Inner City Farmer

Last evening, I attended an Intro to Permaculture and Sustainability talk at Habitat Suites, an extremely green hotel just up the road from my house. The discussion was led by Dick Pierce, the head of the Austin Permaculture Guild, and it was exactly what I needed to hear right now.

While I have been working in relative isolation, there is a vibrant community of permaculture enthusiasts in Central Texas, and they are more than happy to share all the knowledge they’ve collected over the years. I can’t tell you how enjoyable it was to sit in a room full of people who shared the same enthusiasm about creating a sustainable society from the ground up. In fact, the discussion was so inspiring I am planning on attending the Guild’s 10-day permaculture design course that starts in late September.

If I am unable to attend the workshop at Esalen, any money that gets donated to this project (and I’ve already received a donation; muchas gracias!) will go towards paying my entry fee into this design course. If I only attend this course and not the one at Esalen, I will hardly be upset. In fact, it makes sense that I learn how to farm my urban plot from people who live right here in Austin, people who understand the seasons and the soil.

Up to this point, I’ve done nearly everything that needs doing on the farm on my own. But once summer hit in earnest (it now hits 100 degrees pretty much every day) I started spending more and more time working on the interior of my house, which involves using skills I don’t fully possess. My latest project has been creating a serving window between my kitchen and dining room. I had a hunch that simply knocking a hole in the wall would improve life inside my house immeasurably, and I was right. There’s more light in all the rooms, and my small house now feels much bigger.

Making the hole was easy. Destroying something always is. All I needed was a sheetrock saw and a Sawzall. Making the frame for the new window was much trickier so I gave my friend Matt a call. Initially, I thought I would only be borrowing some of the many saws he owns, but in the end I discovered that I needed his expertise even more. Simply put, he knew what he was doing, and I did not. Without his help I wouldn’t have been able to do the job correctly.

This project didn’t require the use of any of my natural building skills, but it did demand that I use an ability that’s been gathering dust during my quest for self-sufficiency, and that is the willingness to ask for help. It’s much harder for me to do this than you might imagine, and I know I need to get over it. For the farm to reach its full potential it’s going to need many hands pitching in and helping out. It seems counter-intuitive, but I think seeking help (from friends, not paid laborers) actually improves my self-sufficiency. Now I just need to start asking.

Waller Creek runs right by my house. Or should I say Waller Creek is “located” right by my house? Because Waller Creek isn’t “running” at all right now. It’s dry as a bone, which provides an excellent illustration of the drought we’re mired in. During the three-year period I’ve lived in Austin it’s only rained with any regularity and volume for two months last spring. Otherwise, nada.

The lack of rain makes everything that needs to get done on the farm that much harder: keeping the garden watered, the chickens hydrated, the clay dug from the ground, the fruit trees growing. Water is life, and without it the farm isn’t looking so lively right about now.

But wait. There’s hope. Relief is on the way, thanks to Hurricane Dolly. While the national news is trying to portray the storm as some sort of “monster” and “killer,” here in Austin we’re ready to welcome it with open arms. Sadly, as of five minutes ago, we hadn’t gotten more than a sprinkling of rain while San Antonio and Houston are getting pummeled. What up with that?

Don’t you wish the intersections in your neighborhood looked like this? If you live in the Northwest (of the country, not Austin, sadly), there’s a good chance at least one of them does. The City Repair Project, an “organized group action” that educates and inspires communities and individuals to creatively transform the places where they live, was created in Portland, Oregon in 1996 by citizen activists who wanted a more community-oriented and ecologically sustainable society. The movement and its ideals have since spread up and down the West Coast to towns like Eugene, Olympia, Seattle, Santa Monica, and Oakland.

Could Austin be next? If so, I know of a perfect intersection, Nelray and Chesterfield, which is right here in my neighborhood. A guerrilla gardener has already hit one corner of the intersection, creating this beautiful array of flowers and vegetables:

On the northwest side of the intersection sits this pleasant-looking bush, the name of which escapes me:

This was the shrub that was sporting pretty lavender flower just last week. I think it might be a Bush Germander?

Together these two corners of the intersection show the inherent natural beauty of the area, but the the two corners opposite show the present-day reality.

Nice tag on the curb, huh? The southeast corner has also been hit with a splash of graffiti:

To me, this intersection represents all that my neighborhood is (as well as could be). Instead of allowing some high-school punk to lift his leg and piss on all of our street corners, wouldn’t it be nice if we were to come together and take back our streets? A City Repair-type action is the most beautiful way of doing it I can think of. Anyone want to join me?

Yesterday evening, I was walking the dog around the block when I ran into a neighbor, Adam, who was pushing his daughter Ada in a stroller. We got to talking about a bush on the side of the road that had recently flowered but only for a couple days. All its purple petals lay on the ground, their color rapidly fading, as we spoke.

Adam made his keen interest in horticulture immediately apparent. He pointed out a plant at the edge of the dry creek bed (taro, I think it was) and informed me that it was edible. Which got me talking about the pond I hope to create in my backyard someday and the plants I hope to grow in it. Which made him think of Tony, who lived just down the road from where we were standing and who I just had to meet.

Like Adam, Tony was my kind of guy. He spoke the same language I do, peppering his sentences with references to “synergy” and “feedback loops” and “aquaculture.” He seemed especially well versed on the last, and I made it known that I wanted to hear more. He promptly led me to his backyard where he showed me his aquaculture system (some of which can be seen in the picture above). In its heyday vegetables—mostly salad greens—grew in the three bins, which held gravel and nutrient-rich water that came from an aquarium full of fish. After the vegetables purified the water, it returned to the fish tank. It was a perfect closed-loop system that grew both veggies and fish… until it got so ridiculously hot and shut down. The same thing happened to the aquaculture project at the Rhizome Collective.

The whole explanation of how it works only took a couple minutes, but it was enough to get me hooked. I now know what Project #91 is.