Grow yer Own, City Slicker!

I was recently given the book "Farm City" by Novella Carpenter by my lovely boyfriend, who grabbed it for me before his most recent visit and job-scouting mission to Portland, and I had a hard time putting it down while he was here. In it, the author takes over an undeveloped lot next to her apartment in Oakland and not only grows an enormous vegetable garden, but raises a variety of animals and poultry for meat and eggs. Reading this book, I saw myself in five years: how do I take what I have to the next level? How do I best use the land I have to provide what I need? After losing my job and flailing to get on my feet as a freelancer, these concerns suddenly jumped from hypothetical, nebulous future dreams into sharp reality.

I was born at home to two aspiring back-to-the-land hippies who raised goats and chickens, selling eggs and milk and building their own barns and structures in a semi-rural area of Massachusetts. Thirty-some-odd years later and I live in a fairly dense neighborhood in a well-appointed small West Coast city. I have a large, mostly private backyard which is shaded under a perimeter of large, leafy trees on three sides. My attempts to grow food back there have been only partially successful. This spring was cold and rainy, unseasonably so, and the pear tree failed to fruit. Almost every seed I planted failed to sprout or was taken by the birds. So this is the year I am planning Round Two: The Front Yard.

My front lawn, at the moment, is dried and yellow with patches of clover and tall dandelions. The two apple trees out front are twice as tall as their hunched, unnaturally dense state three years ago when I moved in, before I started my twice-yearly pruning to open them up and aerate them, growing them away from the gnarled bushes they had been forced to become. Apple Tree East is lined with small ripening fruits, but they are dotted with black scars. No beauties this year, but my plans for them don't involve aesthetics. Apple Tree West, the worse off of the two, is still striving for health, but she has one visible fruit this year - her first since I've lived here. Once the fruits ripen fully in September and October, I'm going to try my hand at fermenting gallons of hard cider. I'm still deciding what to plant as a ground cover underneath, along the sidewalks. Mint? Some of the hundreds of strawberry runners I clipped from my plants this week and set to rooting in a shallow bucket of water?

The front yard is as ugly as it is neglected. No fence or border separates it from the yard of the empty house next door, which until only three weeks ago had armpit-high uncut grass and weeds choking out the sidewalk. However, unlike the idyllic and barbecue-friendly backyard, it gets full sun all day long. It would only make perfect sense to grow my herbs and veggies out there.

Where to begin? I don't want to start digging up chunks of resistant sod and laying out hideous sheets of cardboard to kill the grass, as some of my neighbors have done before putting in beds and walkways and retaining walls. I dug up a tiny corner of the yard a week ago to plant my new forsythia bush and it took so much out of me, I could barely haul a bucket of water to soak the little guy. I dream of embedding trellises along the property line to support grapevines, but I'd have to hire an installer to help me out, and my cash flow is nil right now. I have a plan in mind for the long run - a border of large decorative perennials and herbs to discourage passersby from sneaking food from the central veggie garden, which may or may not be in raised beds (another expen$e I can't quite foot at the moment), with a flagstone pathway from the front stoop to the street in a central arc. I want to grow berries, mint, tea, flowering bulbs, scented vines, plants that attract bees and hummingbirds. Right now there are two giant terracotta pots with some straggly crocosmia shoring up the concrete slab of a front stoop, a squat round daphne with its little pal of a hosta next to it, and the aforementioned forsythia, which I bought in anticipation of its springtime yellow flowers. Not much to look at yet.

Even though I know I'm at stage 1 of at least 10, I feel pretty good about the things I've managed to grow, raise, pickle and brew so far. The four goofy hens out back give me 2 to 3 eggs a day these summer months, and their shit in the compost was what made the strawberry transplants I put in this spring go WILD with fruit and runners. I've expanded my kombucha operation from 2 to 3 giant jars, with a fourth in the works for the next round in a week or so, and the collection of flip-top glass bottles has filled two of my cabinet shelves in the kitchen in between cycles. The kombucha I've made so far has been the best-tasting I've ever drank, and I suck down a bottle a day when I can, trying desperately not to run out before the next batch has had its chance to ferment. I'm about to head out back and put in a thick run of winter leeks in a last-ditch attempt to wring SOMETHING out of the freshly-turned beds back there. My sunflowers came back from the brink of death and are almost as tall as I am, protected from the winds by the garage. Thrifting far afield, outside of Portland, has yielded dozens of canning jars at a fraction of the price of buying them new in stores, so it's off to Freddy's for me to grab fresh lids and some more pickling spices from the bulk bins. I've got envelopes of seeds scavenged from friends and the neighborhood. I can't wait to get this operation going.