Farm City

"I have a farm on a dead-end street in the ghetto."

That is the opening sentence in the book I just finished, "Farm City: The Education of an Urban Farmer" by Novella Carpenter. I thoroughly enjoyed reading how this eccentric woman evolved into a ghetto-farmer who squat-gardens on the empty lot next to her apartment in Oakland, CA. Her writing style is lively and engaging and frankly, hilarious. Here's an excerpt from Chapter 4:

"The next morning, I stood in my lot and yelped. I threw the hose off to the side and examined the crime scene. Half my watermelon seedlings were now stubs. My eyes trailed a jellyfish-like slime that ended at what was left of the baby melon plants. Chewed by slugs. Searching for the culprits in the sunlight, I dug around the moist areas where soil came in contact with wood, a slug's favorite hiding spot. I found a few small ones. They looked -and felt- like pieces of gray snot. Now that I had them, I weighed my options.

Some people suggest tossing slugs; that is, you just hurl them as far from your garden as possible. I had my doubts that the greedy mollusks deserved a second chance, however slim, to slowly creep back from the street, dodging cars and boots, and snack once again on my delicate watermelon seedlings. Other people suggest drowning them in beer moats crafted out of tunafish cans. The slugs would fall into the moat and die a drunken, Janis Joplin-esque death. This seemed suspiciously close to buying the slugs a beer, which was more generous than I felt. So I dispatched them between my thumb and index finger. I offered their corpses to the ducks and the goose, but they didn't seem interested. I knew there were more slugs - bigger slugs, the mothers and fathers of those babies I had just murdered - and I knew when to catch them. Later in the day, as the sun set, I drank a strong cup of tea and strapped on my headlamp. Prepared for hand-to-hand combat, I went slug hunting.

I found them, lit up by the strange blue light of my energy-saving headlamp. Lolling around in the dirt, they approached the supple green shoots of my remaining melon plants with their little horns (which are, in fact, eyes) up. Some people think the horn-eyes are endearing, but if the slugs had their way, I would have exactly zero watermelons. These dirt-inhabiting scum balls are the clear-cutters of the mollusk world. They will leave nothing in their wake. If they exercised restraint, they could have a food source for months instead of hours. But this isn't how slugs operate. And so I committed slug mass murder in order to save a fruit.

I ripped them in two; then, just to be sure, I squished them between boards. When it was done, I tossed the grotesque, loogie-like pile of dead slugs into the garbage can. As I scrubbed my murderous hands I wondered if Lana (my vegan neighbor) would refuse to eat one of my watermelons if she knew what I had done. No one is really pure, except maybe the Jains, that sect in India whose members sweep a peacock feather on the ground in front of them as they walk in order to prevent injury to, say, an ant. They do drink water, I'm told, and I wonder how they come to terms with eating all the organisms that live in it.

It took me a full five minutes of scrubbing to remove all the slug slime from my hands. Like a low-stakes Lady Macbeth, I couldn't shake the sensation that they were still soiled. But I wasn't conflicted: it felt great. I killed so that others might live. Death is all around us, even in an innocent watermelon. You just have to know where to look."

I enjoyed this book so much but I will warn my vegetarian and vegan readers that she does raise her animals for meat and goes into graphic detail about the entire process. I found it interesting and I appreciate the fact that she raises and dispatches her livestock with gentle care and repect, but her descriptions are not for the faint of heart. She honors her animal friends by trying to use every part and for her, eating them takes on a symbolic, sacrificial meaning. I highly recommend Farm City, it is a fantastic read!