By Jeanne Storck
They’re trading lawns for lettuce, bringing hens into the family
fold and harvesting honey just steps from their back door. They’re the
new urban farmers, and they’re coming soon to a yard near you (if
they’re not already there).
As climates change, fuel prices
rise and food shortages loom, a growing number of city dwellers are
realizing that converting a home into a homestead makes ecological and
economic sense. At San Francisco’s Garden for the Environment [1], organic [1]
gardening classes sold out two months in advance. Landscape architect
Colin McCrate of Seattle Urban Farm Company [2] reports Seattlites are
clamoring for backyard vegetable plots. The movement even has its own
campus — earlier this year the Institute of Urban Homesteading [3] opened
its doors in Oakland, California, offering city slickers the chance to
train in the rural arts of gardening, beekeeping and food preservation.
Urban farming isn’t an entirely new concept. During World War II,
Americans produced almost forty percent of the nation’s food in
backyard Victory Gardens. This summer, San Francisco is resurrecting
the idea, replacing the manicured lawn in front of City Hall with
vegetable beds and encouraging residents to do the same.
Good food guru Michael Pollan [4] only fed the plant-it-yourself fervor in an Earth Day essay for the New York Times
magazine. “Rip out your lawn, if you have one, and if you don’t — if
you live in a high-rise, or have a yard shrouded in shade — look into
getting a plot in a community garden,” Pollan implored. “Measured
against the Problem We Face, planting a garden sounds pretty benign, I
know, but in fact it’s one of the most powerful things an individual
can do — to reduce your carbon footprint, sure, but more important, to
reduce your sense of dependence and dividedness: to change the
cheap-energy mind.”
So when your neighbors suddenly decide to
landscape their front yard with fava beans or put a beehive out back,
don’t look askance. They’re the vanguard of a new American food
movement — one that is easy enough to join. For inspiration, check out
five urban homesteaders leading the way.
Radical Home Ec in Seattle
Jessica Dally gets down with her city chickens, Ginger and Marilyn. Photo: Ritzy Ryciak
When Jessica Dally offers a piece of her homemade cheese to someone
who’s used to grocery store fare she always tells them: “This is the
best cheese you’ll ever taste.” It’s her way of coaxing people to try
something fresh and handmade — and she gets a kick out of watching
their faces light up when they realize how good it is.
Cheesemaking is one of the many kitchen arts Dally has mastered, along
with gardening, soapmaking, canning, tending chickens and keeping bees.
She recently joined forces with Slow is Beautiful author Cecile
Andrews [5] (New Society Publishers, 2006) to form Seattle Free School,
where she’s now teaching an updated, more radical version of home ec.
Dally picked up cheesemaking skills while working at Samish Bay Cheese [6],
a small organic dairy farm in Skagit Valley, Washington. She can rattle
off a mouth-watering list of cheeses she’s since learned to make at
home — mascarpone, cheddars washed in red wine, Gouda and chèvre. The
tools, Dally explains, are simple and inexpensive: a quality
cheesecloth from a kitchen supply store, starters, rennet and a cheese
mold. She encourages beginners to improvise equipment from what’s at
hand. Pots for pasta can do double duty for cheese or soap making, and
there’s no need to buy an expensive cheese press when some round
weights and a colander will do.
Spending time in the kitchen
and tending her plants and poultry have given Dally a sense of
confidence and community. When she started her vegetable garden, she
was doubtful tea plants would grow in the Seattle climate, but she
tried it anyway and the plants flourished. When she took on a brood of
chickens, they sparked conversations with the neighbors. “At first they
found it curious and thought I was weird, but when they finally heard
more about it, they were excited.” And she’s become a hit at dinner
parties and family gatherings. “If I don’t give gifts of handmade
cheese now, people are disappointed.”
The Farmer In The 'Hood
Novella Carpenter cuddles up with Bebe and Bilbo on an Oakland afternoon. Photo: Andy Isaacson
Novella Carpenter [7] starts every day with the same quiet ritual. She
scoops up her goat, Bebe, places her on a stand in the laundry room of
her house and gently (but firmly) milks her. Bebe waits patiently,
munching on a bowl of grains while another goat, Bilbo, occasionally
pokes his head in at the door.
Novella and her partner Bill
rent a rambling apartment in a rundown part of Oakland one block from
Interstate 980. Ten years ago, they began squatting the weed-ridden
vacant lot next door and developed it into a mini farm that now blooms
with raised vegetable beds, apple and plum trees, beehives, a hen
house, one turkey and a few Nigerian dwarf goats.
The goats
are a recent addition that Carpenter took on four months ago, signing
herself up for a rapid, intense apprenticeship — milking, caring for
hooves, birthing and dehorning. She’s mastered milking and can brew up
a decent cappuccino from the two cups she gets daily from Bebe.
Cheesemaking is next.
The child of back-to-the-landers,
Carpenter thought she wanted to become a vet, but her life took a
different turn. She studied English and biology in college, went on to
earn a degree at Berkeley’s School of Journalism, where she studied
with Michael Pollan, and now writes on urban farming and sustainable
practices. In a sense though, she’s not far off from her original
dream.
In the backyard, the turkey wanders, clucking to no
one in particular. The goats munch fragrant sprays of hay and alfalfa
trekked in from the nearest farm supply store (a hard thing to find in
the inner city). An ailing lemon tree Carpenter rescued from a friend
mends in some freshly dug soil, and on the front porch rabbits nibble
lettuce and carrots, enjoying the harvest of one of Novella and Bill’s
late-night dumpster dives.
Carpenter’s online diary is a
vivid catalog of small daily acts undertaken with a strong desire to
learn where her food comes from — where gleaning olives from the side
of the road, grafting an apple tree or pondering the dilemma of raising
two pigs for slaughter are literally food for thought. Her memoir about
life as an urban farmer is due out next year from Penguin Press (novellacarpenter.com [8]).
A Regular Middle Class LA Farm
Kelly Coyne and Eric Knutzen have an American Gothic moment on their LA farm
Eric Knutzen and Kelly Coyne’s city farm began its life as a simple
kitchen garden. Motivated by an interest in eating fresh and local,
Knutzen and Coyne assessed the spare 1,750 square foot backyard of
their 1920s Silver Lake bungalow in Los Angeles and saw the possibility
of a food forest. To get there, they poured over gardening manuals,
learning through trial and error what worked in their Mediterranean
climate. Eggplant and broccoli were too fussy. Rosemary thrived. They
put in Italian strains like Borlotto beans, purple Sicilian
cauliflower, rapini and arugula and in the process rediscovered the
good bitterness natural to Italian food. “We’ve lost a whole world of
flavors to bland supermarket produce,” Knutzen laments.
Their “compound,” as they wryly refer to it, has since grown to include
chickens, greywater irrigation, a home brewing system and a fleet of
bikes. Last summer they pushed their homestead’s boundaries even
further and planted corn, beans and squash in the parking strip in
front of the house — challenging the idea that a front yard requires a
lawn. They were worried the neighbors and city would disapprove, but to
their surprise and delight, the vegetable patch sparked more curiosity
than complaints.
The little patch is also a perfect example
of the permaculture they practice, in which planting vegetables
beneficial to one another in the same plot increases efficiency and
reduces labor. In this case, the beans provide nitrogen to the soil,
the corn provides a stalk for the beans to climb and the squash
provides mulch, which conserves water and keeps down weeds — the
perfect time saver for a duo who jokingly call themselves “lazy urban
homesteaders.”
Knutzen advises other aspiring homesteaders
to take it slow and to be persistent. The couple have gathered their
experiences into a how-to manual, The Urban Homestead [9] (Process Media,
June 2008), which touches on vegetable gardening, poultry, DIY cleaning
products and beer making — all outlined with a sense of play and fun.
“Living sustainably doesn’t have to be heroic or motivated by guilt,”
Knutzen says. “You want it to be inspiring. For us, it’s about
incorporating things like home growing and riding a bike into a regular
middle class life.” Follow their adventures at homegrownevolution.com [10].
Edible Chicago
Nance Klehm dices up foraged treats for dinner. Photo: Madeleine Hill
If you happened to find yourself on a deserted island, Nance Klehm
would be a good person to have on hand. She manages to live almost
entirely from the food her Chicago garden produces, foraged edible
plants and what she’s able to preserve — and she does this in a
cold-climate city where the growing season lasts only four months.
Klehm grew up on a Midwestern farm and moved to the big city at 18. But
despite her new digs, Klehm couldn’t shake her connection to the soil.
She’s now built an urban farm on what she calls a “scattered acre” made
up of her yard and roof as well as the yards of friends and neighbors —
a social network bound together by food.
When she runs
through the items she stores and preserves, she paints a picture of a
pantry full of mason jars swimming with luscious fruits and vegetables
from A (apples) to Z (zucchini). She cans soups, chutneys and sauces,
ferments sauerkraut, kimchi, wines and vinegars and makes sourdough
bread from starter. Faced with a windfall of 300 pounds of apples, she
presses cider. When raw milk is available from early summer through
late winter, she makes cheeses and yogurt. It’s a whirlwind of a list,
and she admits she often puts in 80-hour weeks, preparing food,
designing gardens, managing a large greenhouse for a homeless shelter
and teaching her Living Kitchen classes on breadmaking, cheesemaking
and medicinals.
Klehm also forages in the wild spaces of
Chicago, harvesting edible plants where others see only an overgrown
lot. Dandelions are weeds to some, but the makings of a great wine to
Klehm. “Foraging brings out our gathering instincts, our innate
curiosity to discover,” she enthuses. On the monthly walks she leads,
Klehm pulls people into areas of the city they’ve never been and
teaches them to engage physically in our overly virtual world.
Sharing food knowledge is key for Klehm; she believes recipes should be
communal and spread by word-of-mouth. “Ask your grandmother, your
father, an older neighbor or a friend what foods they preserve and
learn from them. Once you have a plan to put up something like marinara
or peach jam, invite friends over and make a day of it.”
“I
don’t use recipes,” Klehm admits. For her, good food is not about a set
of directions written on a piece of paper, but about walking into the
world and making magic out of what you find there.
Back To the (Oak)land
K. Ruby abuzz in Oakland. Photo: Jan Sturmann
As a child, K. Ruby transplanted a weed from her family’s garden,
potted it and tended to it in her room, showing a carefree disregard
for the rules about whether a plant was good or bad, useful or not. All
grown up, she’s still got a flare for maverick experimentation.
Earlier this year she opened the Institute of Urban Homesteading [11] in
Oakland, California where she’s translating her background as an
educator and gardener into a living classroom comprised of city folk
gathering in kitchens and backyards to learn the lost arts of growing,
cooking and storing their own food. “This knowledge skipped a
generation,” Ruby says. “In the 70s everybody knew how to make yogurt
or bake bread, but today people have this idea that it’s so hard when
in fact it’s fairly simple.”
Ruby attributes resurgent
interest in urban homesteading to forces like the Slow Food movement [12]
and locavorism [13]. If her class enrollment is any indication, the idea of
returning to simple, Do-It-Ourselves living is more popular than ever.
Beekeeping and organic gardening sold out, breadmaking is filling up
quickly and they’ve actually had to add extra classes to the schedule.
The idea for the Institute evolved over time. After running a
non-profit for twelve years, Ruby decided to take some time off to
cultivate her garden and teach herself to lead a more sustainable
lifestyle. “I’m something of a homebody,” she admits. She took botany
and beekeeping classes, grew vegetables and installed beehives in her
backyard. But all this time, she had a nagging feeling she should be
out in the world.
When her friends started having babies in
their 30s, they talked about how Ruby should open a camp for the kids
where they could learn to cook and garden. They’d call it Ruby Camp.
Ultimately, the idea took shape as the Institute of Urban Homesteading,
a place where Ruby hopes to completely reinvent the word “housewife”
and give home economics — a body of knowledge once considered
second-rate — a new life.
Jeanne Storck, a Bay Area website designer and freelance writer, is now planning a backyard vegetable garden.
Yes You Can
Where
some see just a tasty, homemade treat, others see a declaration of
independence from “cheap energy mind.” No matter where you fall on the
spectrum, we suspect you’ll be hooked on the DIY deliciousness of a
pantry stocked with summer’s fresh flavors.
Made-it-Myself Mascarpone
Recipe courtesy of Jessica Dally, Seattle Free School
Put up jam from a summer windfall of fruit, pair it with a dollop of
your own mascarpone, then do a happy little OMG-this-is-so-good dance.
1 pint (or more) half-and-half
1 pint heavy cream
1/8-1/4 teaspoon tartaric acid
You’ll also need:
High-quality cheesecloth
Cooking thermometer
Directions Heat cream and half-and-half to 190°F. Add 1/8 teaspoon
tartaric acid and stir for several minutes. The mixture will slowly
thicken into a runny cream-of-wheat consistency, with tiny flecks of
curd. If the cream does not coagulate, add a speck more of the tartaric
acid and stir for another 5 minutes. Be careful not to add too much
tartaric acid or a grainy texture will result. Line a colander with a
double layer of high-quality cheesecloth. Pour the curd into the
colander and drain for 1 hour for a traditional mascarpone texture.
Drain for up to 12 hours in a refrigerator for a whipped cream cheese
texture. Place the finished cheese in a covered container and
refrigerate for up to 2 weeks. Yield: about 1 pound
Leather Breeches
Recipe courtesy of Nance Klehm
This
recipe is based on an old Southern dish. After the harvest, green beans
were threaded on a string, then hung from the cabin rafters to dry.
Once dried, the beans resembled leather trousers or “breeches” hanging
on a clothesline.
Directions
Blanch green beans for two minutes in salted water and drain. String beans on strong thread, leaving a slight space between each bean. Hang your green bean garland in a dark, dry place with good air circulation. In about 2 weeks they should be thoroughly dry, and you have your leather breeches! You can store these in glass jars on a shelf in your cupboard or pantry. Munch on them dry as a healthy snack, or soak them and use them for cooking.
There’s No Place Like Homestead
READ
• The Toolbox for Sustainable City Living by Austin Texas homesteaders the Rhizome Collective (rhizomecollective.org [14]), an all-around, do-it-ourselves guide for creating locally-based, ecologically sustainable communities
• Edible Estates: Attack on the Front Lawn, LA artist Fritz Haeg’s manifesto for making food, not lawns (edibleestates.org [15])
• On Food and Cooking: The Science and Lore of the Kitchen by Harold McGee (Scribner)
• Putting Food By, by Janet Greene (Plume)
BROWSE
• Read Garden Girl’s tips of the trade on gardengirltv.com [16] or browse the archives on kitchengardeners.org [17]
• Get cheesy with cheesemaking.com [18], dairyconnection.com [19], fiascofarm.com [20] or leeners.com [21]
• Everything you ever wanted to know about the birds and the bees and more can be found on backyardhive.com [22], beeculture.com [23], scientificbeekeeping.com [24], backyard chickens.com [25] and thecitychicken.com [26]
• Sow your wild (organic) oats with the help of victoryseeds.com [27], seedsofchange.com [28], bountifulgardens.org [29] or groworganic.com [30]