Inner City Farmer

When I first discovered natural building, I kept hearing the name Ianto. At the Natural Building Colloquium in Kerrville, Texas last fall, it seemed every other conversation started or ended with Ianto-this and Ianto-that. “Who was this guy?” I asked myself. Unfortunately, out of all the celebrated natural builders who attended the Colloquium Ianto Evans was the only who couldn’t make it. My interest was piqued, however, and as soon as I got home I ordered his book The Hand-Sculpted House, which I credit for my desire to remodel my entire homestead using cob.

There’s another name that keeps appearing in my life, and it’s Masanobu Fukuoka. While reading books and articles about different philosophies of gardening, I keep seeing references to this man. Curious to find out more about him, I checked out his book The One-Straw Revolution from the library. For anyone with an interest in permaculture and organic gardening, it should be required reading.

Here’s Fukuoka’s life story and philosophy of farming in brief: As a 25 year old in Japan, he was working as a plant pathologist for the Plant Inspection Division of the Yokohama Customs Bureau when he had an exhaustion-induced epiphany that modern agriculture was FUBAR. He promptly quit his job and returned to his family’s farm where he practiced “do-nothing farming,” which didn’t require plowing, fertilizing, adding insecticides, or even making compost. His philosophy of farming mirrored his philosophy of life, that human beings, full of ego and arrogance, are prone to meddling where they shouldn’t, that if left to its own devices the natural order will be just fine, thank you very much.

As basic as this idea is, it was revolutionary at the time. It was also effective. Fukuoka’s farm produced just as much rice as ones of equal size that used modern practices, and it did so with only a fraction of the inputs and labor. He let nature do all the work and provide all the nutrients, and he used the time he freed up to write books and further develop his philosophy. “There is no time in modern agriculture for a farmer to write a poem or compose a song,” he writes in The One-Straw Revolution.

In the 1970s the world finally discovered this man and anointed him one of the pioneers of the organic farming movement along with Sir Albert Howard and J.I. Rodale. But Fukuoka was never in it for the fame. He wrote several books and lectured on occasion but slowly dropped out of the public light. At 95, he is still alive today, living somewhere in Tokyo, but he no longer farms and even his fan website has no direct contact with him. Who is Masanobu Fukuoka?

It rained hard last night. Finally. We had gone months without a significant downpour so it sure felt good to wake up to the smell of damp earth. The plants and shrubs in my yard were especially pleased. My garden is pretty much done for the summer except for a hardy watermelon vine and the cucumber vines you see pictured above. As if in gratitude to the rain, the flowers appeared this morning. Could cucumbers be on the way? I sure hope so. I want to learn how to make pickles.

While my garden dies a slow and painful death, it’s nice to know that some vegetable-producing plants in Austin are doing well. Earlier in the week, a member of the Austin Permaculture listserv I belong to spotted “several tomato and pepper plants growing among the perennials at the foot of the pedestrian bridge [that spans Lady Bird Lake] on the northwest side.” There was immediate speculation as to the origins of the plants.

One member thought they were part of a demonstration garden for the Green Corn Project, a local nonprofit whose mission is “to educate and assist Central Texans in growing organic food gardens.” This seems likely—on the website they do mention having a garden on Lady Bird Lake.

But the revolutionary in me loved the speculation that it might have been planted by a guerrilla gardener. If you’re not familiar with this movement, guerrilla gardening entails planting vegetation on abandoned or unoccupied tracts of land generally under cover of night. The more brazen do it right in the middle of the day. The goals of these stealth plantings are as varied as the personalities of those performing them. Some do it to grow crops they might one day eat. Some do it to beautify a scarred piece of land. Many are making a statement about land ownership, questioning its legitimacy.

In America the movement has a long, if not glorious, history dating as far back as the first decade of the 19th Century when John “Appleseed” Chapman started planting apple orchards all across the Midwest. The modern origins of the movement have been traced to Liz Christy and her Green Guerrilla group, who in 1973 transformed a neglected lot in the Bowery Houston area of New York into a beautiful garden.

I find it telling that one of the greatest acts of subversion one can commit nowadays is planting some seeds on someone else’s land. If you’re brave enough to do it and keep it up despite public pressure not to, you just might become as famous as Richard Reynolds. I applaud all those who are willing to try.

Our garden is just not producing like I hoped it would. The heat wave we’ve been enduring has stunned most of the plants into a catatonic state. I can almost hear them shrieking in pain. Interestingly, all the edible “weeds” I planted and rarely water, like the row of Lamb’s Quarters, are doing great. Which is just one more reason I need to start building my soil and creating a true food forest out of predominately native plants and trees.

Luckily, we still have a freezer full of meat, roughly 25 pounds of sausage from the wild hog I “harvested” last fall. (Sadly, we finished the last of the venison several days ago.) I know, I know—it’s at this point in the conversation where I lose half my audience. For many, permaculture and veganism go hand in hand. In fact, a couple weeks ago a woman on the permaculture listserv out of the Bay Area that I belong to started a lively discussion on this very subject. Her stance was that, basically, if you didn’t practice both you were going straight to hell. I was happy that several members chided her for being so exclusionary.

I understand her position. Yes, we could feed the world’s population many times over if we stopped eating animals and stuck to a vegetarian diet. Yes, the way many animals are raised and slaughtered in today’s industrial food system is cruel and unsanitary. Yes, we don’t need animal manure to fertilize our soil—we can do just as good a job growing nitrogen-fixing plants like beans and peas or planting a “green manure” like clover and tilling it into the soil.

I hear all these points and they’re valid, but I also agreed with the member who responded by saying, in effect, “Permaculture is a fairly exclusionary practice as it is. Do we really want to make it more so by alienating those who eat meat?” This same member went on to tell a story about an eco-village that disbanded because of this very issue, as if practicing permaculture alone wasn’t enough.

I would never argue that veganism is bad in any way, but I would like to leave you with some food for thought (pun obviously intended). We, as a species, survived for thousands of years living a hunter-gatherer lifestyle. Such a way of life made us not only appreciate animals, but in many cases revere them almost like deities. It was when we discovered agriculture that many of our greatest problems were born. We started buying and selling land. We began trading goods. We started treating animals like chattel. We began fighting over property. Hey, I’m just saying.

There are many excellent reasons to start a garden in the city. Price is one. If you’ve got any sort of green thumb, you can eat like a king while greatly reducing your visits to the grocery store. Another is reconnecting with nature. A garden forces you to be outside, and only good things can come of that. But perhaps the greatest reason is the one that gets talked about the least: security.

It seems every other week there’s a huge recall of beef because of E. coli or salmonella. Eating store-bought meat these days is like playing Russian roulette. At least we can be sure the vegetables we buy are safe, right? Well, think again. Last year, Metz Fresh, a grower based in King City, California, issued a recall of 8,000 cartons of spinach after salmonella was detected in a routine inspection. Now Texans are being warned not to eat two of the most popular kinds of tomatoes (Roma and the ambiguously named “full-sized”) raw because of an outbreak of salmonella in nine states.

Suddenly, the tiny sun-scalded tomatoes I’m finding in my garden don’t seem so bad. My “Green Zebra” variety is doing especially well. Not only do they look cool, they taste great as well… and, most importantly, they’re safe. And what’s more important than that?

Self-Sufficiency Meter: 28%