Farm City

by Novella Carpenter

  At home, a woman who had recently moved to our street, Makeda, was in my garden. She, like all of us, has a hustle. She makes pulled-pork sandwiches, stacks them into a wheelie cart, and then wanders around Oakland’s small rock-club-and-bar district after dark selling them.

  “Hey, Novella, can I pick some beets?” she asked, her red dreads glimmering in the sun. She had asked to pick beets before, and I was always more than happy to share. But now that I was on this garden-eating stunt, it felt like she was asking for my firstborn.

  A stray cat was in the garden with us. Gray, lanky, and half wild, he usually ran away at the first glimpse of a person, but he was so intent on stalking a mouse in the compost pile that he hadn’t noticed us.

  “Sure, sure,” I said to Makeda, and showed her which ones to pull from the dark earth. I had to stay human, I reminded myself as I parked my bike.

  Upstairs I dunked the plums in a bucket filled with water and mercilessly scrubbed them down. I loaded my oven with widemouthed jars, and boiled water in a giant blue enamel canning pot. After the jars were sterilized—really hot—I crammed as many whole plums into the jars as could fit. I boiled the jars of plums in the water bath—this process is called raw-pack canning—and once some of the plums had softened and cooked down, I crammed in a few more until they were an inch from the top of the jar. Then I screwed on the lids and let the jars rumble under two inches of boiling water for about an hour. When I pulled the jars from the water, the plums had turned an amazing fuchsia color. I placed the hot jars of plums into our pantry to cool down overnight and set the seal.

  That night, Bill and I went out to an East Bay institution we had heard about but could not believe until we saw it with our own eyes: in the parking lot of a bakery, four metal bins overflowing with loaves of bread, any time of day, any day of the week.

  Day-old loaves. Bread that was too dark, too pale, or otherwise damaged in some way in the bakery was dumped. Pastries not sold, also dumped. And so these Dumpsters attracted and nourished the entire scavenger community of the East Bay: the hippies, the punks, the scroungers. Occasionally regular citizens appeared, gawking at the plenty before sheepishly snagging a few loaves. These were the Dumpsters of Life.

  The smell of the bakery almost knocked me over. Behind a glass wall, men wearing white surgical smocks sweated, forming dough, mixing flour, pulling pans out of the oven. I stared at them in awe. Carbohydrates in action. So delicious, so not allowed according to rule number three: No food from Dumpsters (except to feed the animals).

  The bread Dumpsters were in the back of the parking lot. They were big, lumbering, each the size of a minivan. ANIMAL FEED ONLY, one sign read; NO TRESPASSING, another read. Bill and I, now veteran Chinatown scroungers, were not shy. We flipped the black plastic lids back; they clanged against the green metal of the Dumpster. The smell of bakery items was intoxicating. I took a deep huff. Bill immediately snagged a cinnamon roll that rolled freely on top of a pile of challah, baguettes, and liberated slices of bread. He gnawed on it thoughtfully, then concluded, “Mmm, good.” I was both repulsed and desperately jealous.

  I was there for the rabbits.

  Riana informed me that Mamie, her French grandmother-in-law, always fed her rabbits stale baguettes. I couldn’t find a source in English that recommended such a practice, but I was eager to save money. The alfalfa pellets were starting to get expensive. I hadn’t been spending any money on food for myself, so I was actually saving tons, yet I was keen to explore the city’s bounty. And there, in the Dumpster of Life, within easy reach, were twenty-four baguettes. We hustled them home, along with some hamburger buns for the chickens and five cinnamon rolls for Bill.

  The rabbits fell on the stale baguettes as if they had been waiting for them their whole lives. They ignored the bok choy and sharpened their teeth on the hard bread.

  The next day for breakfast, while Bill heated up his unbearably delicious-smelling Dumpster rolls, I opened a jar of the stewed plums. Just as it should be, the lid was tight and hard to pry off, but it finally yielded with a satisfying pop. Inside, a thick juice the color of wine covered the plums. I took a swig. Sweet, thick nectar with a slight hint of cherry filled my mouth. I dug into the flesh of the plum on top with a spoon. It was dense and puddinglike, tart but not as sour as the raw fruits.

  As Bill munched on his roll and I ate a whole jar of plums I wondered how the bread-fed bunnies would taste.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO

  Finally, after one missed UPS delivery, the tea plants arrived. The caffeine-withdrawal headaches were now gone, so it was with only mild interest, not desperation, that I opened the long cardboard box. The three plants were wrapped in butcher paper; once released from their brown swaddling, they looked terrifically healthy, like shiny-leaved, ornamental camellias. The invoice reminded me that I had paid $20 for each plant, so I had to put them to good use.

  Two of the Camellia sinensis plants had new bud growth, which is what’s usually picked to make green tea. I planted them in the front yard, in a semi-shady area, and took a few young leaves upstairs. According to the instructions that came with the plants, green tea is the easiest to make. You simply pan-fry or steam the leaves, then dry them out. Within a few hours, I had some grassy-smelling green tea. It wasn’t coffee, but at least it wasn’t another mug of mint tea. A few minutes after drinking it, I felt a surge of energy and well-being. Probably the best $60 I ever spent.

  Bill, a huge fan of green tea—jasmine-spiked was his favorite—came into the kitchen as I brewed my second mug.

  “Can I taste it?” he asked, reaching across the table to snag my mug.

  I made a grunting sound and grabbed the mug back, careful not to spill a drop.

  “You get to eat whatever you want!” I said. I had been coveting his breakfasts of cereal and milk.

  “Just a taste?” he begged.

  I surrended. He took a huge, slurping gulp. “That’s awful,” he said.

  “More for me,” I said, and reclaimed my cup of caffeine.

  Near the middle of my experiment, I noticed that one of my hens had gone broody. A broody chicken will sit on her egg—or, if you haven’t been gathering them daily, the clutch of eggs—and will refuse to move. A broody chicken is an intense animal, devoted to, obsessed about, hatching some eggs. This lasts for about three weeks, the usual gestation time for chicks. Even if there’s no rooster and no chance for a baby chick (save for an immaculate chicken conception), the hen still sits firmly on her nest and does nothing, not even laying more eggs.

  I had been eating—and depending on—up to three eggs a day to keep up my protein levels. I went downstairs to consult the chicken. I brought a cabbage leaf. She had set up a nest near the side of the house, under a bush.

  “Hello?” I started.

  She made a horrible keening noise.

  I went to pet her feathers. She pecked me, hard.

  I offered her the leaf. She stared intently into the middle distance. She seemed annoyed at my audacity, my wilted bribe.

  I prayed that the other chickens didn’t go broody. Experts I consulted on the Internet said there’s nothing really to do about a broody hen; you just have to wait it out.

  As I calculated my protein intake a duck walked by. He was one of seven I had been raising, a white Pekin, like the ones our little neighbor Sophia had loved, one of which had been killed by the opossum. Sophia and her mom had moved away that past winter.

  The duck gave me the hairy eyeball that ducks tend to give, cocking their heads up, beady eyes wary but charming. I bought a pair of pruning loppers the next day.

  The previous batch of ducks, the two who had survived the opossum attack, had ended up on my table around the time Sophia and Neruda moved away. I didn’t have the heart to kill them personally, but they were messy and were eating tons of feed, so I hired two assassins. “Assassins” might be a strong word. More like two hungry hippies Bill knew. I watched, like a coward, from the kitchen as they carried the ducks f
rom the back porch and into the lot, where they chopped off their heads with an ax.

  It took an hour to pluck the ducks, and then we barbecued them. The dinner was the hippies’ payment. Alas, the meat was hard and rubbery because we hadn’t let it rest. The skin and fat were delicious, though.

  One of the hippies chewed thoughtfully. He was tall, had long hair, and frequently went barefoot. Around his neck he wore a rope with a bottle of gin tied to it. On the other end of the rope was a bottle of tonic water.

  Where do you find these people? In Oakland. “You know, modern man doesn’t get to use his teeth much anymore,” he pointed out. “This is exercise for my teeth!”

  I remembered that Carla Emery’s Encyclopedia of Country Living had suggested resting meat before eating it to keep it from getting rubbery and tough, but I didn’t understand why. For a clear, scientific explanation, I turned to Harold McGee’s encyclopedic On Food and Cooking: “For a brief period after the animal’s death its muscles are relaxed and if immediately cut and cooked will make especially tender meat.” Hmm. The hippies and I probably took too long to pluck the ducks. Rigor mortis had set in, the protein filaments in the muscles bound together, creating a tough texture.

  If we had let the ducks rest for twenty-four hours, according to McGee, enzymes called cathepsins would have broken down the bound filaments, making the meat tender. The enzymes also break proteins into tasty amino acids and fats into aromatic fatty acids. “All of these breakdown products contribute to the intensely meaty, nutty flavor of aged meat.” Oh, hell, I thought, what a waste.

  This time around, in a state of semistarvation, I went out to the lot and grabbed the first duck I could catch. I didn’t want to kill him in front of the other ducks and geese, but the backyard was occupied by chickens who might take offense, and on the deck were rabbits who would certainly become upset about an execution. So I took the white duck into our bathroom and plopped him in the tub with some water in it. He quacked and swam around for a few minutes while I collected my arsenal: a bucket and the recently purchased tree pruners. A friend of mine who keeps ducks kills them using this method, which he calls harvesting. It wasn’t like killing Harold. I merely opened up the loppers, placed them around the duck’s neck, and squeezed the loppers shut. The duck went from being a happy camper to being a headless camper. I plucked and eviscerated him outside on a table. The killing thing was starting to feel a bit routine.

  After the duck rested for a day in the fridge, I baked him with the oven on low, letting his fatty skin baste the unctuous meat. I decided to share a little of the duck with Bill. The meat was tender and delicious. Not used to so much food at once, I paused to digest and watch Bill eat. As he gnawed on a duck breast, his lips and chin growing greasy from all the fat, I was reminded that we really weren’t so far away from monkeys. Chimps eat meat—eliminate the concept of the banana-loving fruitarian—and meat, according to Susan Allport’s compelling book The Primal Feast: Food, Sex, Foraging, and Love, “is the food that is most often fought over, stolen, begged for, and shared.”

  Only slightly paranoid that Bill would find them, I put the duck leftovers in the back of the fridge. The fatty skin became my version of bacon for a few days.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE

  I pulled my honey extractor out of the car and lugged it across Jennifer’s yard. Past the fava beans, past the stout kale soldiers, toward the apple tree. Jennifer, just as I had hoped, felt sorry for me in my beeless state and had invited me over to extract some honey.

  When I reached the apple tree, I suddenly noticed a strange hum filling the air. Jennifer stood behind her beehive, and when she saw me, she said, “It’s happening again.”

  Swarming is a perfectly natural event in the hive. When the worker bees start to feel that their quarters are cramped, too filled with honey, or simply unsuitable for a variety of reasons that human beings don’t understand, they make arrangements to move out. First they construct one or several peanut-shaped queen cells on the outer areas of the frames. Then they place a worker-bee egg in the cell. The workers feed the growing bee royal jelly, which contains hormones that create a queen. When the queen hatches, a group of the worker bees departs with her for new digs.

  Jennifer and I now had front-row seats for this dramatic departure. Each bee that had volunteered to join the new queen flew out of the hive and began flying in a circle around the yard. At first it was just a few bees, then more, then more, until the air was thick with them. Jennifer and I stood very still. As the minutes went by the circle got wider, so that every inch of Jennifer’s backyard seemed to contain a bee. Somehow they avoided us, two dummies standing still next to a stainless-steel extractor. The noise was unbearable. I noticed I was holding my breath.

  I wasn’t scared, but it was the same feeling I got when I opened up a bee box for an inspection. You must be fearless. You retreat to a strange, calm, empty place in your mind. Now that I thought about it, I had retreated to that place when I was almost-mugged by the gun-toting kid, and when I was finally able to walk around our neighborhood. Was it facing fears? Giving myself up to the fate of the universe? The bees had definitely taught me how to let go.

  At some magical signal, the bees fell in together, flew in a cartoonish pack toward a lemon tree, and landed on a low-hanging branch. It was my lucky day. If I could catch the swarm, I could become a beekeeper again.

  The only problem was that the lemon tree they had landed on grew in the neighbor’s backyard. And the neighbor’s house was for sale. And there was an open house going on right at that very moment. I peeked over the fence and saw the blond, lipsticked real estate agent looking at the throbbing swarm with an expression of utter horror.

  Though they are intimidating, swarming bees aren’t dangerous at all. They don’t have anything to defend, and they are too enraptured by the scent of the queen to sting anyone. Queen pheromone is the stuff that beekeepers and exhibitionists use to create “bee beards.”

  Fearing that the agent might try to annihilate these sisters of goodness and light with some insect killer in order to sell a house, I vaulted over the fence and walked close to the swarm.

  “See, no problems!” I tried to communicate with body language. I waved to her. Jennifer snickered behind the fence. Time was of the essence. Once they settled into the tree, scout bees from the swarm would fly off to explore possible new homes. I figured I had an hour.

  I rushed to my home in a state of total panicked glee, driving the two miles like a madwoman. If the bees left the lemon bough and flitted off to some inaccessible place, they would go feral, return to nature—and I would remain beeless. I screeched to a halt outside my door, left the car running, waved at a surprised Mr. Nguyen, thundered upstairs, pushed past the rabbits on the deck, and grabbed the vacant bee box, which hadn’t moved since the day of the drug bust.

  Back at Jennifer’s within ten minutes, I saw with relief that the swarm hadn’t moved. Jennifer set up a ladder into her neighbor’s backyard. I schlepped the bottom box over the fence and set it under the tree. Then I tried to entice the bees into this honey-scented place.

  This involved a stick. I gently prodded a few of the bees down into the box, but they flew right back to the cluster. Glancing over my shoulder to make sure the real estate agent or potential home owners wouldn’t disturb me, I started firmly shaking the tree. A clump of bees tumbled into the box, crawled around, then returned to the cluster. The tree was a small one—it looked like a dwarf Meyer lemon. The branch they had landed on was too big to cut with pruners. It would require a chainsaw.

  While I contemplated who might have a chainsaw and considered the fact that bees hate the sound of engines, I gave the branch another shake. A big chunk of bees fell into the awaiting box. The queen must have been part of the chunk, because suddenly all the bees abandoned the branch and cascaded into their new home. Having caught them, I triumphantly slapped a lid over the box and stuffed a T-shirt into the hive entrance. Then, feeling like a pirate,
I clattered up the ladder and climbed over the fence with my new treasure.

  Like a bad parent, I left the bees in the car with the windows rolled up as I went back to extract honey with Jennifer. I reasoned that they would be fine—as I worked, they would be crawling around their new home, making plans for redecorating. The former occupants had left a good foundation for building a new colony: Most of the frames had pulled honeycomb—the wax cells within which the bees store honey and pollen and house their young—some pollen, and a little bit of honey.

  Bees expend an enormous amount of time, energy, and nectar on making pulled comb. They have a feedback mechanism that determines when to make honey or wax. After a day of foraging for nectar, the field bee transfers her load, via her tongue, to a house bee. This bee then ferments the nectar into honey. However, if there isn’t enough comb in which to place the honey, she just digests the nectar longer, creating wax. It’s an elegant and simple feedback loop.

  Back in Jennifer’s yard, while the bees hung out in the car, we extracted Jennifer’s honey. That her bees were swarming meant that her hive was too full of honey. We spun out two full supers of honey. Since I was helping and loaning her my extractor—which had become a communal device, shared by Willow, Joel, Jennifer, and me—I was awarded two quarts of honey—a huge bounty for a 100-yard dieter.

  As I drove home I felt a slick of sweat on my back from the hard work of extracting, the hot day, and nerves. This was my first swarm capture, and I was giddy. I looked into my rearview mirror at the thrumming white box and spoke to the bees about my garden and the merits of their new home. I felt a little proud of my bees. They were, after all, taking a risk by leaving the comforts of their safe, honey-filled home. Why did these particular bees choose to leave while others stayed? There are some things we don’t know about bees. My wager was that they simply liked the way this new queen smelled. They were like immigrants, following a new future.