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.

Mass Disruption?

Today was a remarkable late winter day. Bright blue sky, full sun and thawing temperatures. But we were at the river before it flooded, in that magic few hours between the ice melting off the shore and the water rushing over the banks.

While Gracie had her first swim of the year I found this in the newly thawed sand. It's red clay that has been pressed into a mold. Who knows what it was once, something mass produced. Could be a hundred years old, could be two years old. I'll never know.

Trudging the long way home, I thought about how this little shard looks like more than it (really) is. Or rather that it has become something it didn't used to be- it holds my imagination now in a way it might not of when it was part of something common and mass produced.

Because now that it has fallen off the edge of that cliff, or fallen out of the cycle of mass production/ consumption, I am free to see it differently.

Which leads me, of course, to where I was going: can we deliberately disrupt this cycle of mass production/ consumption by finding our muses and imaginations in the stuff that is cast off? Is that what's going on over at CWB? I really truly think so.

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.