Beautiful Agriculture—and Fiber Rabbits

I GOT rabbits. And thus have I graduated from average urban farmgirl to full maniac. These are farmstead animals, employed members of my backyard system. I'm not going to eat them. They're fiber rabbits.

Fiber rabbits! A few years ago I didn't know there was such a thing. Fiber rabbits belong to a special category of utilitarian farm animals that are adorable and don't have to die. That would be along with milkers, egg layers, bees, guardian animals and non-rabbit fiber animals like sheep. As a sensitive wuss vegetarian and farmstead enthusiast I really appreciate this category.

Even with the egg layers and dairy animals some loss of life must take place. Boy goats and roosters don't make eggs and milk, but eggs and milk cannot be produced without their existing at some point (as breeders or offspring) creating a conundrum most readily solved by someone--not a sensitive wuss vegetarian--eating them. Fiber animals of both sexes give humans something nice without anyone having to die. 

THERE ARE those who believe using other animals for any selfish human purpose is wrong. Animals exist for their own reasons, they say, suggesting we leave them to it. And I fear these presumable vegans are right, though I selfishly hope they are not entirely right. The thorny fact is that laying hens and milk cows and fluffball sheep would not exist without our having bred them into existence. So I think maybe technically, for better or worse, they exist for reasons inextricably bound to us. Same goes for dogs, cats, roses and most things we eat. 

All this human selection is a tremendous responsibility. There is a legitimate argument to be made that it is cruel to breed sheep and rabbits so heavily furred that they depend on us to regularly relieve them of their coats, or poultry who cannot survive the wild. I don't know yet whether I can adequately justify taking advantage of such breeding, but nor am I convinced of its inherent wrongness. 

Animal rights sorts aren't the only skeptics of agriculture, of course. It is rather hip in certain circles to pine for hunter gatherer days--paleo eating and squatting to defecate and all that. Some people find it more honest to hunt or trap a wild animal than befriend, cohabit with and take advantage of a domestic one. I respect that way of thinking, but take a different view. And not just because I love cheese and bread and tomatoes and wool and a bunch of other things agriculture makes possible.

I THINK agriculture is beautiful. Done right. Joel Salatin is fond of saying that good agriculture should be 'aesthetically and aromatically, sensually romantic.' Good agriculture can give its participants bliss. I recently grew a buckwheat cover crop on one of my raised beds and watched my hens tear it up. In that moment was bliss--theirs and mine. They clucked self-actualization as they turned the soil for my fall crops.

Agriculture is a millenia-long collaboration among humans and other species. It's bold, messy and morally complex. It has the capacity to be epically destructive: to the land and to the lives of all who work for or eat from it. So even when you have a postage stamp city homestead, producing piddling quantities of anything, there is much to consider.

And consider I do! The ethics, the economics. I fret myself silly until I decide to go ahead and see if I can, say, keep a pair of Angora rabbits happy and healthy in my yard, and make clothes from their spare fur without ever hurting them, and actually come out ahead when I crunch the numbers. I weigh the costs of housing, organic pellets, grains for sprouting fodder against the benefits of making myself and everyone I know dope luxury scarves and hand warmers of absurd softness. From my own freaking bunnies! I think the numbers look good. We shall see.

My buns are two months old now, learning the ropes along with me: when to hop about the yard and when to rest and digest in the safe hutch, how to relax into my grooming attentions, why collaborating with my wishes is worthwhile (treats!). I was at their conception. I met them hours after their birth.

Luckily I have had about six months to practice on my neighbors' English Angoras, one of whom birthed my own bunny bairns. They have taught me rabbit ways, rabbit treat preferences, how not to offend. (I did not realize this, but rabbits are easily offended.) They shed, I brush them, I accumulate luscious heaps of Angora wool. I watch Netflix, I spin the wool on a drop spindle, I knit the yarn into items of clothing, I wear the clothing. Every part of the process is meditative and gratifying.

THERE ARE other perks. I take very seriously my role as a curator of cuteness in this world. And goodlord: it's almost unbearable how plush these wooly bunny bodies are. The creatures themselves are wonderful much like Angora scarves are. Fluff comfort. The purest kind of soft.

The rabbits eat things neither the chickens nor I particularly care for, like kale stems. And they love to chill in shady nooks neither the chickens nor I can squeeze into. They produce tidy, round fertilizer nuggets that can be applied directly. I am starting to see their niche in the backyard ecosystem.

As I look upon my yard these days--hens laying, bees foraging, bunnies furring, corn looming, beans working the pole--I am amazed at all the creation. Maybe humans love agriculture because it makes us feel like God. But I'm not sovereign over my yard. I'm just semi-competent designer slash manager. I'm in awe of what is going on back there, the crazy way all of us creatures are making something together.

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Homesteady

I SOMETIMES feel strange for loving homesteady things like I do. I chill in my backyard recliner for hours, watching preening hens and homebound bees, scheming how to grow cucumbers on the coop roof. And my love does not always express in sweet, reasonable ways; it frequently veers into obsessive fiend territory. Storey guidebooks and goat kid YouTubes are my bedtime porn.

I might be crazy. But maybe my fixation is rooted in wholesome earnestness. I think this stuff touches depths in my soul.

Nothing satisfies me quite like producing something in collaboration with soil and plants and fellow creatures. With enough health and space I think I'd enjoy producing a significant portion of my own food. In such case I would treat my homestead chores as a job, one I love, one that has clear meaning and is as basic and necessary as work can be: the work of providing for oneself.

The usual model in our time is to pay various someones to provide all or most of our vital needs. We specialize in some niche, earning money to fund our food, clothing and shelter. This model is effective, of course, but it's so ingrained that providing for your own basic needs can seem like a cute lark, while the Serious Business of Life is assumed to be designing apps or distributing parking tickets or whatever one's specialty happens to be. Apps and parking tickets are important, but still.

On the spectrum's other end are the Preppers, whose doomsday expectations seem both paranoid and reasonable. They seek self-sufficiency in preparation for imminent system collapse, when we'll run out of oil or be hit by a mega-earthquake and only those milking their own cows shall survive. They do have a point about the fragility of the systems we take for granted. But I suspect their world-bout-to-collapse alibi partly serves to justify to themselves and others why homesteadiness is urgently valuable, when some Preppers simply feel compelled toward that way of life for less articulable reasons. I bet they're kinda in love with it, like I am.

HOMESTEADY THINGS may seem like a lot of unnecessary bother. I've often felt like I should think of it that way, open my eyes and realize I can just buy honey at the store and save myself the bee suit hassle. 

But my homestead chores don't hassle me. They ground me, and tie me to the non-human world. Sure, they're a pain in the ass sometimes, but I love the steady discipline they require and the calm routines they create. Plus I dislike the notion of household duties as drudgery to be avoided. I think you can take pride in mucking a chicken coop. That's how you know you're doing the damn thing. If I'm not cleaning up after chickens (or scrubbing a toilet, or washing dishes) someone somewhere is doing it for me. I think that's worth remembering.

Far be it from me to preach, like, Everybody should grow their own food! Just try to do one small thing! Grow potted herbs on your patio! I don't like to presume that what is good for me would be good for anybody else. If you work long office hours and eat only takeout, hey: do you. There are plenty things I prefer to have other people do for me (like, say, plumbing). This is not a "you should" diatribe. I just don't want to feel like a weirdo for prioritizing this stuff so much. I don't want anybody to laugh when I start churning my own butter.

Self-sufficiency seems old-fashioned--why do such things when we don't need to anymore? Maybe we don't, practically speaking, need to provide for ourselves, as in we won't otherwise starve. But homesteadiness satisfies the soul. It grants a deep sense of accomplishment. Providing my sustenance is the realest feeling I know.

WHEN YOU provide any portion of your own foodstuffs you also realize how uncertain a game that is. Disaster abounds. Man plans and God laughs, as we pessimistic Yids say. Weather is cruel, pests merciless; your own body betrays your intentions. Coworkers of other species are no more reliable than human ones. And sometimes you just screw up. 

This winter I had two disasters. My original bee colony succumbed to some combination of ailments, ant invaders and my own mistakes. Then Mrs. Darcy, my big, bitchy, beautiful Wyandotte, fell incurably ill. Two friends with an axe ended her miseries. To the extent such failures are my own (and it is impossible to quite know the extent) they make me feel almost unbearably guilty. I question whether any living thing should be entrusted to my care. But I always dust it off and try again. I still trust myself to take better care than a great many food producers would.

Most of us are far enough from the rural life that we imagine it as fundamentally peaceful, but it so is not. I don't ever plan to be a farmer, not least because it's hard. But then hard is real. Sometimes hens quit laying and lettuce gets coated in aphids; any insistence that it be otherwise leads down a road most of us dislike, paved with chemicals and animal abuse. Managing the constantly churning series of backyard catastrophes teaches me a lot.

Peace comes in those glimmery moments when the whole thing is mostly working. When the systems I have painstakingly devised actually allow plants to grow heartily and creatures to live a cushy lifestyle, all harmonizing to give me sustenance and earthly beauty, it seems like a goddamn miracle. But peace comes too in mid-disaster, when I'm burying a hen or taking swarming bees from a high branch, thinking, This is the business of life.

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Farm Dreams (Are Made of Bees)

MY YARD is full of dreams come true. The yard itself, sunny and alive, I dreamed up during a cold, hard Brooklyn winter. I saw the Craiglist ad for a cottage in Oakland with fruit trees and I cried; it looked so much like my dream, and I figured that meant I couldn't have it. (But I got it. That still amazes me.) I dreamed up the foot-high cedar raised beds with tidy rows of carrots and leeks. I dreamed the flock of hens chilling in the shade of the fig tree, and, later, I dreamed the banty subflock, roosting in a barn-red mini coop perched preciously on stilts.

Cat & corn

Dreams are messy, of course, in the coming true. I've lived in '1 BR Cottage with Fruit Trees'  for ten years now. I had to cut down the loquat and the old lemon. The decrepit peach succumbed to disease, and the figs, which aren't very tasty, besmirch the patio. I've had hens murdered by predators and my vegetable beds infected with equally deadly Verticillium wilt.

But none of those disappointments ruin the dream. Such woes are the price of realness; they cannot outweigh the satisfaction of imagining something wonderful and bringing it to fruition. The lemon and orange I planted the year I moved in are big, productive trees now. I open a high window and grab some bout-to-be-juice.

Problems also shape the course of new dreams. The dread Verticillium has made tomatoes and squashes (and hella other things) hard to grow, which depresses me. Last year, as I watched my cucumbers wither and my strawberry leaves turn crisp brown, I started thinking of ways to produce food from my yard that would not involve soil. I began to dream about bees.

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Love, Loss and Cheek Feathers Vol. II: Hard Knock Life

By Ximena the Hen, guest plogger

I BEGAN laying later than most. The other pullets were stepping out of the nest box clucking, tweeting egg pics, preening smugly like they knew they were real hens now, while I just waited. I waited for that feeling you are supposed to get, the deep soul urge that sends you looking for a bit of straw in which to leave your indent. 

Finally, after fall had turned to winter, the urge came. I needed the quiet of the nest box and the undulations of my oviduct as I needed feed and water. There is no greater satisfaction than laying an egg. In my early laying days I would set proudly atop my creation for a good hour after it emerged, enjoying the round certitude under my breast feathers. Sometimes I clucked. Mostly my celebrations were quiet, private.

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Rain

THE CHANGING of seasons can be especially welcome when life has not been going very well. Because the best fact pertaining to hard times is this: Things change. New seasons are solid reassurance of just how deeply rooted this fact is. Some places have four true seasons, but California really just has the one great switch, sun to rain and back again. Where I grew up, in the desert, the rain part wasn't much. Maybe that's why rain does not carry, for me, the gloomy associations it does for many.

I miss rain now just as much as I miss sun each February. It's October and hot. My spine didn't quite work well enough this summer for my garden care to compete with four months of pure Cali sunshine. The south-facing slope is Riverside-baked. Ten-foot cardoon skeleton. Strawberries leaves brown and crisp. Young lavenders are pulling in on themselves. The alyssum is all stem and seed stalks. Even the crabgrass is yellowed, though still cocky as shit. The Gambusia fish in the water garden are sick to death of having to rely on me to treat water for chloramines and add it to their habitat.

The Gambusias are waiting for rain and the plants are waiting and the worms are waiting and the dusty car is waiting and I am waiting for rain.

We humans can only be briefly in love with the feel of rain. It is exhilarating for a few dozen drops (more if you are in The Notebook or East of Eden), but irritating after that.

But the smell of rain! Ah! What is it? Is it made in the atmosphere or does it result from drops contacting the stuff of Earth? Is it an earthy smell or, like Steinbeck says, "the sweet odor of ozone"? How much of it can be replicated watering a dry yard? This would be a good test.

And the sound of rain! Really an orchestra of sounds: water drop percussion on every exposed surface. Floppy drumming on calla leaves, soft and absorptive concrete contact, pattering on windows while you sleep.

You can grow tired of rain--or sun, or snow. But a force of nature you haven't experienced in a while has magic. No point trying to remember what it felt like to be sick of rain, and longing for sun.

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"Shake N Fries" As Performed By My Hens

My writing game has been off due to...ya know. I'm getting it back, but meanwhile please enjoy these video offerings.

You might also like "It Was a Good Day" as performed by my hens.

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Pleasure and Melons (Cold Summer)

Pleasure and melons
Want the same weather
--Italian proverb

I DON'T LIKE spring to be better than summer. It implies something unfortunate, like the best of life is in anticipation and planting, and the harvest can never live up. July was tomatoless. August was half over before I saw the first Black Krim breaking, ending the big green stalemate that was interminable this cold summer. If I'd planted some bitchass cherry tomatoes I'd have long been picking, but that simply isn't the way I roll. I'm not into cherry tomatoes and rather resent consolation prizes.

Turned out this would have been a season to insure against disappointment, but instead I planted eggplants and edamame and the most ambitious, unreasonable heirloom tomatoes--all of which are now sickly, under-performing, shivering every dewy morning. I even switched from my dependable sauce variety, Super Marzano, a megavirile hybrid impervious to setbacks, to the vulnerable, romantic heirloom San Marzano Gigante. The latter is an old school version of the same fine paste tomato; it lacks the usual hybrid goodies (disease resistance, insane profligacy) but makes beautiful, odd-shaped, enormous tomatoes purported to be delicious. And you can save the seeds. It's an heirloom. That's classy.

Alas, I won't be saving any seeds. My San Marzano Gigantes got verticillium. The lush green tops are a fraud, given away by the yellow-and-brown-chevroned leaves at the base. When I grow the Super hybrids, two plants give me a year's worth of tomato sauce. The lovely heirlooms I planted this time will give me a dinner or two at best. But I can't hate; who knows what they could have done with a bit more bravery, in heat and undiseased soil.

Hot weather makes me want to be superficial. Which can be nice sometimes. If it's cold I have to keep considering serious matters instead of offering my bikini self up to the sun and thinking nothing. Plants worry overmuch in the cold too. They just can't seem to relax.

I like to grouse, so good things often happen just to spite me. This cold summer I grew my first successful melon, over at the school garden. Watermelons always top the kid request list, but I'd never been willing to plant them, because I don't like teaching children that gardening is about disappointment and I never thought we could harvest a damn watermelon. If all warm-weather crops want richness and heat, watermelons want both more. More than zucchini, more than tomatoes, more than peppers, more than eggplants, more than cucumbers--hell, even more than other melons.

In spring's planting daze I snuck two plants of an early, small watermelon variety into an already-overstuffed bed we'd newly constructed at the school, making no fuss so as not to build up childish hopes. The soil was lush, the courtyard location snug and warm, and in late July a softball-sized watermelon occurred. No kid ever saw it, as far as I know. (The school is abandoned to custodians and construction workers in late summer. They all like beans and squash.) Like a dummy I picked the prize when it was utterly unripe and had to feed it to my hens. But I think I saw a couple other set fruits nestled among those hand-shaped leaves.

In the same school bed with the watermelons I grew my first successful Bay Area cucumbers and made a half gallon jar of pickles, which ought to keep until Back to School time. Maybe more watermelons will be ripe for the kiddos by then too. Maybe not.

But there's always picking. Even in a cold summer garden.

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The Urban Rural Life

I'm from the exurbs, so I can appreciate both urban and rural. They are both, at least, something, rather than an absence of anything. (Sorry, Riverside. You know you're always my hometown, loved unconditionally.)When I tell people I'm milking an Oakland goat they seem amused slash to be wondering why I feel the need to be so obstinately strange. There is no explaining why goat-milking is wonderful. I cannot make the case in sensible terms, like the milk is so extra delish, or it's saving me money, or I have achieved near-vegan levels of food moralism.

I don't buy milk anymore, and that is cool. But I only quite grasp the awesomeness of the thing at 7:30 on Tuesday mornings when I'm in my pajamas carrying a quart jar of warm milk up the street of my city neighborhood. (Please note that my milking sentiments are less fond at 6:30 alarm time.) It's all there as I walk home: the udder just drained, the cereal soon to be wetted, the cheese later to be made, and the peculiar sensation of knowing how it all happens.

This yield is pitiful. But you get the idea.

Knowing how it happens is not pure bliss. There's a reason we've divorced our food from its origins. The origins are often gross. The Goat Girls, aged twelve and sixteen, are wont to squirt milk from the udder right into their mouths, preferably whilst singing My milkshake brings all the neighbors to the yard/Damn right it's better than the store's--but I cannot yet do this. And in fact it took me a while before I could scramble and consume the eggs laid in my backyard without queasy revulsion. And in fact it took me a while before I could eat the lettuce grown in my backyard without a dubious mix of self-mistrust and grossness aversion.

Milking does not have a singular character. There are many kinds of milkings, as with any elemental activity. Sometimes the Indigoat Farm hens are pecking at the alfalfa hay strewn about the stanchion and Indi is bleating sweetly from the pen and sun reflects off Kiah's deerish brown flank and my hand works like it was made to do this particular finger dance, forcing great white streams into a latte froth in the collection cup. Other times rain drenches my Cal sweatshirt, its cuffs stained by and reeking of Udder Butter, and Kiah hates me, alfalfa bribes notwithstanding, and to spite me kicks her shit-caked hoof into my hard-won supply.

I was surprised (and a tad smug) when I had to convince someone--a wise and worldly reportorial sort once employed by CNN--that milk comes only from animals who have given birth. In the case of a bucolicized small farm creature he was quite willing to believe it, but surely, he objected, this was not the case for those milking machines in industrial farm bondage. Modern agriculture has us well fooled. Surely, we think, it must happen some other way.

The reason for milk. Indi, at her sleepover chez moi.

Speaking of animals' inevitable reproductive habits, Marianne has gone broody, not unlike half my human friends. She sits on the nest, doesn't lay, has to be persuaded even to roam the yard at evening recess. There are nest box skirmishes when Ximena or Betsy want to go in there and get some actual work done, and egg yields are desperately down without her dark brown, speckled contributions. The one upside is I get to bust out heretofore unused chicken terminology, moaning about how she's 'setting' and I have to 'break her up.'

My attempts to break her up have failed. (Ice cubes? Bitch please.) I began to reflect on this latest form of insubordination disguised as poultry instinct in connection with the previous form: her weeks-long campaign of daily escapes, via flight from a high branch of the fig tree that canopies the run.

I came to suspect that the problem went beyond broodiness. She's at the bottom of the pecking order, forever getting her ass beat, has last dibs on chard treats. Disgruntlement has radicalized her. I never saw this coming: my chicken is an anarchist.

Everybody seems to have ideas about how to break broodiness, but I couldn't find any tips online about how to break anarchism. And it's pretty far along. I cleaned out the nest box expecting to find some adolescent knickknacks, perhaps a few punk rock records. But no. She's got the entire fucking AK Press catalog stashed in there. Bakunin quotes scrawled on the walls. Suffice it to say that I came home sporting an "I Voted" sticker and got shat on.

I can roll my eyes and explain it away psychologically, and I'd have a strong case, considering her pecking order issues. But I should also give her choice of philosophy some respectful consideration. I do keep her caged in wire, after all.

Indeed there is much to ponder when keeping working animals. There is no 'freeing' them at this point, having finagled our needs into their very genes. At best we can work to ensure the bargain we strike with them is fair. I think
FOOD + PROTECTION ⇌ FOOD + OBEDIENCE
is pretty fair. Politeness on both sides is helpful; affection is bonus nice. (I don't eat meat, so you'll have to talk to somebody else about the off-with-their-heads bit.) But they are creatures, with creature hearts and minds. They can't be machinized, and I think that's for the best.

Leela (in the black down) and Erykah. Hands mine.

Animal husbandry is a progressive addiction, so I ended up with some ducklings, bought from a feed store in Petaluma. At maturity they're to join the lone duck at Indigoat Farm. But there was an uncute twist in which one of them died, age five days. It might not have been my fault. Then again, it might have been, which is another thing one has to think about. You gotta be on top of your game when it comes to those downy tufts of precious new life.

Shipped via Israeli post! No, not really.

Leela and Erykah have certain duck-specific charms. You can tell they like muck, and seek it (by gathering at the base of my wine barrel water garden) and seek to create it (by making a sludgy mess of their brooder box). When they splash into the Pie Pan Pond™, it is an absolute refutation of any argument that animals can't feel joy.

Meanwhile, Paulie has been in the shade by the passion vine, penning his memoirs. Six weeks in he has only the title, Big Cat Diary. When he sees the ducklings coming, he runs.

And the backyard beat goes on.

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Rebuffing Roosters in Austenese

It may be mating season, but the hens are instead ensconced in their book club. (Currently, Mansfield Park.) Following are their retorts to unworthy rooster suitors.

Ximena: A living of ten thousand a year and the finest carriages to your estate could not overcome a manner so uncivil. Besides which these attentions cannot have merit, your having so recently made my acquaintance as to be utterly ill-equipped to discern my character.

Betsy: Without wishing to insult you, I am nonetheless obliged to bring forth the unsuitability of the connexion, as I should never entertain the entreaties of a man of inferior birth.

Marianne: While in grateful receipt of the knowledge that your examination of my hindquarterly regions has yielded so favourable a result, I speak not from modest delicacy but rather with stern purpose in saying these attentions shall in no manner further the cause to which I can only but attribute your initial addresses toward myself.

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Had Gadya

An Only Kid was born in my neighborhood this week. Mazel tov to the proprietors of Indigoat Farm. Soon: goat-milking!














The full birth video is here. Warning: graphic footage.

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Planting

PLANTING IS an act of faith from which I still, in this my ninth gardening season, am incapable of expecting rewards. I look out on the helpless chardlings and meager carrot sprouts and see not overflowing harvest baskets but a multitude of dire ends inspired by the Yom Kippur liturgy: Who by slugs, who by chicken attack, who by leafminers, who by flooding; who shall grow limply without apparent cause, who shall perish when I fail to water.

Nature scatters a thousand seeds that one might reach mature planthood, and gardeners are usually wise to copy Mother. It is in willful defiance of this time-tested evolutionary strategy that we break out the Accelerated Propagation System (APS) seed-starting kits with the special wicking properties and coddle seedlings like infants. But then Nature must chuckle and sigh over many of our human follies.

Among the ambitious seeds currently germinating in my APS kits are tomatoes 'San Marzano' and 'Costoluto Genovese,' and eggplant 'Rosa Bianca.' Because I trust the Italians on flavor. For beauty, I turn to the French. I get obsessed with particular French plant variety names, like 'Comtesse de Bouchard,' a pink clematis I've yet to grow, and 'Merveille des Quatre Saisons,' a red-tinged crisphead lettuce I've grown to marvelous effect, though not in all four seasons.

This spring I've welcomed another longtime French fantasy, 'Cécile Brunner.' I'm a tad embarrassed to admit that Cécile is a rose.


YOU SEE, my favorite gardens look natural, hiding the blood, sweat, tears and APS systems (preferably in a darling greenhouse). And I tend to reserve my toil for edible plants, on whom it is more readily justified. I've sneered at rose gardeners with their dainty shears and ridiculous wide-brimmed hats and elbow-length gloves undefiled by dirt. They pour on the water and chemicals in exchange for some garish splotches of yellow and hot pink that are at once snobbish and uncouth, like the ladies off one of those Real Housewives shows.

Cool gardener that I am, I just scatter a few annual seeds in fall and when I head out for my spring labor at the edibles, there to surprise me is the unassuming beauty of larkspurs, Nigella, cornflowers, Gilia tricolor, and, of course, plenty of California poppies to set off all those blues.

This is myth, however. In reality, not even the poppies can be counted upon, and while Gilia is reputed to readily reseed--it's a California native wildflower, after all--spring invariably finds me searching the ground in vain, and then scouring every nursery for those finely-cut leaves that will bear the pale blue and surprisingly complex flowers which are my favorite.

Still, it was quite a leap from $2.99 for Gilia (better get two, sake of symmetry, so $5.98) to $30 for Cécile. She'll demand investments of others kinds as well. Unlike my hippie annuals, she cares about soil type and moisture, will faint at the sight of aphids, expects timely pruning, and hopes for 5-10-10. (Keep hoping, honey.)

My investment in Cécile marks the end of a long awakening process. Roses came to my attention from a gardening perspective when I read Second Nature some years ago. Imaginary Uncle Michael has quite the hard-on for his fifteenth-century vintage 'Maiden's Blush':

Her petals are more loosely arrayed than Madame Hardy's; less done up, almost unbuttoned. Her petals are larger, too, and they flush with the palest pink toward the center, which itself is elusive, concealed in the multiplication of her labial folds.

(Yeah. He used to be so cool. Now it's all gastropolitical sermons all the time. I think to distract him we should change the French name for 'Maiden's Blush' from 'Cuisse de Nymphe' to 'Reveille Mouillé de Boomer Chauve.')

Such written rose reveries are common, and I rolled my eyes, quite sure it couldn't happen to me. I was just not that into roses. My easy stereotypes labeled them arrogant and cantankerous. Such cliched beauty--a dozen, red, in a vase. And even if you got past that, to the old-fashioned fragrant climbers, in classy cream whites and pale pinks...well...their attractiveness was so obvious as to be obnoxious.

ANY MAJOR plant acquisition is preceded by an onanistic research phase. That involves some Google image searches, sure, but--garden nerd that I am--I really get off on the fine print. I was keen to learn, for example, that although Cécile is technically a hybrid tea, she is a venerable sort, not the trashy newfangled kind. (Growing the latter invites the scorn of any garden sophisticate.) And while Céciles do grow in bush form, the plant I purchased is the descendant of a 'climbing sport'--a freak of nature who climbed instead of standing still, from whom climbing progeny were then bred.

By the by, the garden pr0n images that please me most are not flowery; they feature army rows of vegetables, diverse but segregated. Whispy carrot row, rotund cabbage row, beets distinguished by their red leaf midribs, slender onion tops in a hectic mass. A spray of sweet peas climbing behind is the sole permissible ornamental flourish.
Anyway. Pretending amnesia for all my nerdlicious study, I then show up at Berkeley Hort and fake an impulse buy. Makes me feel spontaneous.

I aspire to be more like garden guru Pat Lanza, who finds grapevines on sale one spring, buys three when she hasn't space enough for one, plants them nine inches apart (!), and in so doing remarks, "There's something to be said for my kind of blind faith. I rush in and plant while others stew over the what-ifs." From Lanza I also learned about Dreaming & Planning, which is what gardeners do in winter. (I try to instill this concept in my garden class kids, because in their corner of the world some D & P is warranted.)

Of the two, Planning seems vastly more acceptable. Dreaming overmuch is just gross. Whenever I start in picturing how lovely the fence would look draped in rose blooms, how lovely the warm spring air scented with same, I smack myself and consult the Jew Manual, which decrees that such wistfulness be swiftly undercut by gloomy ruminations and self-deprecatory quips.


I PLANTED the rose in what was a sizable wooden container and now passes as a mini cylindrical raised bed. Before its bottom rotted, it contained, for several seemingly successful years, my dwarf Braeburn apple, a plant acquired amid a similar frenzy of earnest research mixed with blind hopes (albeit at a more innocent point in my gardening career), and a plant which, despite my sincere devotions and because of my myriad mistakes, as they say 'failed to thrive.' It did bloom beautifully, and gave me some apples before its decline. But I let the little tree languish, probably for too long.
Cécile will probably perish within weeks herself, says the inner Eeyore. Barring that, she may prove to be a pain in the ass. But then again: ease of cultivation is not a recommendation in and of itself. There are as many easy to grow plants as there are thirsty dudes in the city of Oakland. Doesn't mean you want them seeding in your yard. If you want an easy plant, I've got ten thousand oxalis bulbs for you, free of charge.

While planting I was viscerally reminded that roses also, famously, have thorns. This is quite hostile. One gets resentful, always having to wear those elbow-length gloves. But thorns served their evolutionary purpose, before we humans became the natural selector protectors, and they ought to persist. A rose de-thorned would be wrong. The thorns remind us about something, likely to do with beauty and pain. Seeking the one, encountering the other.

Thus far Cécile is contemptuous, or at best inscrutable. My Italian tomatoes are but spindly sprouts. The winter peas have been chewed down by some creature, probably one whom I feed expensive kibbles. The nurseries have no Gilia. I've done a lot of renovations, and it looks bare. But spring is come and the hens are laying and we can all photosynthynthesize again. One ought to be optimistic, even if such is not justified by the facts on the ground.

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Keyshia vs. Goapele: A Hens' Debate

IT IS A TRUTH universally acknowledged that hens love their soul music. And Bay hens take special pride in their rich Bay soul legacy. Visit any local coop at the right time of day and you might hear a flock cackling as they re-enact the backstage opener skit off Funky Divas. (Note to self: future flock members to be named Dawn, Maxine, Terry, Cindy.)

Nothing soothes nervous pullets on their first night out in the coop quite like Bay soul lullabies. There may be peeping without ceasing, but with those first softly-sung strains of "I used to think that I wasn't fine enough" or "As summer was ending, you were walking in" all will be well.


FOR WEEKS NOW Ximena has been losing neck feathers. And I scoured my poultry library for answers, to no avail. Then it hit me. Betsy's been plucking her. They are fighting again about who is queen of Bay soul.

In Betsy's corner, we find Keyshia Cole. Betsy says Keyshia may not have a lot of fancy lyrics or expensive beats, but she's hella fine, and girl knows how to sang. Pure Oakland-grown ghetto fab flavor. Which describes Betsy as well; you don't know the meaning of funky chicken until you hear her belt out "Love." Granted: no one belts it out like Keyshia. Bets and I watched this incredible interview Keyshia did with Sway for an MTV special on Oakland, and they were out in her old neighborhood in like the 60s or 70s in East Oakland and she hit the chorus right there on the street.


IT SHOULD surprise no one that Ximena is all about Goapele. They both have that odd beauty, and foreign pedigrees. One Araucana, one Israeli-South African. But both came up Oaklandish.





Of course Ximena in her Goapele sophistication finds "First Love" played out. Her top jams are "Closer," "Love Me Right" and "Crushed Out." She loves the intelligent sensitivity and tender voice that are Goapele's signatures, but clucks disdainfully about the poor production value on both her old albums. We haven't dug into the new album yet, but aren't crazy about the first single; only Michelle Bachmann should be Auto-Tuned.

When I saw Goapele live a couple months back, she announced she'd do one song that wasn't her own--and broke out "Maps" by the Yeah Yeah Yeahs. I sang along and sounded terrible and tingled to my toes. I rushed home to tell Ximena, and she laid a fucking egg right there on the roost we were both so excited. (Chickens never get to go to shows.) Now I just need to hear Aretha do "Heavy Cross" and I'll be straight. Rock & soul => emergent property.

I also once saw Goapele strolling at the Grand Lake Farmer's Market, because it is so goddamn great. (Sorry, Temescallions.)


FORTUNATELY, I HAVE an odd-numbered flock, so it was on Marianne to break the tie. She's at the bottom of the pecking order (read: was gonna get her ass beat either way). Ever the squawking contrarian, she says, no, actually the reigning soul queen doesn't come from the Bay at all. (This ruffles some feathers.) She contends the throne-holder is an LA chick, one whose version of "Don't Speak" Gwen should be embarrassed to know is out there. The other two hens are stumped, but I smile, because I know she means Leela James:

Sip me up like lemonade
From a mason jar
Make it good like [some chicken]*
Fried in a pan of lard
I'm gettin spoiled like old beans
And I can't lose my head
Cause when you're not around
I'm crumblin like cornbread

*This part is mumbled.


And once you hear Leela slay "A Change Is Gonna Come," you'll surely agree.

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Ice Cube's "It Was a Good Day" As Performed By My Chickens

Just hoppin down off the roost, gotta thank God
I don't know but today seems kinda odd
Hit the feeder hard
Ate chard
And got let out into the full yard
Found grubs to grub on
But didn't pig out
Finally flew up in this flower bed I wanna dig out
Crop fulla greens and I'm peckin more
Thinkin will I live another twenty-fo
I gotta hide cause I got me a wormpop
And if I bite the head
I can make that wrigglin stop
Do a little preening in the sunlight
Checkin out my feathers, not a single red mite
And everything is alright
The Lady's comin out the house, and she gives treats on sight
Squawked to the coopmates and I'm askin em
Which box, are y'all layin eggies in?
Get me in the nest and I'm trouble
Last week fucked around and laid a triple double
Sonnin all these lazy layers like Hennessy
I can't believe
Today was a good day

Headed out front, walked straight into the kitties
They ran the other way, left me sittin pretty
Cause just yesterday them fools tried to scratch me
Saw a mean dog and it strolled right past me
No flexin, didn't even look in a henny's direction
and I just kept on peckin
Found a perfect dusting spot, and the dirt felt wet just right
Get my feathers lookin tight
Shake em up, shake em up, shake em up, shake em
Roll those parasites in a bath of dirt and watch me break em
And it's heaven heaven for hens and heaven for hens
Heaven with with my back in the cool soil
My dusting hole's dug low
Eye on the bugs, found me a poli roll
Plus no poultry I know got slaughtered in Oakland, CA
Today was a good day

CBT came out again late
With some oyster shell, replace calcium from the eggs I laid
Did our bit, my crop was full, she had the grit
Now I can really grind this shit
She reached under Betsy's big fat fanny
Pulled out the eggies, fixed em with toast and jammy
And my eggs taste sweet, so sweet
So sweet make the humans peep
Cased a bed border
Ain't no doubt I'm on top the pecking order
Snuck into that raised bed and I'm coastin
Took a sip of water-garden potion, hit the two-leg motion
I was glad everything had worked out
Jumped in CBT's lap and then chirped out
Today was like one of those fly dreams
Didn't even see a possum stalkin those high beams
No raccoon lookin for a murder
Eight in the evening got the Scratchburger
Even saw the lights of the Goodyear Blimp
And it read 'Three Hens is pimps'
Crop fulla scratch but no throwing up
Almost to the roost and my clucker still blowing up
Didn't hear anybody call straw 'hay'
I got to say it was a good day

© 2009 Three Hens
Polwick Farms Productions

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Farewell, Best Little Garden Crew

I taught garden class for two years before this one, and I'll teach it again. But there was something about the group of gardeners I had this year. I know I'm gonna miss them.



This one, especially. Graduating. It's funny: last year, garden class was basically black girls plus Dylan. This year, it was basically Mexican boys plus Dylan.

Holding it down every Monday was the fabulous brother team of Uriel and Jose. Uriel is one of those eleven year-olds who seem thirty-five. There are a lot of them at the school. I had seen him on the bus once, before he joined garden class. For reasons unknown he had somewhere to go, alone, on a school day afternoon, and he sat crumpled in his seat looking weighted by the world. Only his feet swinging well above the bus floor gave away the fact that he was a kid.

Jose is lighter of heart, as younger brothers will be. Here he is being Bugs Bunny, with Uri's support. Ever the comedian, his favorite joke was to sneak up on me when I was inspecting cabbage leaves or checking seedbeds before class. I caught him every time, but he could never be deterred from trying again. One day he did this hilarious bit he called watering "like a model". He made his eyes all smoldering and did suave hose maneuvers with one hand while rubbing his head mock-sensuously with the other. And he loved weeding competitions, because he ended up with the biggest weed pile and won the prize every time.




There was Oscar: quiet, eager to please, and best known for his starring role in the game "Who's Taller: Oscar or the Pea Plant?" (which successively became "Who's Taller: Uriel or the Pea Plant?" and then "Who's Taller: Miss Emma or the Pea Plant?" and finally "Who's Taller: Kobe or the Pea Plant?")



And there was Shauntenai, who was surly and difficult ninety percent of the time. But that other ten percent--oh man, how sweet it was. You had to toil for it. She only ever showed up for half an hour at a time, but she planted the most successful tomato seedling, and took a lot of pride in that fact.



We dug potatoes on the last day, and pulled our garlic. And watered, as always. And as always, the kids wanted to put the hose head on the cherished "mist" setting, which creates a beautiful, cooling cloud of water, almost none of which reaches the soil. (Probably my most frequently-yelled admonition this year was "Put it back on 'shower'!") One very hot afternoon this spring, I announced that there would be a special treat. At the end of class, I gathered all the kids in front of me, held the hose over their heads, and put it on "mist."




Here's the thing about Dylan. Yeah, he's bright. Yeah, he's sweet (often enough to cancel out when he isn't). Yeah, he's got gardening in his blood. But the quality that won me over most completely was his weirdness. Witness the photo above. Oh, it's cute, sure. Sweet kid, sweet smile. But look a little closer. Those green things aren't part of his "Water Strider" shirt, which looked like a brand-new freebie. No: he picked Scarlet Runner beans (from the vine just to the right of his head in the picture) and discovered what he called their "velcro" capacity and stuck them to his shirt. See what I mean? He also ate a carrot and turned the tops into a lash--even had the audacity to give me lashings with it, and I had the audacity to let him get away with it, on the Last Day principle.

After all the kids had been picked up, I finished watering the vegetable beds and found myself getting teary. When I got in the car that Keri Hilson "Knock You Down" song burst on the radio, way too loud. You know: Sometimes love comes around/And it knocks you down...I had denounced the song as cheesy. But as I drove homeward dewy-eyed, tender images of Dylan digging potatoes still playing in my mind, it sounded pretty right.

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Meeting the Night Neighbor

Nightly came the crashing sounds below: toppling stacks of plastic pots, tomato cages that bent and thwanked, a persistent metallic scraping. I initially theorized that the neighbors' funny-eyed cat was hunting rats down there and rested easy on this theory, with its benign implications, until the neighbors and cat moved out. Then I moved on to thinking a homeless drunk was bedding down in the crawlspace. (The challenge was explaining the spectacularly awkward movements that would create such mayhem. Most creatures are sneaky and smooth; they don't trip over stuff with every step.)

I developed half-waking paranoia that the drunk would break into the coop and slaughter the chickens for a meal, and Crim amused himself exploiting my fears. I'd bolt awake in the night and say, What the fuck is that? and he'd say, Shh, go back to sleep. It's just Ernie the Homeless Guy, stumbling home hungry.

A few times I whined enough to make Crim gallantly step out the back door, peak under the house and report that there was nothing there. We let the mystery persist for a good half-year. It became de rigeur to pretend it wasn't really weird to have something crawling around down there.

Was it rats, drunk off whatever was in the corners of the bottles Ernie left behind? A raccoon doing dissertation research on coop security systems? A skunk? In any of the above cases, I didn't want to encounter the perpetrator, which fed the systemic denial. But then fleas fled the cats and invaded our bedclothes (nice work, Advantage), and one fitful night I lay awake with fleas and phantom fleas crawling all over me, hearing Ernie or Skunkie or whoever down there knocking shit over. Classic invasion of grossness. I snapped. I threw on my robe, grabbed a flashlight and said, I'm ready for you, fucker. Be thee skunk or drunk, I shall face thee.

As I stumbled down the back steps, I thought about Writing. I think about it a lot, Writing being the altar at which I have sacrificed whatever money, power, respect I might otherwise have coming as a thirty year-old college graduate. When you want to write things, stories tend to come. And maybe also courage. Because you want a good story, and a good story requires going out there and meeting the beast.

(When I was ten, a skunk got into my bedroom at night--don't ask--and I spun it into my first publication feat: a proud check for $10 from Stone Soup, the magazine for children that no child has ever read. The check was tacked to my wall for years, beginning what I can only hope will be a lifetime of Writing paychecks so tiny that they are more trophy than income.)

I soothed the hens, who were making quiet sounds of anxiety. That's the best they can do, defenseless in the night: commiserate with each other like, You hear that?--sounds like something--well I'm okay--you okay?--everybody here?--united front, girls, stick together--we're okay--not to worry. Then I looked under the house.

Nothing there, of course. Silence where the crashing sounds had been. But I wasn't going back inside. I crouched among the cobwebs and the rat droppings and waited.

Finally, near the opposite wall, I saw something. A swish-swish. A long, white tail. No other movement. No other sound. It became The Sound of Music: me as Nazi soldier with my flashlight and this thing as the Von Trapp family hiding in the abbey. But there would be no climbing the verdant Alps to Switzerland on this night; I was persistent.

Whatever this creature might be, it was not bright. No self-awareness where the tail was concerned. It was struggling mightily to keep the rest of its body concealed, but the rattish tail was out there unselfconsciously flapping in the breeze. That tail looked familiar, and I gradually remembered why. I had seen one like it when I accidentally caught a baby opossum in a rat trap (an unfortunate incident, which may or may not have made me cry).

Finally the fugitive was ready to give himself up. Lowered his gray and white fur girth out of his hiding place and stepped into the beam of my flashlight. Big, fat possum. And an affable creature: once he decided the jig was up, he started tightroping across an elevated pipe bridge--there was the metallic scraping!--right toward me.

Posse the Possum. Long last we meet. I was taken with delight. Possums make unobtrusive neighbors, and their appetite for snails, rotten fruit and pre-killed carcasses earn them the nickname 'Mother Nature's cleanup crew.' They don't disturb the garden and, best of all, they are North America's only marsupials! Who wouldn't want to cohabit with a species that carries babies in a pouch?

Posse stopped a few feet away from me. We stared at each other for a while, then went our separate ways. I went back to bed contented, knowing that somehow I wasn't going to mind all the knocking and scraping and thwanking. Because I would think, hey, it's Posse, of the Midnight Marsupial Janitorial Crew, just going along to get along. I still don't know why he makes such a racket; supposedly opossums' jutting eyes give them excellent night vision. But now his awkwardness seems kind of sweet. I'm glad we met.

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The Best Little Gardener in Deep East Oakland

In the far southeast corner of Oakland, where white people aren't, an eleven year-old boy is wondering whether the bulbs are off to a good start, inspecting the cabbage for camouflaged worms and nervously urging the peas up their trellis. Worry is a hallmark of great gardening, and this kid's got it.

Three years ago I needed to scrap together more income, and Dylan, although he didn't know it yet, very much needed a garden at his school. (Laugh now at my supposition that starting an after-school gardening program at a public elementary would be a lucrative lark.)

It didn't take him long to become a gardener. The transition was well underway when we planted crocuses that first fall. He was inspecting the packaging--intense, as usual, while the other kids were wilding out, also as usual. Printed on the crocus package was a flower icon that read "MAR-APR," and he asked me to interpret this.

"March through April. That's when they'll bloom."

Dylan's eyes went wide. His fingers curled like talons grasping prey. His skinny limbs trembled. And he squealed as little ghetto boys are not supposed to squeal: "THAT'S WHEN THEY'LL BLOOM??" Affirmative. "Eeeeeeeeeeeeeeee!!!"

We had discussed the bulb concept as a class beforehand, but imagining these brown lumps creating fat purple flowers in a mere (he had a gardener's patience already) five months was just too much.

He quickly learned to identify seedlings. Pale gray-green V sprout? California poppy! And why is it special? Because...Because! Oh! Oh! (Talon hands.) BecauseitsthestateflowerofCalifornia!! He attacked stands of oxalis with rage, ignoring the little girls' pleas that the yellow flowers were pretty. It's a weed, he answered with unveiled disdain. Miss Emma, tell them.

I knew from the start that Dylan was not, for lack of a more circumspect phrase, regular black. His pants were a little too tight and his hair was a little too long. When he came back for a second year of garden class, my only repeat recruit, he was mooning about orchids, which he said reminded him of Belize.

"Are you from Belize?"

He nodded, excited to tell me, and said he had been back over the summer. His fourth grade iteration included new big jeans and a fresh-clipped fade, but he was still kind of a loner and a bit weird. Certainly no other kid would play along when I wanted to talk in British accents. He developed an obsession with tomatillos (planted as a nod to the Mexican half of the class) even though he never quite understood what or why they were.

With Dylan as its stalwart, the garden program gained popularity. During one class I overheard a group of girls talking about how much they loved gardening. Dylan swished past them, busy with his trowel, and said, "I just come for the flowers."

That spring we planted tomatoes from seed. Each kid got to plant a four-inch pot with three seeds to take home. Ten kids in the class, plus the drop-ins who suckered the teacher into letting them plant their own pots too--probably sixty potential tomato plants were in those hopeful pots. Many were banished by parents who hated having their kids touch dirt. Some fell victim to kids' inevitable neglect. But one lucky seed was coddled and sprouted and fawned over and transplanted and in late summer it bore fruit to feed a large Belizian family.

The tomato experience planted a seed in Dylan as well. This year, our third, he began asking me for extra seeds and seedlings to take home and in my harried state I would pour a few seeds into his hand and move on to the next crying catastrophe. Only recently did I come to understand that he had created a vast menagerie of potted plants at home. I try to picture it, the mad scientist amid his many experiments. His mother explained that he had somehow obtained a cob of ornamental corn, painstakingly removed the kernels, and grown some cornstalks.



This fall the veteran fifth-grade Dylan showed the new crop of kids how to plant bulbs. (Two leftover bulbs were destined to join his menagerie.) He ripped open the package of paperwhites with glee, but was disturbed to find the roots already sprouting.

"Miss Emma, they think they're in the soil!" And that's when I knew the transition was complete. He knew what the bulbs were thinking.

Driving away from the school one cold night, jean cuffs dripping, I saw Dylan riding home on the handlebars of his big brother's bike. Seeing him perched so precariously, my little horticultural genius, heading off into the dark of a neighborhood where the murder rate is high and the optimism rate is low, I decided to drop the hardened teacher thing. I thought, I'm just gonna love this kid. /

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Harvest Pr0n: Happy Thanksgiving!

Mad peaches in August.




Late summer came the big heirlooms.























Pumpkins and pie from the school garden.

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