A re-post from Pluck and Feather:

I never quite expected that “urban farming” would grow in popularity to the degree that is has. Its hard work and our culture is so driven toward convenience. However, it has and because of this, new social and political issues are coming to light.

For example, there is a significant issue around bringing attention to and attempting to legalize backyard food and animals. For the people that have been maintaining themselves by quietly cultivating their backyards, community and government scrutiny means others will attempt (in some cases successfully) to impose their values on private practices. I recently read a well written post on this called, the politics of urban farming. I encourage you to read it too.

Then there is the concern I have mentioned before, which is sustaining community projects. Nonprofit funding runs in trends. With the sudden bloom of urban farm projects, funding will dry up. This is exactly what is happening with Quesada Gardens in San Francisco.

All of this is to say that urban farming has moved well beyond our backyards. It is critical to consider this bigger picture as we forge ahead in our effort to build a healthy equitable food system.

Monday is cold, Tuesday is hot, and more cherry blossoms are raining down than raindrops. How can we take care of our gardens in the shifting weather? Master gardener and Alameda resident Birgitt Evans shared some good guidelines with me during a recent chat.

• “It’s really sunny right now but we have to be careful because it can still be really cold. If you’re trying to push the season you need to watch,” Evans said.  Use a blanket or tarp on colder nights to protect your new plants.
• At this time of year, germination temperatures are crucial to determine what can be sown directly in the garden. Read your seed packets and note the germination temperatures, to see what can be directly sown outside. Good ones to try now are leafy greens, fava beans, potatoes, and onions. “Parsley might do okay. It’s too early for carrots. It’s too early for beans.”
• Another good one to start is peas, though they take some care. “Peas are perfect right now. You need to protect them though, because birds like them. They’ll be pecked to nubs.” Evans recommends taking 2-qt juice bottles and cutting the tops and bottoms off, and setting them half an inch into the ground to protect new shoots.
• Broccoli and cauliflower can be transplanted now, but they probably should not be directly sown, or aphids, which come out with the warm weather, will do some damage.
• Also destructive: slugs and snails. “Snails and slugs can be a big problem this time of the year. In our cooler rainier season they breed and come out in force.” Now is the time for a 10pm slug patrol.  Evans likes to collect them in containers and give them to a neighborhood friend who raises chickens.
• Back indoors, summer crop seeds like tomatoes and squash can be started, under lights and heating mats. Depending on the microclimate, tomatoes can be planted outdoors as early as late March. “The further you are from the bay, the longer you have to wait,” Evans explained. Residents as far away as Fremont or Orinda can plant them in early April.
• All this said, plants can be as unpredictable as the weather. “Plants can take more cold than we think they can,” Evans said. “I’ve had tomatoes germinate outside in my garden in late January. Not a lot of them, but it does happen.”

Last Saturday, I got my first apple tree. Well, it will be. Right now it looks like a broomstick in a bucket of water. But soon I’ll give it some compost, and with luck, time, and care, I’ll get some apples.

Did I tell you my tree cost only six bucks?

And it’s a rare breed. Carmelite Reinette, a French apple tree from the 17th century, is good for both the kitchen and table, Google tells me. It’s not self-pollinating, but don’t fret, said John Valenzuela, who grafted my tree. Just take a flowering branch of another apple tree, stick it in a bucket of water, and place it at the center of your tree, come time.

The broomstick is a graft, courtesy of the Scion Exchange, which is an event  that was held last Saturday by the local chapter of the California Rare Fruit Growers. For four bucks, you can explore a huge room of tree cuttings — scions –  which can be grafted to another tree. Scion and rootstock will fuse, potentially, with luck and some basic skills. And then, hopefully, figs, pomegranates, plums, apricots, cherries, and all sorts of other good things will drop onto your lawn in time. At the scion exchange, as you whisk one rare variety of nectarine into your bag after another, visions of plum trees do dance in one’s head, and the atmosphere of the room is one mainly of joy and excitement. A Christmas Day for plant people.

Basic skills were easy to be had. The cost of admission includes not only the opportunity to get a serious horde of scions, but to get educated. Two free classes were given by Idell Weydemeyer, a local expert,  about what to do with all the cuttings I, and all the other newbies, had exuberantly, ignorantly picked up. What do I do with these green gage plum scions?  My mulberry twigs? The class gave me enough to start with, and also a healthy respect for how much deeper my knowledge can go. She also gave great tips. For example, for those cuttings which can be directly planted (no grafting required) take a fork to the scion and scratch down to the fine, green cambium, before planting it. “I got 100% take when I started to do this,” she said.

It’s enough to get you to purchase the rootstock and supplies to try your hand at grafting yourself. Both of these were sold at the exchange for low prices — rootstock can be expensive, and  is mainly ordered online. Here, rootstock was three dollars.

Trees seem expensive, time-consuming, and intimidating to me. But the scion exchange make learning and growing possible. Carmelite Reinette, what do you taste like?

Here are some reasons to get The Essential Urban Farmer, just recently out last December:

1. It’s written by two Oakland urban farmers — that’s right, two of our own  — Willow Rosenthal (City Slicker) and Novella Carpenter (Ghost Town Farm, author of Farm City);
2. You’re new or new-ish to urban farming, and you want to know what it entails to start or expand your activities;
3. It’s January, and  you’re feeling just a little lonely in the backyard, cleaning out the chicken coop, and would like some words of support;
4. It’s January, and it’s time to plan/dream.

Fluorescent green — 80s fluorescent green — and liberally sprinkled with cute line drawings of keyhole beds and jokes about pyromaniacs welding flame weeders, The Essential Urban Farmer manages to be entertaining, frank, and encouraging both for newbies and old-timers alike.

Urban agriculture isn’t new to this country, but it did go into quite a long hibernation. Bee boxes in San Francisco and goats in Oakland are uncommon sights. The book assumes — and rightly so — that many of the people who pick up this book have never performed a soil test, used a honey extractor, or eaten an egg from their backyard. The book provides fodder for questions like  “Could it be worthwhile to plant a fruit tree?” And, “If I buy hens, what do I do with her after she stops laying eggs?” There are even relatively non-gross descriptions of how to butcher livestock. In short, it gives curious experimenters enough to go on to begin making informed decisions about their backyard or balcony.

Both Rosenthal and Carpenter have had years of experience dumpster diving for chickens, scavenging for “urbanite” (that’s the chunks of blasted concrete one may find, um, around), and growing kale. Their explanations are concise, and for the most part, easy to understand. One gets the sense that they’ve explained the basics of soil building and rabbit raising hundreds of times, and we’re receiving not only the benefit of their knowledge, but the benefit of having experienced teachers. If I can get through their explanation of soil chemistry without falling asleep, that’s saying something.

Unlike many older homesteading books, the book takes into account our current, trash-littered cityscapes, and gives expert tips on how to use pallets, plastic milk crates, and laundry machine rinse water in an urban garden. Unpretentious and cost-aware, The Essential Urban Farmer is pragmatic and enthusiastic, showing us how accessible urban farming really is.

Support local craftspeople and Oakland’s youth at Acta Non Verba‘s First Annual Holiday Fair this coming Saturday, Dec 17th at Tassafaronga Community Center, from noon to 4 pm. There will be door prizes, giveaways, and booths selling wood carvings, edible arrangements, and other handmade goods. Proceeds go to Tassafaronga Community Garden and Urban Farm, a place to educate and train inner city youth in urban farming and other vocational skills.

Tassafaronga Community Center
975 85th Avenue
Oakland, CA

I saw a man,
An old Cilician, who occupied
An acre or two of land that no one wanted,
A patch not worth the ploughing, unrewarding
For flocks, unfit for vineyards; he however
By planting here and there among the scrub
Cabbages and white lilies and verbena
And flimsy poppies, fancied himself a king
In wealth, and coming home late in the evening
Loaded his board with unbought delicacies.
- Virgil, The Georgics (29 B.C.)

I came across this while reading the urban agriculture section of the Beginning Farmers website, and it made me think about what it is that farmers do, and foragers, and how ancient the practice is of growing and finding food. I’m not one for prayer in any traditional sense, or for Christmas. But there is weight when one repeats the same words that others have said, for centuries past, as in written prayers and poems, and there is also weight when one repeats the same actions, over and over. I feel connected to something deeper, when I remember that people the world over and and from long ago are doing what I’m doing — looking for and growing food, putting it on the table, and fancying themselves kings. It’s a ritual of necessity.

The Georgics is a four volume book of poetry whose subject is farming, and you can read it for free.  There are passages about planting vineyards, livestock disease, and gathering honey. A bit wordy in parts, but other sections are very readable. It begins: “I’ll begin to sing of what keeps the wheat fields happy ….”

At Oakland’s Frank Ogawa Plaza, off to the side from the sea of weathered tents, Emma Armstrong, an Occupy Oakland protester, planted greens in a raised bed, a little over a week ago.The bed is close to the kitchen, where a decent number of people are being fed, 24 hours a day.

No one person manages the garden, though Armstrong mentioned that Spiral Gardens provided some of the materials. “Its really a waiting game for donations,” said Bobby [no last name given], another volunteer gardener. ”When there’s work to be done, people just materialize to help.”

Aside from this bed, several of the permanent cement planters around the plaza have been replanted by Occupiers.  Once overrun with mint, they’re now filled with lettuce unfurling and snap peas trailing their leaves. Other vegetables planted include onions, kale, chard, and beans.  “I’m trying to sprout some wheatgrass too, but I don’t know. It may be too cold for that,” Armstrong said.

The project is tiny, but it has a certain value. “Every time we plant, it’s an opportunity for people to learn more about how to feed yourself. It really encourages people to grow food at home,” said Armstrong.

A graphic designer and portrait photographer living in Oakland, Armstrong grew up on a New England farm. This is her first experience with urban farming. “I like the creative possibilities and limitations that an urban setting puts on gardening,” Armstrong commented. “I like the way you can find stuff on the street, and you’re in a place where there’s always people and supplies around to help out. I’m curious to see how the plants deal with all the activity around. I hope it’s not too traumatic for them.”

Armstrong camped for the first two weeks of Oakland’s Occupation, until the raids, when she lost her tent. Also destroyed, during the raid, was the first attempt at a garden.

“We came back the next day. Everything was destroyed,” said Armstrong. “The plants were stamped on. They [the police] killed it on purpose.”

This time it’s slower. Armstrong hopes that they’ll be able to harvest. “If we can grow our own salad and serve it here,” she gestured to the 24-hour kitchen not fifty yards away, “it would make a powerful statement.”

— Cynthia Salaysay is a writer and editor living in Oakland.