Farm City: The Education of an Urban Farmer (18 page)

CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE

On day ten of the experiment, I stood on the boggy roof of an abandoned carport eating plums. The house was abandoned, too. The tree, planted at the back of the house by some kindly farmer of yesteryear, groaned with fruit.

In order to be truly self-sufficient for the month of July, I found that I had to become a hunter-gatherer of sorts. There was no shame in this—I couldn’t grow everything, after all. Even Wendell Berry, farmer extraordinaire, agreed. In the essay “The Whole Horse,” he wrote, “A subsistence economy necessarily is highly diversified, and it characteristically has involved hunting and gathering as well as farming and gardening.” It was true that eating the same things out of the garden—lettuce, beets, squash blossoms—day after day had gotten a little monotonous. I needed to supplement with some foraged food. According to Roman law, it is perfectly legal to harvest fruit that hangs over into a public area.

I spotted the plums while I was riding my bike. I had never noticed them before, but the 100-yard diet had so heightened my senses, I started to see food everywhere. Every shrub, tree, and weed I encountered quivered with potential usefulness. In every abandoned lot, I saw a potential garden. I could also smell a hot dog a mile away.

These plums were a variety called elephant hearts. They had green skin and bright red flesh, in the shape of a heart. They didn’t taste particularly good. In fact, if I hadn’t been doing this experiment in self-sufficiency, I never would have gone out of my way to find the tree, shimmy up a wooden fence, make the catlike leap to the garage, and creep across the rotting beams for a few plums. And now that I had gone through that, I found them to be vaguely dry, maybe too sour. But I was hungry, so I scarfed them down on the rooftop.

As I munched, I silently thanked the long-gone home owner who had planted this tree. Whoever had done so probably had to make a tough decision: a beautiful ornamental or a fruit-bearing tree.

“Garden style is a continuing expression of the changing idea of the universe,” environmentalist Paul Shepard observes in
Thinking Animals,
pointing out that Italy’s Renaissance gardens were orderly and complex, like aristocratic society. If this is true, and I think it is, what does our city landscaping say about us? The barren ornamental pears, the trimmed hedges, the ubiquitous lawn—the pedigreed landscape. I find this environment to be wasteful. “The observer of city gardens cannot fail to notice that not one of the plants that are grown in most urban residential areas, or that appear on planting plans, have the slightest nutritional value,” landscape architect Michael Hough writes in
City Form and Natural Process.
“However, opportunities for using edible plants are just as great as [for] using those that are purely ornamental. Tree planting along city streets could include fruit-bearing species.”

Here, someone had ignored convention and planted this fruiting plum tree. Maybe he had been hungry. Maybe the tree reminded him of home. Maybe he had imagined plum dumplings or plum jam. Whatever his motives, he watered the tree, didn’t cut it down, let it flourish and fruit for all these years. Based on its size, it must have been forty years old. Whoever planted it could never have predicted my existence—a crazy, starved, foraging locavore. The past was feeding me today, and I was grateful.

After I finished eating, I loaded two plastic bags with fruit, let them fall to the soft earth, and climbed down after them. I balanced the bags on my bike’s handlebars and headed home. I had a hunch. It involved canning.

On my way, I paused a few blocks from the 2-8 to watch a dice game. Two boys were playing—one fat, one thin. They yelled and rolled. The fat one threw down a dollar.

“Excuse me,” I said. “How does this work?”

Without pause, as if he had been waiting for someone to finally inquire, the thin kid explained that the first roll determines the bet. If it’s a seven, for instance, then the person who bets is betting that another seven will be rolled.

I watched for a while, and the fat kid lost all four of his ones.

“Can I have ’em back?” he said to the thin kid.

“OK.” The skinny kid passed him the floppy bills. I wasn’t the only one just playing. This kid was pretending to bet; I was playing at self-sufficiency.

I continued cycling, keeping the BART tracks and highways 980 and 24 on my left.

I passed the lumbering
Magnolia grandiflora
s growing along some of MLK. The trees have leathery leaves and giant white blossoms, and if it’s not rush hour, you can smell their tangy-sweet lemon scent.

At home, a woman who had recently moved to our street, Makeda, was in my garden. She, like all of us, has a hustle. She makes pulled-pork sandwiches, stacks them into a wheelie cart, and then wanders around Oakland’s small rock-club-and-bar district after dark selling them.

“Hey, Novella, can I pick some beets?” she asked, her red dreads glimmering in the sun. She had asked to pick beets before, and I was always more than happy to share. But now that I was on this garden-eating stunt, it felt like she was asking for my firstborn.

A stray cat was in the garden with us. Gray, lanky, and half wild, he usually ran away at the first glimpse of a person, but he was so intent on stalking a mouse in the compost pile that he hadn’t noticed us.

“Sure, sure,” I said to Makeda, and showed her which ones to pull from the dark earth. I had to stay human, I reminded myself as I parked my bike.

Upstairs I dunked the plums in a bucket filled with water and mercilessly scrubbed them down. I loaded my oven with widemouthed jars, and boiled water in a giant blue enamel canning pot. After the jars were sterilized—really hot—I crammed as many whole plums into the jars as could fit. I boiled the jars of plums in the water bath—this process is called raw-pack canning—and once some of the plums had softened and cooked down, I crammed in a few more until they were an inch from the top of the jar. Then I screwed on the lids and let the jars rumble under two inches of boiling water for about an hour. When I pulled the jars from the water, the plums had turned an amazing fuchsia color. I placed the hot jars of plums into our pantry to cool down overnight and set the seal.

That night, Bill and I went out to an East Bay institution we had heard about but could not believe until we saw it with our own eyes: in the parking lot of a bakery, four metal bins overflowing with loaves of bread, any time of day, any day of the week.

Day-old loaves. Bread that was too dark, too pale, or otherwise damaged in some way in the bakery was dumped. Pastries not sold, also dumped. And so these Dumpsters attracted and nourished the entire scavenger community of the East Bay: the hippies, the punks, the scroungers. Occasionally regular citizens appeared, gawking at the plenty before sheepishly snagging a few loaves. These were the Dumpsters of Life.

The smell of the bakery almost knocked me over. Behind a glass wall, men wearing white surgical smocks sweated, forming dough, mixing flour, pulling pans out of the oven. I stared at them in awe. Carbohydrates in action. So delicious, so not allowed according to rule number three: No food from Dumpsters (except to feed the animals).

The bread Dumpsters were in the back of the parking lot. They were big, lumbering, each the size of a minivan. ANIMAL FEED ONLY, one sign read; NO TRESPASSING, another read. Bill and I, now veteran Chinatown scroungers, were not shy. We flipped the black plastic lids back; they clanged against the green metal of the Dumpster. The smell of bakery items was intoxicating. I took a deep huff. Bill immediately snagged a cinnamon roll that rolled freely on top of a pile of challah, baguettes, and liberated slices of bread. He gnawed on it thoughtfully, then concluded, “Mmm, good.” I was both repulsed and desperately jealous.

I was there for the rabbits.

Riana informed me that Mamie, her French grandmother-in-law, always fed her rabbits stale baguettes. I couldn’t find a source in English that recommended such a practice, but I was eager to save money. The alfalfa pellets were starting to get expensive. I hadn’t been spending any money on food for myself, so I was actually saving tons, yet I was keen to explore the city’s bounty. And there, in the Dumpster of Life, within easy reach, were twenty-four baguettes. We hustled them home, along with some hamburger buns for the chickens and five cinnamon rolls for Bill.

The rabbits fell on the stale baguettes as if they had been waiting for them their whole lives. They ignored the bok choy and sharpened their teeth on the hard bread.

The next day for breakfast, while Bill heated up his unbearably delicious-smelling Dumpster rolls, I opened a jar of the stewed plums. Just as it should be, the lid was tight and hard to pry off, but it finally yielded with a satisfying pop. Inside, a thick juice the color of wine covered the plums. I took a swig. Sweet, thick nectar with a slight hint of cherry filled my mouth. I dug into the flesh of the plum on top with a spoon. It was dense and puddinglike, tart but not as sour as the raw fruits.

As Bill munched on his roll and I ate a whole jar of plums I wondered how the bread-fed bunnies would taste.

CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO

Finally, after one missed UPS delivery, the tea plants arrived. The caffeine-withdrawal headaches were now gone, so it was with only mild interest, not desperation, that I opened the long cardboard box. The three plants were wrapped in butcher paper; once released from their brown swaddling, they looked terrifically healthy, like shiny-leaved, ornamental camellias. The invoice reminded me that I had paid $20 for each plant, so I had to put them to good use.

Two of the
Camellia sinensis
plants had new bud growth, which is what’s usually picked to make green tea. I planted them in the front yard, in a semi-shady area, and took a few young leaves upstairs. According to the instructions that came with the plants, green tea is the easiest to make. You simply pan-fry or steam the leaves, then dry them out. Within a few hours, I had some grassy-smelling green tea. It wasn’t coffee, but at least it wasn’t another mug of mint tea. A few minutes after drinking it, I felt a surge of energy and well-being. Probably the best $60 I ever spent.

Bill, a huge fan of green tea—jasmine-spiked was his favorite—came into the kitchen as I brewed my second mug.

“Can I taste it?” he asked, reaching across the table to snag my mug.

I made a grunting sound and grabbed the mug back, careful not to spill a drop.

“You get to eat whatever you want!” I said. I had been coveting his breakfasts of cereal and milk.

“Just a taste?” he begged.

I surrended. He took a huge, slurping gulp. “That’s awful,” he said.

“More for me,” I said, and reclaimed my cup of caffeine.

Near the middle of my experiment, I noticed that one of my hens had gone broody. A broody chicken will sit on her egg—or, if you haven’t been gathering them daily, the clutch of eggs—and will refuse to move. A broody chicken is an intense animal, devoted to, obsessed about, hatching some eggs. This lasts for about three weeks, the usual gestation time for chicks. Even if there’s no rooster and no chance for a baby chick (save for an immaculate chicken conception), the hen still sits firmly on her nest and does nothing, not even laying more eggs.

I had been eating—and depending on—up to three eggs a day to keep up my protein levels. I went downstairs to consult the chicken. I brought a cabbage leaf. She had set up a nest near the side of the house, under a bush.

“Hello?” I started.

She made a horrible keening noise.

I went to pet her feathers. She pecked me, hard.

I offered her the leaf. She stared intently into the middle distance. She seemed annoyed at my audacity, my wilted bribe.

I prayed that the other chickens didn’t go broody. Experts I consulted on the Internet said there’s nothing really to do about a broody hen; you just have to wait it out.

As I calculated my protein intake a duck walked by. He was one of seven I had been raising, a white Pekin, like the ones our little neighbor Sophia had loved, one of which had been killed by the opossum. Sophia and her mom had moved away that past winter.

The duck gave me the hairy eyeball that ducks tend to give, cocking their heads up, beady eyes wary but charming. I bought a pair of pruning loppers the next day.

The previous batch of ducks, the two who had survived the opossum attack, had ended up on my table around the time Sophia and Neruda moved away. I didn’t have the heart to kill them personally, but they were messy and were eating tons of feed, so I hired two assassins. “Assassins” might be a strong word. More like two hungry hippies Bill knew. I watched, like a coward, from the kitchen as they carried the ducks from the back porch and into the lot, where they chopped off their heads with an ax.

It took an hour to pluck the ducks, and then we barbecued them. The dinner was the hippies’ payment. Alas, the meat was hard and rubbery because we hadn’t let it rest. The skin and fat were delicious, though.

One of the hippies chewed thoughtfully. He was tall, had long hair, and frequently went barefoot. Around his neck he wore a rope with a bottle of gin tied to it. On the other end of the rope was a bottle of tonic water.

Where do you find these people? In Oakland. “You know, modern man doesn’t get to use his teeth much anymore,” he pointed out. “This is exercise for my teeth!”

I remembered that Carla Emery’s
Encyclopedia of Country Living
had suggested resting meat before eating it to keep it from getting rubbery and tough, but I didn’t understand why. For a clear, scientific explanation, I turned to Harold McGee’s encyclopedic
On Food and Cooking:
“For a brief period after the animal’s death its muscles are relaxed and if immediately cut and cooked will make especially tender meat.” Hmm. The hippies and I probably took too long to pluck the ducks. Rigor mortis had set in, the protein filaments in the muscles bound together, creating a tough texture.

If we had let the ducks rest for twenty-four hours, according to McGee, enzymes called cathepsins would have broken down the bound filaments, making the meat tender. The enzymes also break proteins into tasty amino acids and fats into aromatic fatty acids. “All of these breakdown products contribute to the intensely meaty, nutty flavor of aged meat.” Oh, hell, I thought, what a waste.

This time around, in a state of semistarvation, I went out to the lot and grabbed the first duck I could catch. I didn’t want to kill him in front of the other ducks and geese, but the backyard was occupied by chickens who might take offense, and on the deck were rabbits who would certainly become upset about an execution. So I took the white duck into our bathroom and plopped him in the tub with some water in it. He quacked and swam around for a few minutes while I collected my arsenal: a bucket and the recently purchased tree pruners. A friend of mine who keeps ducks kills them using this method, which he calls harvesting. It wasn’t like killing Harold. I merely opened up the loppers, placed them around the duck’s neck, and squeezed the loppers shut. The duck went from being a happy camper to being a headless camper. I plucked and eviscerated him outside on a table. The killing thing was starting to feel a bit routine.

After the duck rested for a day in the fridge, I baked him with the oven on low, letting his fatty skin baste the unctuous meat. I decided to share a little of the duck with Bill. The meat was tender and delicious. Not used to so much food at once, I paused to digest and watch Bill eat. As he gnawed on a duck breast, his lips and chin growing greasy from all the fat, I was reminded that we really weren’t so far away from monkeys. Chimps eat meat—eliminate the concept of the banana-loving fruitarian—and meat, according to Susan Allport’s compelling book
The Primal Feast: Food, Sex, Foraging, and Love,
“is the food that is most often fought over, stolen, begged for, and shared.”

Only slightly paranoid that Bill would find them, I put the duck leftovers in the back of the fridge. The fatty skin became my version of bacon for a few days.