The New City Farmer: Breaks With Tradition

These are photos of a very new urban farm up the street from us. We walk by every day; every day I think a bit more about what this garden is telling me.

In these photos of the neighbor's garden, you can see their raised beds and minimal lawn in the first, and in the second their view of their neighbor's more established grape vines growing on an arbor.

About half of their parking space in the front (technically City property) has been devoted to the raspberries you can see in the third photo.


As I've written about before, there is a long history in the neighborhood of people growing food. I interviewed one of our neighborhood elders years ago who told me about people sharing food they grew on their own and the City's property. There were Victory gardens too of course.

But this is not one of those 'traditional' gardens. Rather, it is worth noticing that this is in fact new.

Traditional gardens around here were born of necessity. And a culture that tolerated doing things like growing food in your yard!

The context for this City Farm is very different, however. Today food is both cheap, and suspect- the price of food is at an all time low given mass production, but consumers are increasingly disturbed by the consequences of that mass production.

Consumers are increasingly aware that cheap petroleum makes it possible for food to be produced as inexpensively as possible, meaning wherever necessary to generate profit. This means that the control of key resources- land and water- is more concentrated in the hands of big market producers than ever before. And processed foods have never been cheaper or more available.

This City Farm comes into existence at a time when anyone who eats is more a captive of the market-driven food system than at any time in human history. Rich and poor alike, we are part of this super-efficient system, despite the multiple crises it spells. Unlike my Gramma's City Farm, this City Farm comes into existence in the face of that crisis. For Gramma, she was doing what she knew how to do well- expertly even. Small-scale mixed-plot agriculture, and all that implies about preparing, preserving and sharing food. Unlike the New City Farmers, she was not challenged to launch a new way to look at food.

New City Farmers like the one on my street pose a direct challenge to the processes creating the crisis of the food system today, by abandoning the system that has very nearly made us all captive.

These City Farmers are rebuilding the bond that has been broken between producers and consumers because they are both! Better than that, they are creating a new kind of community around these bonds, because they open this garden to others, on community work days: anyone who wants to come help out with the weeding shares the harvest.

This last quality, of recreating community through the production of food, is the quality I most admire about this garden- well, and that they produce food in their front yard- because it is the most difficult thing to do. That is, we live in an era when we can create community through commercial transaction. The best examples of this for me are 'Food Banks', institutions that affirm this triumph- I buy food at the grocery store, give it to the Food Bank, they give it to my neighbors.

This garden also reveals a respectful relationship with water. They use rain water, sparing the river that run off, full of all the muck it picks up running over our roads. But if they do have to irrigate, they can use City water. And City water is protected and its quality is regulated, because here it is a commonly held resource- which cannot be said of water in many countries which export vegetables. In many exporting countries, water resources are used without regard to any other users- poor farmers especially. Export vegetables are full of this looted water, and leave plenty of polluted water behind.

This New City Farm on my street is a "quiet protest", to quote Deb G over at Bee Creative. This New City Farm welcomes the beauty of producing food on a small scale, like the artistry of Grace over at Windthread (here too.)

And, while I was there taking pictures, a giant bumble bee was buzzing around. So, the bees we grow for need this garden, too. And maybe the New City Farm needs our bees.

The New City Farm on my street shows me one way to disrupt a system of production that undermines community, that cannot value the work of the pollinators, and that separates 'making' from 'living'. This garden is something to celebrate, and be grateful for, everyday.

Full House

This is kind of a book review, but with the slight twist that it is meant to highlight the functions of a book. Here, 'book as weight', enlisted to pin down some unruly (salvaged) pallet straps being made into a basket for the bike.

The reason the book was at hand, of course, is because it was in the midst of its first reading when the basket was under construction. And I couldn't put it down, except to go and peer at the Bee House we put up last summer. Book, thus, as constant inspiration.

The reason I couldn't put the book down is that it is absolutely engaging- each chapter is a trip through some specific aspect of bee life, and how that life is conducted given the challenges wrought by humans, all told through the eyes of a humble human (or rather a human who is seemingly humbled by being a student of wild bees).

And so the book teaches you about bees. Who 'they' are, how their social interactions work amongst themselves, how they cope with disturbance, how they get food, and how Bees collectively make up an almost boundless net of activity that is all around, wherever there is something to eat. The book left me in fresh awe of how big ecosystems are, and gave me new reason to marvel at the sheer volume of bees and bee-like things that come around here now.

Most of all, however, and even more important for me is that the book also reveals an awful lot about the astounding discoveries about the web of life out there created through basic scientific research (ie: actually just watching bees in their habitat). The book is not a 'bee research methods manual' or a memoir by a scientist, no. But Packer's tack here is to often explain how insights about Bee Life have been made, and how often that has meant simple (!) field work armed with a willingness to defy conventional scientific belief about bees. To put it more simply, Packer makes clear how very little we actually know about bees, and what a crisis that is at a time when they are clearly and objectively more at risk than ever before.

It is these two qualities together- information and an understanding about the processes of learning- that make this book so useful. It is, then, I guess, kind of a manual, but a manual for how to engage with knowledge about the natural spaces around us, about how to be a humble student of these places.

Which leads back to the title of the post- the book is a 'full house' as in complete to bursting at the seams, like the house at Thanksgiving. But the title also eludes to the fact that our little bee house or Ontario Bee Roost was FULL this summer- each cell got cemented up with mud by some little bees we never managed to see close up. We also got no pictures because we can no longer actually get to the bee house without trampling towering meadow plants. So we don't know what happened in our Bee House, exactly, except that some kind of bees nested in there.

Which, in turn, leads to what binds the book and our bee house together, or what links processes of learning with action. This week we had a guest for supper who asked to photograph our bee house to pass on to the guy at the Farmer's Market who makes and sells bird and bat houses, while also educating his customers about creating habitat for said winged beasts. Well, our guest has convinced Bird House guy that he wants to start making bee houses. And so next week we will be delivering a huge package of information about bee habitat here in Ontario to this guy, plans for making bee houses and photographs. And so just maybe....

Wouldn't It Be Easier to Buy a New One?

Working on creating a sustainable garden environment, and the many successes we've had with this project has emboldened me to hold our indoor environment to higher standard. Meaning that by insisting on sustainability and consideration for the larger web of life outside, we are able to do it inside more easily.

And, I think we have learned the secret to making this transition both inside and out: learn about process, where you fit in, and choose to cherish some processes over others. How is your food produced? How are your goods produced? How are garden spaces produced? How do the systems you are part of as a producer and consumer work? What is your role in them? So for example, as a student of a local eco-system, I've learned how to work with its processes to create our gardens. As consumers, we are lucky enough now to consume ethically and sustainably produced food exclusively, having researched the processes through which food is produced.

So I wanted to share a recent success on this front that I am really proud of: Recycled Couch. My brother rescued it from a friend's parents' garage in the mid 1980s (no one remembers when, exactly). It was then my couch when my brother's girlfriend moved in with her own couch (1990-ish). All through grad school this was my couch, and even though it was tattered and frayed and the cushions all replaced with blankets and pillows, it was still my couch last year when my mother said "you know, this couch has a hardwood frame".

My mother took a class in recovering furniture in the 1960s, and has recovered every single piece of reclaimed furniture we ever had as a family. But even better, my mother is brave enough to say 'yes' to crazy ideas-like 'I want to make my own cushions out of reclaimed textiles'. Because now I want this couch to last, to honour, in a sense, its inherent durability and sustained utility (it has a hardwood frame remember).

So here it is, a testament to my mother's abilities, her willingness to help and teach (we even used reclaimed and second hand tacks) and to her encouragement that 'sure, you can make your own cushions'. And to the fact that everyone else has raided their stashes of worn out blankets, tattered jeans and ancient fabric swatches to get me started making the cushions. And it has become a product and a testament to a workshop given by some of the Gee's Bend Quilters I took in August, where I learned a lot about blending form and function working with textiles, and more about both trusting my own design judgment and taking risks with fabrics.

Yes, a thousand times yes it would have been easier to buy a new couch as a friend asked. It is, however, more satisfying and livable, and way more FUN to have this couch as an on-going project- each cushion is a 25"x74" pad that can be tossed in the wash and dried on the line- so we'll need many, and each will be an opportunity to practice more work. More process.