That's not exactly how Novella Carpenter came to be an urban farmer and her GhostTown Farm in Oakland, California isn't exactly an oasis of peace and calm, but it is a little slice of Eden in the middle of a ghetto. I visited her farm recently. After meeting the chickens and petting the goats, we sat down in her lot-sized garden between a corn patch and an apple tree and she answered a few questions about her farm and her book, Farm City: The Education of an Urban Farmer. (Read this Review of Farm City by Novella Carpenter.)
When did you start farming?
I got started farming, although I didn't call it farming, in 1998. I was working for this small press, Sasquatch Books in Seattle, and they put out this book The Encyclopedia of Country Living and I thought, "Damn, I could do some of these things!"What made you think you could do the things in the book?
My parents were back-to-the-land hippies in Idaho. I always had this myth of that farm but I was really too young to remember it. But my mom kept those fires alive—she talked about that farm constantly. I then grew up in rural Washington state—Shelton, Washington—where my mom was sort of a proto-urban farmer. We lived in town and she had a huge vegetable garden.What was the first step?
I started by getting some chickens. I had no skills, but I had this book. It really wasn't that much work—you just throw the feed down and we built a chicken house. Then we got bees. And harvesting honey was great.
Then we moved to Oakland and the gardening here is just so outrageous—there is so much sun and so little winter. And California is a great place to keep animals. California really is Eden. Up in Seattle the chickens were always wet and I felt bad for them, and you had to worry about mold in the beehive. And so I got interested in raising other animals and specifically in raising animals for meat.
