Inner City Farmer

After a brief hiatus during which I visited my family in Virginia, completed a lengthy work assignment, and played an inordinate amount of poker, I am back working on the farm. This weekend I prepared my fall garden, planting kale, lettuce, onions, carrots, peas, and onions. I also spread some buckwheat seeds around my nearly barren backyard, hoping to green it up and add some nitrogen to the soil. My plan is to let it grow to about a foot in height, then till it into the soil so that it acts as a “green manure.” I also planted a pomegranate tree on the south side of my house, which stays about ten degrees warmer than the rest of the yard during the winter.

Originally I had planned to start building my cob tool shed right about now, but the Man Cave has proved to be a far more difficult project than I had imagined, requiring the assistance of an electrician, a plumber, and a carpenter. I am hoping to “pay” for the carpenter using the Austin Time Exchange Network where I earned some credit last week editing somebody’s writing. Meanwhile, I am hoping to make a spiral herb garden in the next several days.

As you can see, things are getting busy around here. Luckily, the fall weather is starting to make working outside bearable once again.

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.

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%

Yesterday, my neighbor Craig, the Home Brewer, was talking to Ernest, the old man with the very prolific garden, and during their tete-a-tete they hit upon the same observation: their tomatoes weren’t doing so well. Sadly, mine aren’t either. Hoping to solve this mystery, Craig start doing some research and discovered a very discouraging fact—tomatoes stop producing flowers after the temperature gets above 95 degrees. Well, guess what? It’s been above that mark just about every day for the last two weeks, and 100-degree temperatures are projected for later this week. Only in Texas.

The lack of tomatoes combined with the near obliteration of my zucchini crop (thanks to what appears to be fungal rot) is a real blow to my quest for full self-sufficiency. I’m going to knock two whole percentage points off the…

Self-Sufficiency Meter: 27%