Gardening in the Ghetto

I loved Barbara Kingsolver’s Animal, Vegetable, Miracle, but I found Novella Carpenter’s new book, Farm City: The Education of an Urban Farmer (Penguin, 2009) both grittier and funnier than Kingsolver’s book and even easier to read.

Farm City chronicles Carpenter’s somewhat unintentional experience of creating a “squat garden” in the vacant lot next to her apartment building in Ghost Town, which is what she and the other residents call their rundown neighborhood near downtown Oakland.

Carpenter starts small (vegetables) but ends up with bees, goats, chickens, ducks, rabbits, geese, turkeys, and pigs. Along the way, she and her boyfriend, Billy, befriend their new neighbors, a motley crew that includes Bobby, a homeless man who sleeps in an abandoned car on their block; a woman named Lana (“it’s ‘anal’ spelled backwards,” Lana points out matter-of-factly on their first meeting) who runs a speakeasy out of her apartment; and a temple-full of Vietnamese monks.

Carpenter also makes friends with Willow Rosenthal, the pioneering urban farmer who started City Slicker Farms, and a much-lauded local chef, Chris Lee of Eccolo in west Berkeley, who teaches her to turn the two pigs she and Billy raise entirely on scraps gleaned from the green bins of Chinatown and local dumpsters into delicious hand-cured meats.

While leading us on her journey from backyard gardener to urban farmer, Carpenter also takes us soul-searching through such topics as race, class, and rural-versus-urban divisions; what it means to be a carnivore; and how raising your own animals for food changes that dynamic. All the while, she pours her heart into growing things green, beautiful, and nourishing that feed not only the mouths of her own household, but also those of her friends and neighbors in Ghost Town.

Carpenter attended UC Berkeley’s Graduate School of Journalism (where she studied with Michael Pollan), and her training as a journalist has not gone to waste. Her writing is evocative, quirky, funny, and brutally honest. My interest in her story never waned and I even found myself laughing aloud at times.

After you give Farm City a read, you can keep up with Carpenter’s adventures at her blog, Ghost Town Farm,

ghosttownfarm.wordpress.com.

—Eve Fox