Inner City Farmer

It has come to my attention through the Austin Permaculture Guild’s listserv that Masanobu Fukuoka, the pioneer of natural farming in Japan, died at his home in Iyo, Ehime Prefecture on Saturday. He was 95.

“I, as one of millions, will cherish and spread his memory as far and wide and well as I can for as long as I can,” Dick Pierce wrote in a recent email. “I know that people we teach will teach others, and others… so that the flame will grow, not wither. Truth is eternal. He humbly spoke the truth to all that would listen. In his passing, let us pray and work toward the day when all will listen.”

I take solace in these words because I know that, despite the fact that I will never learn directly from the man, I still have a chance to learn from those who learned from him. Fukuoka only entered my consciousness for the first time a month or two ago, but I now have a feeling that he’ll ever leave it.

In a recent job interview—that’s right; you heard me correctly, unfortunately—the woman grilling me from behind her desk asked me what I would do if I could do anything. I didn’t hesitate before telling her that I would run my farm full-time, turning it into a more productive operation and, perhaps, a demonstration site. Needless to say, I didn’t get the job. (Was I really supposed to say that I wanted to program computers all day long?)

This is the great conundrum of the Inner City Farm. In my effort to extricate myself from the clutches of the greater market economy, I often become completely dependent on that economy. For example, photovoltaics. I would like nothing more than to slap some solar panels on the roof of my house so that I could generate my own energy and not have to rely on Austin Energy, but solar panels are freakin’ expensive!

Here’s another example. I would love to attend the workshop on urban permaculture being held at the renowned Esalen Institute in three weeks (and featured in the flyer above). It’s right up my alley. I’m sure I would learn a ton about urban sustainability and could share that information with those who follow this blog, but like solar panels the workshop requires a hefty investment. Esalen ain’t cheap.

To keep the dream alive, I added a DONATE button to this site today. It’s over there by the cheesy ads (which, if you click on them a hundred times a day, would help me keep my chickens in feed). I figure if everyone who reads this blog donated between $10 and $20 I could attend the workshop. The fee for the workshop ranges between $535 and $1,120, depending upon your accommodations. I would be happy to sleep on the floor just like the hippies who made the place famous in the ‘60s did. If I’m able to raise the money in the next ten days or so, I promise to write about the workshop every day I’m there. If not, no biggie. There will be other conferences (In fact there’s one in Austin this fall).

I’m really embarrassed right now. I just took the Ecological Footprint Quiz designed by Redefining Progress, and my results stunned me. The bottom line: If everyone on the planet lived my lifestyle, we would need 3.14 Earths! My monstrous footprint requires 121.91 acres when I am ostensibly trying to survive on just one-fifth. Ugh.

The good news, I guess, is that the average in this country is 246.41 acres so I am doing much better than most, but, still, 121.91 acres! You have got to be kidding me! How can this be? As you might imagine I have an incredibly small housing footprint but my carbon footprint is through the roof. Why? Mostly because of air travel. If you take even a couple flights each year, you’re basically offsetting all the good you might be doing by biking to work and eating from your garden. Air travel as we know it is unsustainable, and I foresee it becoming a luxury in the very near future in the same way taking a cruise across the Atlantic was at the turn of the last century.

Despite my horrific score, I’m glad I took the quiz because now I know exactly what I should be working on around here. I challenge you to do the same. It takes less than five minutes and only stings a little bit.

It’s a common problem for homeowners. How do you get rid of the critters you don’t want while at the same time attracting those you do? My neighborhood is plagued with mice and rats, creatures I prefer to admire from a distance. Once they start trying to get into my house, I feel the need to start taking direct action.

The most effective remedy I’ve come up with is the brother-sister cat combo I adopted two years ago. Thanks to Zephyr’s incredibly logical system of naming things, they are named Brother and Sister. Compared to his skittish sister, Brother is quite a showman. Here you can see him proudly showing off the rat he has just eaten three-quarters of.

Like most female cats, Sister is actually the better mouser. They become particularly efficient, I have found, the less I feed them. Unfortunately, their utilitarian value dips every time I discover that mice and rats aren’t their only prey. I used to have far more birds and lizards visit my backyard before I decided to adopt two kitties. Oh well. Everything in life is a trade-off, isn’t it?

Ever since I moved into this place, I’ve been stockpiling my old used batteries. What do you do with these toxic time bombs? How does one properly dispose of them? In the good old days we used to just blithely toss them into the garbage and hope some future generation of smarter humans would figure it all out. Admit it, you did. We all did. But now we know better.

Through diligent research I discovered that in Austin you can drop off your spent batteries at the Household Hazardous Waste Facility, which is open noon to 6 p.m. Tuesdays and Wednesdays and 7 a.m. to noon on the first Saturday of each month. The problem for me is that the Facility is in way South Austin, which, the way I drive, might as well be Africa. So I called up the Facility and found out that you can also drop off your old batteries at pretty much any Radio Shack or Batteries Plus. I took mine to the Radio Shack in the Hancock Center and simply handed them to the guy behind the counter who dropped them in the plastic tub you see in the picture above. Easy, simple, done.