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.

City Farmer No More (Prologue to The New City Farmer)

It was a big decision to 'give up' the food garden. It was a well positioned raised bed, and the soil had been improved and tended for years by our home's previous owner (and also one of my gardening mentors). I had spent a good deal of time working in that garden with him, practicing stuff I learned (or 'learnt', as I actually say) in my own childhood and learning new stuff.

My grandmother (that's her wedding photo) had created a somewhat more ambitious food garden in the midst of London's first 'suburb' in the 1950s, on the quarter acre that my grandfather had acquired as a Veteran. They (literally, by hand) built a tract house on one corner, and on the rest gramma planted fruit trees, asparagus, squash, tomatoes, strawberries, currents, raspberries and on and on. My mother remembers her youth there as a worker: picking beans and plums, all to be canned and preserved, 'put up' as they say.

She didn't know it, but gramma's garden was defiantly anachronistic. It stood like a farm in the middle of a newly minted 1950s suburb where the culture of home landscaping was steadily taking root. Gramma brought (and planted) the roots of her rural culture instead, and did nothing to hide that this land was her family's feast. While each neighbor obsessed over his/her lawn and the three carbon-copy evergreen shrubs in front of each house, gramma grew pears and beets and cabbages.

Not surprisingly, my first garden as a little kid was vegetables; I started a compost pit when I was ten; my first guerrilla garden was beans, squash, medicinal herbs and onions. Growing up in the old core of the city, I was surrounded by dozens of food gardens, each a culture-specific expression of the kind of rootedness my grandmother grew: grape arbors, chickens, rapini, broad beans. And the guy that lives here, well he arrived with his own rural family's heavily annotated and mostly memorized book of recipes for putting food up. And so it was with great trepidation that I firmly stepped away from being a city farmer- it is in our roots, after all.

But I had come to the realization that something precious was missing in my world that had been present in my gramma's: social bonds built between producers of food and its consumers. During the second world war, living in her rural hometown with her parents and daughters, my gramma had traded her canned goods for scarce foodstuffs; in return she got bacon and oxtail and milk to feed her family. (She even managed to can meat to send overseas to my grandpa's sisters and brothers.) She and her neighbors were part of an interdependent network of producers and consumers that even small producers could be a part of. Together they knew all the secrets of small and varied production and self-provisioning. They had recipes, knowledge, skill and each other.

I finally really noticed that this was all gone when I went to my gramma's home town one summer to see that not a single farm in the area was producing anything except cash crops- feed corn and soybeans. A few pig farmers (they are now gone because of massive overproduction and crumbling export markets). No stands at the front gate of tomatoes, peppers, squash and pears, maybe eggs. Nothing. Not even maple syrup. At the Fall Fair in this teeny little town, there were barely any canning and pickle competitions. But lots and lots of entries of soybeans, feed corn and pumpkins the size of a car.

It had become impossible for me to see these farms in close and immediate relationship with my food, that relationship instead mediated by a long chain of wholesalers and retailers. The places and people that I thought of as producing my food had been modernized, severing ties between producers and consumers.

It was this realization- and the consequent anxiety it produced- that tipped me over the edge away from city farming, as counter intuitive as that sounds. I realized that what I feared was the loss of those links, those networks, that knowledge. I didn't want a relationship with a handful of beets, I wanted a bond with someone who grew beets, expertly and with care.

Now all of this is actually prologue to another post about the city farmers on my street and in my neighborhood, and about the systems through which we provision ourselves here at Gracie Gardens. And Grace at Windthread's cucumbers. And how in them I see not nostalgia for a time gone by, but something new, even as it is a kind of resurgence. How this new city has room for- maybe even needs- what we do, growing bees and flowers and snake habitat. And buying our food.