Inner City Farmer

At a young age I established several hard-and-fast rules for myself: I will never wear a suit to work, I will never turn down a free meal, and if given the choice I will always opt to pee outside rather than inside. Living in the very center of the sixteenth largest city in the United States has made that last dictum a bit difficult at times, but so far none of my neighbors have said anything about my habits. My view: what’s the point of owning a house if you can’t pee off your own front porch?

What used to be a simple declaration of freedom has since evolved into an integral part of my urban farming life. The most important element in growing your own food is creating and maintaining healthy soil, and good soil needs a proper balance of carbon and nitrogen. The earth seems to have a much easier time accumulating carbon. It gets nearly all it needs from decaying leaves and rotting wood. It’s far more difficult for it to attract enough nitrogen. Commercial farmers remedy this situation by bombarding the land with expensive fertilizers, but natural gardeners know there is a better way.

One method is is to grow nitrogen-fixing plants such as clover, indigo, peas, or beans. These plants effectively pull nitrogen out of the air and send it into their roots. The presence of such plants will help all the other plants around them to flourish. Another way is to make a nitrogen-rich compost and add it to your soil. Fish scraps and cottonseed meal are especially rich in nitrogen with a carbon to nitrogen ratio of 4:1 and 5:1 respectively. At 7:1, chicken manure is another great source of nitrogen, which is just one more reason to raise a backyard flock. But perhaps the best source of all is human urine. That’s right, pee!

At a ratio of 0.8:1, human urine is nearly 90 percent nitrogen, comparable to what you’ll find in chemical fertilizers you buy at a store. It is estimated that Americans excrete 90 million gallons of pee a year, enough nitrogen to fertilize 31,962 acres of corn, but instead of treating our vegetables with it we flush this valuable resource down the toilet (along with potable drinking water, I might add). If this makes any sense, someone please explain it to me.

Remaining true to my beliefs, I’ve been peeing in my backyard ever since I bought this house. I’ve taken particular delight at aiming my stream at the base of the little Mexican white oak I planted in the the summer of 2006. The picture at the top is of Zephyr standing in front of the oak tree. It’s a little hard to tell, but the top of the tree is just over his head. Now here’s a picture I took yesterday of him standing in front of the same tree:

My boy has grown a lot over the course of the last year, but the tree has nearly doubled in size! Yes, it gets ample sunlight and has good drainage, but more than these factors combined I credit the power of my hops-laden pee! [Warning: if you choose to adopt this fertilizing technique yourself, be warned that urine is strong enough to burn leaves and kill plants if applied to the same area over and over. Pick different spots in your yard or dilute it with some water.]

The photograph above shows the gazebo I made last fall entirely out of natural and recycled materials. The project started as a simple earth oven, the design of which I copied from Kiko Denzer’s book Build Your Own Earth Oven—I also watched Kiko construct a simple one at last year’s Natural Building Colloquium in Kerrville, Texas. The foundation of the oven consists of “urbanite,” large chunks of concrete that, before I took a sledgehammer to them, used to be a set of crazily titled stairs leading outside my kitchen. The clay I used came from a pit in my own backyard and the sand I got for free from someone on craigslist who just wanted to get rid of it.

Once the oven was finished I needed to figure out a way to protect it from the elements other than the ratty old tarp I’d been using. That’s when I decided to make a living roof nearly identical to the one I’d seen Sun Ray Kelly make at the Building Colloquium. For those unfamiliar with his work Sun Ray’s modus operandi is basically to smoke a joint, take a walk in the woods, gather the coolest looking materials he stumbles upon, and use them to build houses that make adults feel like kids. He’s a genius.

The four corner posts of my gazebo are tree limbs. I drilled holes in the bottom and each and then placed the limbs over rebar I’d set into the ground with concrete. (The very small amount of concrete I used was the only material I had to buy in a store.) The tree limbs I found at a park alongside the river on the east side of Austin. No one ever stopped me and asked me why I was hauling off these enormous pieces of wood so I kept going back.

To make the gazebo’s roof I laid a latticework of bamboo across the cross beams. The bamboo I found at a fraternity house on the University of Texas campus. The Delta Tau Delta house (the most famous member of which is this guy) spent all of January preparing their courtyard for their annual Delt Freedom Party (what used to be known as the Mekong Delta Party) and after one glorious night spent drinking cheap beer they completely dismantled it. Fortunately (for me as well as the local landfill) they put an advertisement on craigslist, telling anyone who might be interested to come and haul off the mess they’d produced.

What caught my attention was the mention of free sand because the principal ingredient of both the earth oven and the cob bench I’d built beside it was sand, and I had many more such projects I hoped to embark upon in the future. Last fall I did things the normal way and paid for a dump truck to come and unload a pile of sand in my driveway. This cost me a little over a hundred bucks, cheap relative to the number of things I would be able to build with it, but then I realized that the sand itself had only cost like ten bucks—the other $90 had gone to pay for use of the dump truck!

When I arrived at the Delt house I couldn’t believe how much sand they had, a huge mountain their pledges had methodically placed in sand bags. Envisioning all the things I could build, I started hauling them back to my place. In the end I managed to take seven van loads, enough to build the toolshed I’ve been talking about for a while now. I probably saved about $500 hauling this sand myself and afterwards I felt strong as an ox. Here’s a picture of the sand bags piled in my yard:

Self-Sufficiency Meter: 30%

Yesterday I introduced the Self-Sufficiency Meter, which is a rough gauge of our level of autonomy here on the Inner City Farm. I aspire to reach 100 percent but fully realize that it’s not a very realistic goal. 100 percent self-sufficiency would mean that we use zero electricity from the grid and zero water from the municipal supply, that we grow and raise all our food, that everything we use gets recycled in some manner, that we never throw anything away, that we never buy anything from a store, and that we never pay for services provided by someone else. No, not very realistic at all. And yet I still aspire.

I estimated that we were at 29 percent self-sufficiency yesterday, and, to be honest, that was just a number that popped into my head. There are ways to compute exactly how much of the earth’s resources you’re using and how much carbon your lifestyle is producing. If you’re into crunching numbers, read Jim Merkel’s book Radical Simplicity: Small Footprints on a Finite Earth. He provides countless charts and graphs that analyze how many children you have and how often you use your car and how much land you live on and then they spit out a number that reflects your level of consumption. Nice, but a little geeky for me. I’d rather guesstimate.

That’s how I came up with 29 percent. So what does that number mean? Well, right now we’re getting about half our food from the grocery store and the farmer’s market and half from our garden and hunting. The broccoli has been harvested and eaten (as far as the amount of food you get for the space required to grow it, I wouldn’t recommend growing it). The spinach is on its last legs. The arugula has been the centerpiece of most of my meals this week, but it just flowered so it’s pretty much done too. The carrots are looking good and we should be eating them within the next several weeks. The chickens are still producing between two and three eggs a day, and when we’re not bartering the eggs for vegetables from Chad and Lindsay we’re eating omelets and fried-egg sandwiches.

I’m also happy to say that roughly 95% of the meat we’ve been eating I’ve shot myself. This lifestyle would be much easier if I was a vegetarian, but I’m not. I crave meat and believe humans were meant to eat it (we have incisors for a reason), and there is a huge surplus if you’re willing to do the dirty work of actually finding it and “harvesting” it yourself. I’m lucky to have a friend that has a large ranch full of deer and wild hogs. Without any natural predators to keep their numbers in check these animals have seen their populations explode in recent years.

While commercial pork producers do unbelievable damage to the environment by raising too many animals in too little space, wild hogs are everywhere you look and very few people are hunting them. The population of feral hogs is estimated to be four million, two million of which are in Texas, and you don’t even need a hunting license to shoot one, and yet very few people do. Many ranchers shoot these animals and leave the corpses to rot in their fields because they believe that the meat tastes bad. Well, I shot one in December, and, let me tell you, it’s some of the best tasting meat I’ve ever had. I have about thirty pounds of sausage in my freezer, and I wish I had more.

As you can see, we’re doing pretty well when it comes to food, but we have a long way to go when it comes to energy and water consumption. I aspire to build a guest house on the back end of my lot that would get all its energy and water from the sun and the sky, but I’ve got a lot more to learn about natural building before I’m going to be able to start that project.

I’m going to give ourselves another percentage point on the meter today because I’m going to be eating an arugula salad for lunch and because I have yet to use my van and because I’m about to go water the loquat tree I recently planted with last night’s bathwater. Every little thing counts.

Self-Sufficiency Meter: 30%

It appears I’m on to something. This morning, two friends emailed me a link to an article published in yesterday’s New York Times about urban farmers. The article discusses backyard farms cropping up not only in and around New York City but all over the United States. Specifically mentioned were the cities of Detroit, Milwaukee, and Oakland, places that have “low-income residents, high rates of obesity and diabetes, limited sources of fresh produce and available, undeveloped land.” Basically, the ghetto. Regretfully, the Inner City Farm wasn’t mentioned.

Interestingly, the article discusses the many obstacles the “urban agriculture movement” (there it is, official confirmation; this is a movement, and I am part of it) has faced over the years. In the article John Ameroso, a Cornell Cooperative Extension agent who has been working with local farmers and gardeners for 32 years, describes the disdain he was shown by city environmental officials in the early 1990s when he suggested creating urban farm stands. They dismissed his idea as being unrealistic. Now, less than two decades later, it is coming to be seen as a practical solution to many of the problems we face.

One aspect of the article that surprised me was that many of these urban farming operations are making serious money from their backyard operations. Evidently they don’t possess the same hippie ethos I do.

Self-Sufficiency Meter (how close we are to being fully self-sufficient): 29%

My trip to New Orleans was as enjoyable as expected. That town never fails to thrill me, and it’s particularly vibrant during Jazz Fest. The highlight for me occurred on Friday night when my krewe and I took a trip to the Lower Ninth Ward, one of the areas most devastated by Hurricane Katrina. We attended a free concert put on by Michael Franti and his band Spearhead as well as the Rebirth Brass Band. We’d heard the rumor the day before, and it was confirmed at the Fairgrounds: the show would be taking place at an elementary school at the corner of Claiborne and Caffin to benefit Common Ground Relief.

Those adventurous enough to stray from the beaten path most tourists are advised to stay on while in New Orleans discovered a real treat: one of the most uplifting bands you’re ever going to see, playing for less than three hundred people. At one point Franti talked to the crowd about the difficulty of trying to affect change in a world that seems hostile to it. It was an inspiring pep talk with a simple take-home message—all you can do is do your best and eventually the little acts of kindness we perform will have a huge impact. Change will come.

I found his words particularly moving because lately I’ve been struggling to find meaning in my urban-farming project. So what if I am able to reduce my ecological footprint down to nearly nothing? So what if I’m able to grow all my food right here on this lot? So what if I build a tool shed—my next project—entirely out of natural and recycled materials? Franti’s words reminded me that what I’m doing matters, that it’s important, and that I must continue to do it.

And then I returned home to discover that one of my chicks had died during my absence. Six weeks ago I started raising four chicks in a cardboard box in my garage. Right before I left for New Orleans I moved them into the chicken coop, separating them from the three hens with some chicken wire and building them their own temporary shelter. The space they had was triple what they had before, but evidently it was still too small. Three of the chicks went psycho on the fourth, pecking it to death. It’s a sad lost but not an unexpected one. The attrition rate for chicks is extremely high. If a raccoon or disease doesn’t do them in, something else will.

Zephyr doesn’t know about the chick’s death yet, but once he hears I doubt he’ll be too upset. We’ve lost chicks before and he’s come to understand that death is simply a natural part of life on the farm. One of the main reasons I started this project was so that he could learn such things, concepts city kids have grown completely out of touch with. I’ll be sure to tell him the news while he’s collecting eggs so that he can see that life and death go hand in hand.