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.
