Feed Thyself, Or, More than Just a Tomato Plant for Today’s Urban Dweller

“This is the book we wished we had when we first started out, a how-to manual that speaks directly to farmers trying to grow food and raise animals in the city.”

— From the Introduction

Any urban dweller who has ever wished to garden, turn a lawn into a vegetable patch, or create an urban farm on an empty lot is well advised to reach for Novella Carpenter and Willow Rosenthal’s The Essential Urban Farmer. After successfully learning urban farming techniques via trial and error, the authors were besieged by calls and emails from flummoxed would-be farmers. In response, they created this comprehensive manual, offering a cornucopia of information about urban organic farming, firmly grounded in a do-it-yourself ethos. Throughout, the novice farmer is gently taken by the hand and lead into the complex world of urban farming.

The women boast impeccable credentials. Rosenthal is founder of Oakland, California’s City Slicker Farms, a non-profit organization that establishes backyard and urban farms in downtown Oakland. City Slicker’s organic produce is sold on a sliding scale, and nobody is turned away for lack of funds. Carpenter is the woman behind Oakland’s Ghost Town Farm and author of the bestselling Farm City, a memoir of farming the plot of land beside the rental she shares with her longtime partner, Bill, and their adorable newborn daughter.

Rosenthal and Carpenter shared a Saturday morning conversation with me about The Essential Urban Farmer and the urban farming ethos.

We met at Carpenter’s house, where I was able to see Ghost Town Farm. After years of admiring these women from afar, I nervously felt as if I were being allowed backstage to meet the band. Their warmth and friendliness soon put me at ease. The women sipped tea as we spoke, the occasion less an interview than a comfortable conversation.

I began by confessing I cannot grow a thing. Rosenthal said she hears this constantly. She pointed out that farming is a learned skill, one that’s been lost to the populace at large. A lot of people, she said, are initially intimidated by the idea of growing anything. For the fearful urban farmer, the women agreed fruit trees are a good starting place, as they require little care apart from occasional fertilization.

In the introduction, Carpenter writes: “growing edibles in the city—even on a deck or small backyard—makes economic sense for people who have more time than money.” Carpenter and Rosenthal advocate tapping the city waste stream when creating an urban farm, scooping up what is left for trash — discarded pallets, old milk containers, pvc pipe, leaves raked up from a community park — and repurposing them for farm use rather than the landfill.

While more time than money describes a goodly number of people these days, it doesn’t describe me. In addition to my fear of gardening, I’m not a handy woman. I can barely hang a picture, much less construct a farm trellis from repurposed materials using a circular saw. Even if I were more adept, a full time job makes intensive farming impossible.

Further, prior to reading The Essential Urban Farmer , I had no concept of what it truly means to tend a farm, with its constant myriad needs, minor or major crises, weather considerations, and possible animal care. Surmising many other readers are in similar predicaments—perhaps having a small outdoor space, wanting to do more, yet unable to — I asked about how urban farming would work for people with little money, manual skills, or time.

“Hire somebody to farm your yard,” Rosenthal suggested. “Work out a barter plan.” The Essential Urban Farmer is not about “shoulds”, she added, nor is it meant to induce a feeling of guilt. “The idea that everyone will grow food is ridiculous,” she said. “Farming is a skill. Do we expect everyone to be doctors? Of course not.” Both were quick to say The Essential Urban Farmer is not prescriptive; rather, it’s about wanting to try.

Both children of hippies, each expressed gratitude for inheriting what Rosenthal called “the gift” of a hippie mentality: do it yourself, make it yourself, figure it out. She used herself as an example: “Women need to be more empowered about these things. You can always take a carpentry class at a community college. When I bought my fixer-upper, I decided to learn how to repair the wiring. But I hired a plumber.”

“Willow is a really good carpenter,” Carpenter offered. “I just sort of throw things together.” Ghost Town Farm, with its flourishing plants, cob oven, and neat chicken coop, belies this modesty.

Given the above, I was curious to know who The Essential Urban Farmer’s audience is. The heavy reliance on do-it-yourself methods, from rudimentary to more skilled carpentry and building talents struck me as limiting even for the more manually skilled. And tapping into the urban waste stream is a concept many Americans find foreign, even repulsive. Going into other people’s garbage? Dumpster diving for animal feed?

The Essential Urban Farmer seeks to “increase urban farming as a goal”. Though Carpenter and Rosenthal feel that readers are largely people intending to sell produce locally, they emphasized the importance of cities and communities taking responsibility for self-sufficiency. Meaning, where you see an empty, weedy lot, they see an opportunity: for chard, tomatoes, radishes, oranges. Both were quick to note that “community” is defined by who your neighbors are, not a select group of like-minded friends. And although differences of opinion are inevitable, the point is to work together as much as possible. “Unintentional communities are critical to farming.”

The road to urban farming, even if you are an avid tapper of curbside wealth, is full of expensive equipment. Depending on where you live, you may need to get your soil tested for contaminants. For urban dwellers living near freeways, toxic tire dust is a hazard. Quality gardening tools are expensive, as are proper beehives and attendant beekeeping equipment. Chickens, ducks, and rabbits all must be housed and fed.

How can the farmer with more time than money afford all this? Buy with your neighbors,” Rosenthal said. It was a repeated motif: share and invest with the community. Nonetheless, they are practical, realizing that short of trust funds or equally committed neighbors, most of us will have to make do—or choose to make do–with a few good tools and perhaps a couple of like-minded friends.

Recalling Carpenter’s experience dumpster diving in Farm City, which led to a fortuitous alliance with chefs Chris Lee and Samin Nosrat, I asked whether rummaging through curbside or business waste aroused the ire of owners. Rosenthal smiled. “Well, you can always ask a property owner. If somebody gets angry and asks you to leave, just say okay.”

Humanure

And what are the most common misperceptions of urban farming? They looked at me, bemused. “That you can grow all your own food,” Carpenter said. “People really dive in, and expect to grow all their own food within two weeks. Instead, grow what you like to eat. Grow what’s more expensive at the market. There is something of a millennium frenzy to go off the grid, but it really cannot be done without the community doing it together. We can’t do it alone.”

At this, Rosenthal admitted “We’re idealistic.”

Idealism brought me to my next topic. The Essential Urban Farmer devotes a great deal of space to water use, including more commonly known reclamation acts like cisterns and gray water diversion. But when the Carpenter and Rosenthal wrote of watering plants with diluted human urine and how to compost what they dub “humanure”, I was amazed. Yes, I know people have farmed using human waste for centuries. But the 2006 e. coli outbreak in ostensibly organic bagged spinach loomed large in my mind: the suspected cause was either nearby cattle or a farm worker too far from a portable restroom.

To be clear, The Essential Urban Farmer gives precise instructions about safe handling of human waste. But urinating in a bucket rather than the loo struck this princess as a bit over the top. “I have to ask you about this,” I began slowly. They looked uncomfortable. “Humanure.”

They relaxed. “We thought you were going to ask about killing animals.”

“People say we’re freaks,” Rosenthal said. “We live in a Bay Area bubble. It’s not totally shocking. It’s been done for centuries. China had a farming system that used up all human waste. Though it is extreme farming for the extreme end of farmers. But this is how humanity has survived for eons.”

Carpenter added that California is in an extended drought: winter, with its critical rains, failed to arrive this year. Yet the water in our toilets is potable and therefore wasted with every flush.

Fair enough. From there we did discuss raising and killing animals, a delicate topic, as Carpenter has been unduly hassled by some in the local vegan community.

Rosenthal described a chicken workshop she taught. The first part was about egg laying, the second, slaughter. Half the class invariably planned to leave come the slaughter section. Rosenthal asked that they stay and at least watch. Many did, and were grateful, as the idea was far worse than the reality. She heard repeatedly that witnessing a humane animal slaughter was a life changing experience. (And the methods described in The Essential Urban Farmer not only honor the life being given, but minimize suffering.) More than one person cried. A few became vegetarian, but it was an informed decision.

Many urban dwellers have no connection to the natural world. Rosenthal noted we’ve lost our sense of material heritage. “One hundred years ago, people could not only manipulate tools, they could repair them.” Carpenter marveled over FarmVille. So much of life is synthetic, she said, borne of a craving for connection. So many people are using computer connectivity to emulate reality, even as they realize the virtual world only weakly echoes the real. “Why play a game when they could actually be out there, farming?”

What of the resurgence of artisanal cooking — home canning, preserving, charcuterie, all ways to create something tangible after a day spent tapping computer keys? “So many people feel powerless right now, there’s a lot of fear. They think: what in my life can I change?” said Carpenter. Farming, obviously, is about getting your hands dirty. “It’s meditative,” she said. “It feeds your soul.”

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Even if urban farming isn’t in your future, I strongly recommend picking up The Essential Urban Farmer. The book is an excellent educational source for non-farmers interested in food sourcing and responsible eating. Prior to reading it, I had no idea that large box stores with attached nurseries are some of the worst places to purchase soils, seeds, and plants. I didn’t understand why the local Ace Hardware put up a huge window display for spring and summer planting in February—wasn’t spring planting something you did, well, in spring? Actually, no. For spring planting, the serious urban farmer starts seedlings in February. And while I knew Roundup, a weed killer, was bad stuff, I didn’t understand why. Now I do.

Indeed, urban farming is about more than just growing plants and raising animals in the city. It’s a natural outgrowth of a lifestyle decision: choosing to live off the grid, at least a little bit, while living smack in the middle of it. Given the tremendous economic and ecological pressures our planet is facing, and America’s enormous role as (over) consumers and creators of waste, Rosenthal suggests we need to acquire more of a third world mindset, utilizing everything possible. “Americans need to learn to be bottom feeders. There are never any leaves on the ground in India. People pick them up for compost.”

I’d considered myself a good environmental citizen, a hardcore recycler and committed sustainable foodie. But after reading The Essential Urban Farmer and standing in Carpenter’s flat, a charming place furnished entirely with street finds, I realized how very much I still rely on the grid: my plumbing, the water heedlessly used for dishwashing, the damaged city compost bin I keep meaning to replace, meanwhile tossing valuable compostable items into the trash.

Rosenthal and Carpenter are quick to say that obsession with perfectionism is the enemy of urban farmers. The point is not neatly aligned rows of plants rolling in weedless glory across a pastoral expanse. The point is planting a few seedlings in an otherwise neglected piece of ground. Tend your plants, harvest them, and then — bring them triumphantly to the table.