The Neighbor-Beast

I finally encountered that dreaded beast, that most dangerous and destructive pest to urban farming, He-Who-Limits, The Witherer, the Engenderer of Store-Bought Eggs: the complaining neighbor.

IIIIIII. SEEEEEEEE. YOUUUUUUUU.
"I know. You live next door. Also, P.S., your dog is loud as hell."

Letting our lawn die in anticipation of putting in raised beds was not too bad, since most of the neighbors didn't know our plans and we had just entered the worst drought in California history. All over the neighborhood, people were ripping out their lawns and planting rock gardens, laying down artificial grass, and putting in succulents. Even people who weren't planning on trading in the grass for a food forest were letting their grass die--it just wasn't worth it to spend money on watering on such a tight schedule, since the little water we were allotted wasn't really enough to keep the grass Kardashian green.

The concept of drought shaming was literally invented for this estate. 

So when we let the lawn die, even though we live in a nice neighborhood with a lot of beautiful landscaping, we weren't vilified, we were lauded as eco-heroes. Luckily for me I live across the street from a hoarder, and the shards of shredded blue vinyl tarps he uses to cover his graveyard of junked out cars detracts from my apocalyptic front yard.

Even when we filled up the backyard with raised beds and moved our food garden to the front yard, our neighbors seemed to approve. They stop to ask what we have growing; my weirdly prolific loofah gourd vines were especial rock stars, with their frenetic vining (they clung to my stucco and climbed six feet and more with no support), their spectacular brilliant yellow flowers, and the enormous loofah gourds themselves that look like gigantic cucumbers, defying physics by hanging weightlessly from vines far too delicate to support them. 

That was the first time the Neighbor-Beast opened its great eye and looked down on me. "Hey," he said, looking down on me from over the fence as I hand watered my blueberry bushes.

"Uh, hey." Hey, neighbor I've never exchanged a single word with in the ten years I've been living here. Okay, be nice. Maybe he wants to know more about the gospel of soil.

"How are you doing that? We've been wondering. Growing a garden. In the middle of the drought." Subtext, why are you doing that and who do you think you are, growing a garden in the middle of the drought.

"Oh. Well, actually once we stopped watering the lawn, we dropped the water use 1000 gallons a week; the garden only takes 175 gallons, and I get a lot of that from what we collected in the last rain, and reusing water I collect while the shower is heating up, pasta water, cooking vegetables, you know." Is that okay? Are you satisfied that I'm not contributing to the drought now? Because b-t-dubs, you have a pool.

"Hmm. Well, great. Good luck," he said, ending his sentence with that lilt people use when what they really mean is "that's NEVER gonna work, I would never do that, and I've lost what little respect I had for you by virtue of you even having an interest in such a stupid concept" and disappeared behind the fence.

Nice. Well, it's been great.

When we got chickens later that month, it was a little more worrisome. We knew people were going to think it was weird because WE had thought it was weird; but as we built the coop in the evenings out in the garage, neighbors stopped by to see what was taking shape and to ask us questions, take a peek at the baby chicks growing in the cardboard box behind us, and tell us how often they had thought about having chickens. Once our redwood coop was finished we hesitated, then plunged ahead with having the hens out in the front grass in their detachable run so they could free range. I worried about the random lady who had stopped by once, indignant about the hoarders across the street and demanding my help in starting a homeowners association. What would she think about chickens in the yard?

Turned out she and all the other coiffed Country Casuals ladies in their white capris and gold drop earrings loved them; the families that walked by in the evenings with their kids that ran to peer at the chickens through the chicken wire loved them; the old couple that power walked in the mornings as I carried the pullets out to the run loved them. On days we didn't have the chickens out, passersby asked worriedly what had happened to the chicks. In a neighborhood I had never really interacted with, I suddenly felt part of a community.

Enough of a community that there was gossip.

We heard through the grapevine that the Eye of Sauron was back upon us, that our uphill neighbor was unhappy with us having chickens because of the noise. Now, I'm the first one to say that roosters are annoying and they crow all day long--which is why they're banned in residential neighborhoods. We do not have a rooster. The chickens themselves let out a fairly loud squawking for about a minute once a day when they lay an egg; but for the most part they make little contented clucks all day. Their pitch is far lower than the screeching jays, crows, ravens, mockingbirds, and woodpeckers that live in the neighborhood; lower than the constant construction noise that seems to always be going on from one house or the other; lower than the motorized scooters that tear loudly through the neighborhood; and lower than the myriad of barking dogs. Ironically, The Eye of Sauron had a dog that barked all day for years, waking me and my baby from precious sleep in the early months when every minute counts, and continuing to annoy me throughout the day, disrupting my peace with a piercing yet booming explosion of sound.

My husband, ever the pacifist, saved eggs for a week and brought them up the hill as a conciliatory gesture. In exchange for the eggs, the Eye of Sauron let my husband know all about how annoying the chickens were, how the sound of their clucks traveled, how awful it was since he had chickens both below him (us) and his next door neighbor as well. I can only imagine. I once heard his next door neighbor's chickens cluck, once, in the early morning. That trebling contented warble was a lot to take in. Sauron also let us know that our dog's bark was piercing and asked us not to let him out before 7 a.m. Delivered kind of like a treaty: if  you keep your dog inside then I'll allow you to keep your chickens.

The next day, The Eye of Sauron began construction on what I can only assume was the armory of Mordor, because a banging, grinding, pounding, pinging cacophony that thoughtfully didn't begin until 7 a.m. emanated from Uphill.

It's not easy.

Urban farmers are always at the mercy of the Eye. In a street of perfect lawns, my raised beds stick out, and never more so at the ugly end of the season when things are dying on the stalks while I let them go to seed. We don't get any lovely smiling neighbors passing by wanting to know what the fading, withered obelisks of lettuce are when they're turning into a forest of dandelion fluff. I've been coveting a beehive enough to find out about the zoning restrictions (two hives allowed in a residential property in San Diego!) but continuing relations with the neighbors on all sides give me pause. One of my favorite books on urban farming, "Little House in the Suburbs", relates the story of one of the co-authors' struggles to keep her mini-goats. Deanna checked the zoning ordinances for her city carefully before buying her goats. The city code stated: "It shall be unlawful for any person to keep or maintain one or more horses, mules, cows, or hogs in any residential section of the town within 300 feet of any residence and without the consent of the owner or occupant of such residence and permission from the board." No mention of goats. the title read: Requirements for Keeping Horses, Cows, Hogs, and the Like. A typical mini-goat is much closer to the size of a golden retriever than a hog or a cow. They can be lap-pets, and some people keep them indoors. She felt well within her rights to bring home two little nanny goats. Right up until she started getting a nagging feeling that maybe she was misinterpreting the code and decided to call the city and check.

Deanna was plunged into a maelstrom of media and bureaucracy. Animal control threatened to remove the goats. The local TV station loved the story of the cute, fuzzy animals and the movement toward sustainable living. In the end, the city allowed her to keep her goats as long as she obtained signatures from all of her neighbors within 300 feet--which she did; but her best advice in dealing with neighbors?

--Do your research. Read books, talk to people in your area that have done what you want to do, search websites and online forums, check the city and neighborhood association's laws.
--Communicate, participate, be a part of the community. Introduce yourself to your neighbors. Welcome new neighbors. Organize a block party. Learn to make amazing cookies.
--If you have an HOA, find like-minded members and form an alliance so you can effect change from the inside.
--Cooperate with the city but at the same time, the tide is turning for urban farming; now is the best time to try to change ordinances. Find a city official to get on your side and stick with it. It can take three or four hearings for the process to be complete.
--Educate! There are a ton of misunderstandings and misnomers. You wouldn't believe how many people want to know if we have a rooster and think that a chicken requires one to lay eggs. I thought that was silly until I realized I'd always thought cows and goats just gave milk automatically, without understanding that like humans, ruminants only give milk after giving birth. Bees aren't anymore dangerous living in a hive living next door than if they live in the canyon at the end of the street; leave them alone and they'll leave you alone. The Eye of Sauron wasn't the only person I told about the water savings on my food garden vs. my lawn. I also make an effort any time I see someone with squash blossoms peeking out among their nasturtiums to congratulate them and ask them what they do for pollination, or to tell people what I'm doing when I'm out collecting pine needles for an acidic mulch for my blueberry bushes.

At times of economic stress, neighborhoods all over America and Europe have traditionally turned to different versions of urban farming; chickens in the yard for garbage disposal in small villages in England; rabbits kept people in the French countryside alive after WWII soldiers swept through, taking supplies; American and British families took the strain off farmers and their own pocketbooks during the depressions and wars of 1893, 1914, 1930 and 1944 with versions of the Victory Garden. Although today's urban farming movement has its roots in a desire for a simpler life, a return to our roots, a search for more nutritive food and the preservation of the planet's resources; it's no coincidence that the revival of urban farming spiked at the same time as the economic crisis of 2007. Maybe that's why urban farming makes people uncomfortable. The advent of the green manicured lawn (and hedges, and ornamental trees, for that matter) was a manifestation of wealth, an outward display that a landowner was wealthy enough to divert the resources of their soil from vegetable gardens to purely decorative carpet of green. Farmers, despite the fact that our survival literally hinges on their knowledge and devotion to a physically demanding, financially unrewarding trade, have long been the object of our derision--"dirt poor", "redneck", "hick", "hayseed", "bumpkin", "yokel." We measure our success in this country in many cases by our wealth and accumulation, and even subconsciously, the proximity to urban farming and its disruption in maintaining the appearance of wealth (even as we struggle under our mortgages and our rising water bills here in California) is too much to take gracefully. It's a chink in the perfect facade we work so hard to create in the suburbs.

Maybe at its heart that's why I get dressed for work in pencil skirt and stilettos before heading out to water my pumpkins; why my watering cans are all enameled with a floral design instead of a more practical galvanized steel; why I turn my Meyer lemons into vanilla infused lemon curd to give as gifts rather than plastic Target bags of loose fruit. It's why we made our chicken coop out of cheap but beautiful redwood decking; and why when people come up to look at the chickens I show them what I find beautiful about the hens, the intricate designs on their feathers, their glossy coloring, the myriad of colors of their eggs, their brilliantly red combs. I want people to see that my urban farming doesn't mean I'm lowering the property values--that there's beauty and poetry in the companionship of plants, in the flowers that draw the pollinators and the hummingbirds, in the herbs that repel the bad bugs and attract the ladybugs; that there's humor in the bewildering antics of hens; that there's a gourmet sensibility in growing pumpkins that will be both jack-o'lanterns and sweet pumpkins pies, fresh butter lettuce you can harvest straight from the bed to the salad bowl, strawberries and blueberries actually sweeter and more flavorful than any you can buy. Urban farming may be muddy but it is still so exquisite. It is, quite simply, The Shire--the Hobbit villages from the Lord of the Rings, where life is an endless party and a quiet nap in the grass, happy healthy rosy-cheeks, the best food, the best wine, the biggest and most abundant flowers--the picture of heaven.

My husband came back down from Mordor Uphill with a plastic Target bag full of lemons from Sauron's tree--his own conciliatory gesture--two normal sized ones and about ten thumb sized inedible spheres. I realized that Sauron is (a) a secret urban farmer himself, since he has a fruit tree, but (b) probably moved into the house with the tree already mature, and doesn't know what to do with the abundance he's so lucky to have, if he's picking and giving away lemons of that size. Does he know it only takes six lemons to make a carafe of the best and most amazing fresh lemonade on earth? Does he know you can make lemon curd, lemon sorbet, lemon ice cream, lemon bars and lemon icing with only a few lemons? I don't know if Sauron enjoyed my golden backyard eggs, but I turned his teeny lemons into Mary Berry's Cherry cake and ate every bit of it, from the rind to the juice to finally recycling what was left of the peels into my compost, to rebuild the soil of my personal Shire. 

I don't always take life's lemons and turn them into lemonade.

It's okay that the Eye of Sauron is still upon us. Who could look down at the Shire every day and not have the desire for growing, living things start to take root?