What Happened in 2016? Part 2: Urban Farmer Workshop, Free Backyard, and Gabriel Farm

After attending the Eco-Farm Conference, I continued on my quest for ideas and possible answers about where to go next. Luckily, my time off from teaching in January coincides with other folks' time off from farming, so I signed up for yet another workshop, this time with Curtis Stone of Green City Acres, who was away from his urban farm plots in British Colombia and on book tour, promoting The Urban Farmer, Growing Food for Profit on Leased and Borrowed Land. 

Stone’s premise is that quite a bit of food can be produced on a small (sub)urban lot or collection of lots, and it isn’t relevant whether you own or lease the land. As it states on the back cover of the book, Stone’s approach involves, “minimizing risk and maximizing profit by using intensive production, and making a good living growing high-yield, high-value crops right in your own backyard (or someone else’s).” As someone who did not own a backyard, was reluctant to invest in land that wasn’t mine and take a huge financial risk, this sounded right up my alley. Off I went.

The daylong was full. We covered a ton of logistical and practical (yes!) information, like market research, site and crop selection, bed layout to maximize yield in small spaces, work tools and infrastructure, and business software and strategies. He talked quite a bit about the value of high-rotation crops or "quick crops," meaning growing crops that can be harvested quickly and multiple times within each growing season (like salad greens instead of say, a watermelon). Also of great importance is a crop's price per pound, or as he calls it, "yield per linear square foot." Since urban farms must maximize on small spaces, each crop should fetch a certain amount of income for the amount of space it occupies in your lot. (There is even a numeric ratio for this!) Another crucial consideration, of course, is what the people where you live want to buy, and whether the market needs yet another farm that produces gobs of heirloom tomatoes, for example. So you really need to know and cater to your local market's desires and also cultivate strong partnerships with local businesses by trying to grow what best pleases your clientele (restaurants, in particular). He advocates becomes well-versed about high-end cuisine, so you can tap into that steady revenue stream. There is so much more to unpack here, but if you're intrigued, I encourage you to click on the links in this post. He offers a lot of information online, too.

Stone’s techniques are not as permacultural as I was used to hearing, but they made a lot of sense. And although it sucked a bit of the romance out of my idea of a small neighborhood farm that creates an all-encompassing experience for the local community, that distance was important, I felt, if I were to think about this from my fledgling practical perspective. It was not just a lifestyle shift I was contemplating, but a career/business shift, after all. And he seemed to be right. His slides of practical stuff like numbers were more impressive than those at the Eco-Farm Conference, quite honestly.

In fact, those numbers looked pretty damn great. Here's a video of some of the main ideas.

Everyone went home with a copy of the new book, spreadsheets, and a healthy dose of inspiration, and I was left thinking, well hell, maybe small-scale farming could be practical after all…

Meanwhile, back in Selmo, feeling newly inspired and like I wanted to do at least something in our smallish backyard, my partner and I decided to create a garden that didn’t cost anything. We would only use items that were available nearby for cheap or free.

I remembered having passed by Urban Adamah over in Berkeley one day and having noticed their garden beds made out of pallets and burlap. I revisited this mental note.

The mesh bed is lined with burlap and sits up on pallets

Since my partner works in a coffee warehouse, we had a direct supply of as many of those as we could ever use, so he finally brought a bunch home and built these.

We also used additional coffee sacks for ground cover under wood chips (added later). Works great for weed suppression!

We hung up a swing from a piece of scrap wood, and filled in holes in the garden with plants from neighbors who moved and had an extensive, lovely selection. We built a path from bricks that a different neighbor was selling for 50 cents each, planted low-water ground cover called Kurapia that our landlord purchased, and I even got a chicken coop (but no chickens) from other neighbors two blocks away. That was actually my big big splurge, but I still liked the way it all came together from nearby and unwanted materials.

Planting Kurapia under the swing. In the background are rescued plants from neighbors (blueberry, roses, lavender.)

Splurge. I couldn't resist this.

Adele's Rose, named for our neighbor's daughter that moved. This was a great way to still feel connected to them.

All-in-all, it shaped up pretty well. Although, I understood firsthand the permacultural principle that you should observe a site for a full year before implementing anything new. We hadn’t yet spent a full summer in our rental, and our garden boxes were not in the place for optimal sun. The lettuce got too hot and bolted early. The tomatoes never really reached their full potential. But that may also have been because a little someone kept sneaking them before they were ripe. Also, the Kurapia needed more sun than the spot we chose. It grew very, very slowly.

Despite the hiccups, we enjoyed putting it together. Still, it was no local farm. And our next move continued to be very vague. We had been searching for about 3 years to buy some combination of a house/land to no avail and after feeling like each work week was a hectic sprint to the finish line, we still had lingering questions about whether to just leave the Bay Area and slow it all down, ease it all up. There were many, many factors of money, family, friends, how we wanted to live and raise our daughter (see previous post). Honestly, it was all a little impossible to weigh. How do you assign value and importance to any of those things against the other? (If you can answer that, do share in the comments.)

The year of questions continued to tick by, and at the end of the summer/early fall, we became members of Gabriel Farm near Sebastopol (thanks to the mention from our old neighbors with the extensive, lovely plant collection!), and spent a day or so a month there picking their abundant organic apples, raspberries, and flowers. Sadly, we missed the persimmons.

Taking a break from the heat at Gabriel Farm

Just like at Draper Farm, it was an overwhelming pleasure to spend time at their farm and hear whatever tid-bit stories they would offer about how they got started and managed to live a life of farming. Again, the take away seemed to be that full-time farming is a mix of passion, demanding work, and is not, I’m afraid, wholly practical, but you just commit and do everything you can to make it happen.  

One idea that kept resurfacing was that you have to think about revenue and gain in a different way from how society defines it.

While I often felt like I was at a loss, what I did know was that the idea of farming apparently was not something I could shake. I was trying to channel some of my old self, the one who in her 20s and 30s would embark upon God-knows-what next adventure and project without over-thinking it. But the other thing I did know was that I couldn’t rush the answers to any of this. And there was a lot that was out of my control. I just tried to maintain a balance between keeping my feelers out in a lot of different directions and seeing what bit.

Until finally, one thing did.

After 3-and-a-half years of searching for homes and land throughout the entire Bay Area, we landed something in West Marin. But technically, that was in early 2017. So, I’ll blog about that next in a separate post, appropriately titled!