Book, made a shocking announcement: automobiles only accounted for about 6.5 percent of the energy consumption in the U.S. while buildings consumed over 40 percent of the energy and emitted 50 percent of the greenhouse gases.

Is it too mawkish of me to say that learning how to cob changed my life, that it made it better, that if everyone used it to build their houses our planet would be in infinitely healthier? Probably, but I’m saying it anyway.

Self-Sufficiency Meter: 31%

The more I read about other people’s attempts to live more sustainably (the latest is Heather Flores’ book Food Not Lawns), the more I realize how far I have to go, how much I need to learn. But the one thing I have learned is that you have to do things when it’s the right time and not a second before.

For example, I started my stucco project just after it had rained because I knew the ground wouldn’t be as hard. Then, sensing that more spring rainstorms were on the way I set up a rain barrel (which has since been filled to the rim). So when it came time to decide which project to embark upon next I, once again, let nature decide. This time the “decider” (thanks for making up such a neat word, George W.) was the opossum I found in my garage. Sigh: it was time to take off the old, crappy garage door and seal up the entrance with a cob wall.

I’m either crazy to be doing this or very wise. I started to think it was the former minutes after I’d ripped off the door and discovered much of the wood frame had been destroyed by termites. Uh oh: this was going to be a bigger job than I’d anticipated. As I was prying a piece of the rotted wood away from the wall a man walking down the middle of the street lugging a lawnmower and a gas can asked me if I’d pay him to mow my lawn. I actually laughed and said, “Man, do you think I’d be doing this if I had any money to spare?”

He told me about his family getting thrown out of a motel.

I told him about someone stealing my brand-new chainsaw out of my garage (my other inspiration for wanting to replace the old, crappy garage door and replace it with a thick, cob wall).

He told me he didn’t do it, which made me laugh again. I should have tossed him a five spot just for cracking me up because no one else has been able to do it lately.

The whole encounter reinforced my belief that we as a society are living a big fat lie. This is the richest country in the world? Really?

After ripping away the termite-ridden frame, I set about laying a course of bricks at the base of the future wall. You can’t put cob directly on the ground because, even if it’s protected by plaster, the rain will quickly erode it. You need to make a foundation plinth. I had never laid brick before, but for some reason this didn’t deter me one bit. I laid three courses in all, using up an entire 80-pound bag of mortar. I was too tired to do any cobbing so I simply put the old, crappy garage door back into place. It’s not attached to anything so the only way it actually might deter a thief is if it falls and lands on him, which, if it happens, might make me laugh for the third time today.

Self-Sufficiency Meter: 31%

Until yesterday, the Inner City Farm didn’t have a compost bin. When I started my garden in the early spring, I actually went to a s-t-o-r-e—but, admittedly, a really cool one—and bought ten bags of their Revitalizer Compost. Nothing makes you feel like a bigger idiot than buying dirt, and shitty dirt to boot. I vow never to do it again.

I blame my hens for my lack of a compost bin. They have been getting all my kitchen scraps, and it’s hard to deny them this pleasure. They live to eat the stuff most people toss into the garbage. Whenever they see me walking towards them with the compost bucket from the kitchen, they race towards me with such enthusiasm it’s almost frightening. As excited as they get, there are certain things they just won’t eat: banana peels, lemon rinds, coffee grounds, onions, and their own shells, to name a few. These used to sit on the ground, rotting and attracting flies, but no longer.

My motivation to make a compost bin yesterday can be traced to a specific event—I mowed my front yard for the first time this year. Yes, I confess that I actually have a “real lawn” in front of my house. Because it consists almost entirely of Bermuda grass, it doesn’t require any watering so I have no real objections to it. Then again, if it were suddenly to die I wouldn’t be very upset either—I would happily plant native plants in its place. To mow my yard, I use one of those old-timey push mowers that leave the cut grass pretty much where it had been standing so it’s really easy to rake up and throw on a compost pile. One of the great downfalls of a compost pile from what I’ve read is lack of greens, but thanks to my front yard that shouldn’t be a problem this summer.

Building the compost bin was a fairly straightforward procedure. Luckily, I had all the materials I needed on hand. I knew when I hauled off the eight sheets of particle board I found at the fraternity house last fall I’d eventually find a use for it, and so I did. I have to laugh (and cry) when I hear of people spending a hundred bucks at Home Depot to buy a plastic compost bin… as if the world needs more plastic. I put together a bin in a couple hours and at no cost, other then my own labor. Its best attributes, as far as I can tell, are its size (quite large) and functionality (it’s got two compartments). I do fear that it might not allow enough airflow, but I’ll address that problem only if it actually becomes one.

As happy as I am to finally have a proper compost bin, I’m actually far more excited about the idea of sheet mulching, which involves adding a thick layer of newspaper or cardboard on top of your soil and then heaping a pile of mulch on top of that. Not only does this prevent weeds from popping up, it also helps build your soil. Basically, you’re composting in place. Ecological gardeners swear by it. If you want to read more about it, I recommend checking out Toby Hemenway’s book Gaia’s Garden: A Guide to Home-Scale Permaculture or Ruth Stout’s classic The Ruth Stout No-Work Garden Book.