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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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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Ximena: Love, Loss and Cheek Feathers

By Ximena the Hen

Guest Plogger

Not long ago, I was in an egg. I broke out, let my feathers dry and joined a swirl of other chicks in claustrophobic spaces. I ended up in the gentle hands of a lady human. She called me Ximena and put me on a postal scale and recorded that I weighed 1.5 ounces. I spent my chickhood in a plush box with my broodermate, Winona, who had no cheek feathers.

It was a simple time. I was content to peck at the feed, sip water and swallow it with my head back, careen across the brooder box, and then collapse in a nap. But Winona often treated me unkindly. Once I became sick and in my weakness Winona threatened to peck me to death. And she would have, had not the lady human erected a six-inch fence of hardware cloth between us. I lived through my illness, grew stronger and came to see Winona as fundamentally good-hearted, if awfully pushy. It was just the two of us in a twenty-inch square box, so we became very close. Together we grew our first feathers; they poked awkwardly through our fluffy chick down.

At two weeks old, we were permitted a trip outside. It was glorious. How to describe that first ray of warm sun on my back? The green blades of grass in my beak, the freedom to run--how bright and beautiful it all was! In the backyard we met Camilla. She was a towering figure, a red hen ten times our size. When she came near, we were confined to a wire cage for our safety.

Right away, I admired her. I began to dream of being a big, brassy hen myself one day. On later occasions, Camilla would cluck with me a little, telling her secrets. She too had grown up in a box indoors, with a broodermate named Hennessy. Camilla said she had been tiny just like me! But after two years of squawking and laying eggs and attacking the garden together, Hennessy had become ill and recently died. Camilla believed that we little ones were supposed to bring the coop new life after this loss. I could not really understand this. Also puzzling was the fact that Camilla was just as eager to peck and chase us as initiate us into the world of grown hens.

In time, Winona and I moved out of our box in the human house into a small hutch in the backyard. We were still too small for the coop; Camilla wouldn't have it. Still, we got to see a lot of the big red hen. I think Camilla took a real shine to me. She taught me hen things, like eating bits of bread or tomato out of the hand of the lady human. We called her "Comes Bearing Treats," which I thought was funny. Winona was still full of sass and when we all three roamed the patio in the evenings, she would try to challenge Camilla. This always made me laugh because Camilla was twice her size. But pound for pound, Winona was the scrappiest chicken in town.

Winona started a fun tradition when we lived in the hutch. The hutch was elevated a few feet off the ground and it had a little wooden walkway from the door to the patio below. Whenever Comes Bearing Treats opened the door, we ignored that walkway and flew halfway across the yard! We were wild!

There were certain things about myself I had to learn to accept as I feathered out. Well, mainly one thing: my cheek feathers. You see, I'm an Araucana, an "exotic" South American breed. I look very different in the face from other chickens. Winona called me Mutton Chops and The Bearded Lady, which hurt my feelings. I am also unable to see much of anything in my peripheral field. But Comes Bearing Treats told me my cheek feathers were adorable and my chickie godmother, Comes Bearing Snails, agreed.

One night, a terrible thing happened. I heard sneaking sounds on the hutch roof and then squawks and screams from the coop. Winona and I pressed close to each other, shivering with fear. The light of day found Camilla's body lying on the coop floor, ravaged by a brutal beast. A hungry raccoon had broken in like a thief in the night. For a few days after that, we had to live inside the human house again.

I was so sad for Camilla. She had just lost her friend when she lost her own life too. More tragic still, she had fallen gravely ill and made a stunning recovery just before the raccoon attack. I was also afraid. I could have been killed too.

That was the first harsh blow of my young life, but it would not be the last. Soon after Camilla died, we were allowed to move into the coop (which now had safety retrofits) and Winona began acting strange. She had grown to be much larger than me as we neared henhood, and she seemed meaner even than usual. Every morning, she would lift her head and unleash an awful sound, nothing like the earthy clucks and squawks I'd heard from Camilla and had begun practicing myself. Something in my nascent hen soul told me to fear my old broodermate.

Comes Bearing Treats seemed to be of the same mind. I was fond of my human. When CBT sat in her lounger, I hopped onto her lap or perched on the chair's arm and we sunned together. Now she seemed to know something about Winona that I didn't. She stopped saying "Winona" and said "Wyclef" instead. Only now can I understand what Winona was and always would be: a rooster.

Not long after the morning noises began, Comes Bearing Treats and The Other One took us on a terrible journey. I remember little of it because I was angry and confused. For a moment, I was on a farm faraway and heard the calls of many chickens: roosters, baby chicks and young pullets like myself. I went there in a cage with my old broodermate, but I came home with strangers. One of them was a White Rock pullet, smaller than me, but fiesty. The other was a pipsqueak Maran, and I'm sorry to say, I took my anger out on this little one. I pecked her. I chased her. I regret that now.

I got along just fine with Betsy, the White Rock. She was a no-frills, sensible sort of bird, and I could appreciate that. I was ready to be "No Drama Ximena." With Marianne, it was more complicated. She made a godawful racket when we went to roost. Peeping without ceasing. Betsy always had to come squeeze between us to keep me from pecking Mari. My despair was still raw. Winona had been my flock. I had a lot of big feelings I didn't know what to do with at that time, and poor Marianne bore the brunt.

In time, Marianne matured and Betsy helped me come around and we became a flock, roaming the patio as one. Betsy and Mari joined the proud tradition of going airborne out of the coop when the door was open. That reminds me of Winona. And I taught the new girls to eat bits of bread and tomatoes from the hands of Comes Bearing Treats. I felt comfortable around CBT, who (I now understood) had raised me from a ball of fluff to the proud hen I was becoming.

But the new girls feared her! They ran in terror when she tried to pick them up. I felt bad for them, because they must have come from a place very different from the backyard. They had never known any human like I knew Comes Bearing Treats and Comes Bearing Snails and The Other One. I try to show them the way by flying up onto CBT's lap. Betsy and Marianne are learning to come nearer and sit with us sometimes. When I encourage the others, CBT calls me her "hen cosigner." Whatever that means!

Hearing my story, do you believe that six months ago, I was in an egg? I have seen so much of the world since I broke that shell, its beauty and its pain. But there is one thing I have yet to do. It is my fondest ambition: to lay an egg. .

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Kardashi-hens

ON tomorrow's episode of Keeping Up with the Kardashians, the notoriously callipygian family adopts laying hens. I did not expect this confluence of my more outlier interests and I'm not sure how to feel about it. My disgust is arguing with my delight.

The Kardashians kinda remind me of a flock of chickens anyway, with the high female to male ratio and the pecking and the discomfiting intrasexual vibe.

My chickens also live in a Calabasas manse.

Teasers of the ep show five or six hens huddled in the bathtub--presumably the result of Krazy highjinx on the part of Kim, Kourtney, Khloe, Kendall, Kylie or perhaps mom Kris--and a hapless Barred Rock crapping on the very well-polished floor of the Kardashian Kompound. (Cut to close-up of the crap; looks a bit less than solid and healthy to me.)


I WANTED to get Hennessy and Camilla's take, so I went out to the coop and explained to them that humans have this thing called reality shows and someone named Kim Kardashian, who is, to quote Joel McHale, "famous for having a big ass and a sex tape," stars in one, along with her large, wealthy family, which includes stepdad Bruce Jenner, a de-balled former Olympian. And that they had introduced chickens, high jinx, and so on.

Camilla squatted for a dump and took off in the direction of the compost bin. But Hennessy just stood there staring at me. Her head tilted jerkily to one side, then the other, then back.

As if to say, I can't believe I even have to explain to you how deeply this offends me.

It might just be jealousy; rappers are more into Kim these days.

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That's My Shit

Every now and then something comes along that just restores your faith in the great human project. Actually, I think I felt like that for some other reason lately, but I plum forget what it was.

I can hardly contain my glee about two new products hitting shelves this spring: Cowpots and Biobags.

Cowpots are biodegradable pots. You start seeds in them, and once they're grown you put the whole thing in the ground; no transplant shock. Wa, you're thinking. We already have those. They're called peat pots and they're not that rad.

But behold the Cowpot! It's made from (yeah) cowpats. A renewable resource, unlike those mysterious peat bogs I'm told to feel guilty about. And then, too: it's fertilizer! Now that's the kind of ingenuity that makes me proud to be an American. I think I maybe felt proud to be an American for some other reason lately, but damned if I can remember what it was.

Biobags are compostable plastic bags. You heard right, my friend. Compostable plastic bags, made (some alchemical way) from corn.

You take one of these bags, you put it in your compost pail, you fill the pail just like a trash can, and when the time comes to empty it into the compost it's not a household saga involving black sludge and fruitfly larvae. I have a package of them under my sink right now and every time I review that fact it blows my mind.

Compostable plastic bags! They go right in the compost! That's the coolest thing since what's his name. (Chazack. No. That's a Hebrew word meaning "be strong.") I mean, it starts with compost pails, but imagine the potential! I almost paid a grip of money to order a hundred pack of these little miracles online, but then I saw them just waiting for me, pretty as can be, in the household supplies aisle of Berkeley Bowl.

Goddamn. It's a new day.

(Chazack, Barack: you just might win this.)

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Harvest Porn

You know you want it.



In each and every one of my first five seasons of gardening, I tried to grow tomatoes and--to greater and lesser extents--failed.

The first year I planted my pots of sorry-ass Sweet 100s on a balcony in Brooklyn with only morning sun. Needless to say, the maters sucked. The next year, I grew glorious heirloom beefsteaks in a sunny community garden plot--and found the two-pounders smashed on the ground by no-good kids just before they ripened.


In my real garden in Oakland, my first year's tomatoes succumbed to verticillium wilt. The beautiful vines turned yellow and then brown and I watched, hapless, helpless, hopeless. The next year, to avoid the dread disease, I planted in ginormo pots. But in my greed and haste, I put two plants to a pot, and by mid-summer they were starving.







Last year, one plant succeeded: a hybrid of acclaimed Italian sauce variety San Marzano called (SO appropriately) Super Marzano. But I didn't want just a bunch of damn paste tomatoes. I wanted big, pornographic heirlooms to slice into a caprese.

So perhaps you'll pardon a bit of horn tootage; I have journeyed from the edge of despair back to faith.

This year I grew EIGHT MILLION* tomatoes:





*Statement should not be taken literally.



Post Script

This has nothing to do with garden porn (well, not much anyway), but I didn't want to give these pictures their own post. I took them at a car show we somehow ended up at in SanJo. I shouldn't pretend not to know: we ended up there because DJ Big Man 808, of the Bay Area Record Rockers, Brian's crew, got us free passes. His brother is the king of car shows and judged the Car-Hopping Contest, a hydraulic olympics.




But I really want to talk to you about the skanks. These of course are the charming young ladies (the youngest looked fifteen) who pose in hoochie outfits with the cars. I did not photograph them posing, as many guys did, because I wanted to capture their humanity. They are seen here walking, standing around and all too human.







What bothers me so much about the skanks--well, many things--but what bothers me most about them is that cars and skanks have nothing to do with each other other than the fact that men want to ogle both. I find this infuriating.

Why should anyone get to have such absurd fantasies fulfilled? And at the cost of another person's dignity, no less. I would love to have a gardening video narrated by The Game wearing a wifebeater and pulling the red Bloods bandanna out of his back jeans pocket to wipe the sweat off his brow as he transplants seedlings--but I don't expect to have this fantasy provided. It just wouldn't be right.

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Cooped up in the house so thought I'd post

One of my chickens always manages to fly the coop. I build the fence ever higher, but she still flaps her way over it. This is Camilla I'm talking about, of course--the impetuous one. In case it isn't obvious, by the way, I named her after Gonzo's girlfriend.

Her partner-in-laying (but not in a sexual way) is Hennessy. She's always getting shouted out by rappers and it's so sweet! But I do wonder, sometimes...why are they so into her? What goes on in that coop at night?

Anyway, Hennessy is very well-behaved in daylight. But Camilla always flies the coop. This might not sound like much of a problem since chickens really do always come home to roost. She doesn't wander off. But she does shit all over the patio and dig up my plants.

So I was thinking maybe I should clip her wings.

Are you crying? Doesn't that sound terrible? Clip her wings, oh god: I couldn't handle the metaphoric implications.

Then I recalled that I am already fencing her in. And keeping her cooped up.

Maybe whenever you take up something humans have been doing for a really long time you bump into the origins of metaphors. It's kinda awkward because you're like, oh, hi, you're literal.

I noticed it when I started gardening, sowing seeds and reaping harvests, making fertile ground and the like. And when Brian started working down at the docks (okay, yes, he does payroll), I found out that some people literally put down anchor and set sail. Go overboard and ship out.

I know. It's pretty mortifying that I never thought about all that before. But the chickens don't think I'm stupid. Course they're freakin bird brains.

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