Level One Pumpkin Latte

What is it about pumpkins that makes us personify and yet mutilate them, dress up as them, fill our perfectly good lattes with their guts? What is the strange hold they maintain over autumn-crazed white girls that allowed Big Pumpkin to make this kind of madness possible?

Every year, the Great Pumpkin rises out of the pumpkin patch that he thinks is the most sincere and allows himself to be transformed into these convenient pocket packs.

Like all white girls in season-starved Southern California, I admit I go a little crazy for the orange chalkboard penned menus in Starbucks around October. Add in the little green vining curlicues and something primal inside me rises up to order a pumpkin latte.  If I can get it in the last week of September I feel smug that I've beaten the system and have stolen a tiny bit of the perfect ambrosial flavor of the autumn they get to have for free in--I don't know. Maine? 

It's all SOOOOO easy when you have deciduous trees and a temperate continental climate, isn't it. Smug.

Pumpkins were one of the first things I tried to grow in my urban farm. I had visions of fields of curling pumpkin vines, the likes of which I had always hoped to see at the so-called pumpkin farms that dot San Diego county but which are typically parking lots covered in straw bales and cardboard crates of the same pumpkins you can now just pick up at Vons. Even the mythical "Big Max" pumpkins, those huge monsters that grow to a whopping 50-100 pounds and you could conceivably sit inside (not that I was entertaining ideas of making myself a fairy tale carriage...really...) now wait patiently in piles right outside the local big box grocery store. The mystery of the growing pumpkin is stolen from us. I want to pick my pumpkin off the vine, not off the shelf. 

The other thing that increasingly troubles me with pumpkins is that even the fresh from the farm pun'kins are bred specifically for carving and not for food anymore. Open up a typical "Jack o'Lantern" pumpkin and you'll find specially selected innards that are stringy, not goopy, and easy to remove; almost no seeds, and nothing inside that you could make into a pie.

Or into Pringles. 

Pumpkins have become kind of like turkeys. Over the last century we decided that we didn't need turkeys to taste good, particularly, we just need them to be big. Selective breeding gave us turkeys that gained weight quickly, even if it does sometimes outpace the ability of the bird to support that weight. Since turkeys don't need to brood their eggs, and a brooding turkey hen actually has a lower laying rate, no one bred for maternal instinct and for the most part it has disappeared from commercial turkeys. The new shape and size of that turkey, with its heavy and muscled frame, make it almost impossible for adult turkeys to complete the mating act, and as a result the fertility of commercial turkeys is so low that most turkey farmers use artificial insemination to fertilize their eggs. What we're left with is a commodity that has been so uniquely bred for its singular purpose that what remains is little more than a cheap corn-to-protein engine.

Pumpkins are no different--a holiday novelty used far more often in decorative piles stacked up by the doorstep in the Barefoot Contessa's flawless Martha's Vineyard colonial, or carved up into dizzying Pinterest-inspired monuments to insanity before ultimately being smashed on the streets of the suburbs, than they are ever as a food source. Pumpkins were crucial for the pilgrims, man! This was the gourd that kept Native Americans fed through the winter and eventually kept the British colonists from starving during their lean times. Given our propensity for pumpki-fying everything in sight (I admit it, I had a pumpkin-spice facial at a spa in Palm Desert), shouldn't we at least know what a pumpkin seedling looks like, and show people who carved pumpkins after 1997 what a goopy pumpkin that you could potentially make a pumpkin latte out of looks like?

Pumpkin latte, step 1. 

Pumpkin seeds are super easy to sprout indoors; a fresh packet of seeds will pop up strong, waxy leaves with satisfying reliability, cracking through the seed shell from the inside and bursting into life. The seedlings, started in February or March, grow slowly at first, but then explode into gargantuan leaves of amazonian proportions and myriad brilliant yellow starburst flowers by May. The vines start creeping over the sides of raised beds, tiny crazy curlicues corkscrewing up retaining walls and rocky slopes and fences. Mine mingle among the sunflowers and climb the sturdy stalks, blossoming under the canopy of the sunflower seed heads.

In my early attempts, like so many things with urban farming, I assumed that because the seeds were so easy to sprout, pumpkin growing would be easy. I mean, in Laura Ingalls Wilder's book "Farmer Boy" Almanzo is, I don't know. seven? And manages to use some kind of milk-feeding technique to grow a prize-winning monster pumpkin that beats all the adult farmers at the fair. I guess I thought if a little kid could do it, how hard could it be? I conveniently glossed over the fact that at seven Almanzo cut ice, dug potato vines, drove a team of his own oxen, and broke a colt, having come from one of the most prosperous gentleman farming families in the East. This is a kid who comes from a farming community where the teacher literally, LITERALLY used a bullwhip to discipline the hard kids.

"I SAID, 'I' before 'E' except AFTER 'C'!"

Sure. That kid's experience was basically the exact same as mine, since I did drive to the fancy nursery and pick through the prettily illustrated seed packets and buy one.

Pumpkins were one of the first things that I actually researched before planting, although not enough to realize that I didn't need to sprout the entire packet of "Big Max" seeds. I ended up with twenty seedlings that all needed to be set out at crazy distances from each other in full sun and quickly realized I had spent weeks nurturing pumpkin-lets I was now going to have to kill, always a hard pill for me to swallow. But I dutifully selected the toughest seedlings with the strongest true leaves and planted them in holes along the side of a sunny slope like the seed packet suggested, with a scoop of compost in the hole. They grew quickly and expanded into vines of about a foot and then suddenly, sullenly refused to grow any further.

Shoot. Back to the web. Aha--squashes, and pumpkins in particular, are notoriously greedy feeders. I followed a recipe to make compost tea and started feeding my little vines regularly. Soon after they sprouted a handful of flowers, and about three of the ten developed into little yellow pumpkin babies.

The humble start of my pumpkin farming empire. 

The flowers kept coming but the pumpkins didn't, and even though I fed the vines with increasing frenetic regularity, the pumpkins didn't reach anything close to their promised size of 50-100 pounds. The seed packet promised that some record holding pumpkins had reached 300 pounds! Mine were about 5 pounds. Still--they did turn orange and it was fun to watch the vines climb up my rocky hill.

The next year I found a few pumpkin seeds in the bottom of the seed packet and threw them in my sprouting pods with the rest of my spring starts. Only one popped, so I figured I'd still get at least one nice pumpkin. I fed it better this time, planting it in a nice compost/garden soil mixture to begin with and adding vegetable fertilizer on top of the compost tea. I'd also read that when bees are scarce squash and pumpkins can be artificially inseminated (shades of the noble turkey!) so I watched to see when the female flowers appeared so I could pollinate them from the males. 

Alas, my pumpkin vine that year was an all-boys club. Even though I watched it like the hawks that circle my chicken coop, no female flowers ever sprouted. Boy flowers, in abundance. They had a full parade of sassy male flowers, showing off their gaudily dressed pollen sticks. But no girls showed up. I suspect they may have realized what I read, too late, that pumpkins aren't self-fertile, so even if the female flowers HAD sprouted, I wouldn't have been able to use the male flowers from that one lonely unicorn of a vine to make little incestuous pumpkin babies.

A story about a pumpkin vine that didn't know it was related to itself. 

Failure again. I tried for the third time this spring with "Spookie", a food and carving pumpkin that is supposed to have great flavor for pies as well as a strong shell for carving. Though I did discover all new ways to fail (putting seedlings into sunny but newly energy efficient windows that filter out UV light isn't a super successful strategy) I did use my past failures for good instead evil (plant more than one, plant in a good compost/manure/soil mix, fertilize fertilize fertilize through the flowering season) and to my delight, I got the chance to swallow my pride and artificially inseminate some pumpkins this year because the girls came out to play!

All the single ladies, all the single ladies...

Hey gurl, how YOU doin?

Female flowers have a little clearly evident circular ova, as in the top picture, while male flowers have a very prominent stamen they like to show off. The stamens are abundant with huge almost cartoonish pollen grains; it was quick and easy to play bee and use a cotton swab to gather quite a lot from the stamens, and from there do a little match making.

Cue the slow saxophone music. 

The female flowers start with little swollen round bellies under the petals to start with, about the size of a walnut, but once they've been pollinated they immediately start to grow like crazy sci-fi pregnancies. This little alien baby is only a few days old.

My pumpkin patch isn't the typical one, I suppose. Huge volunteer sunflowers came up from the compost I planted my pumpkin seedlings in, and since I like things a little out of control and overgrown, I let the sunflowers grow up above my head and shade the soil in a forest of stems and amazonian leaves; bachelor buttons are coming up at their roots with more bright yellow blossoms to attract the bees. The pumpkin vines twine up the thick sunflower stalks, creep up my fences and anything the iconic curlicues can grab onto, popping out flowers like fireworks at every height, and spill out over the sides of the raised beds; and this year since I fertilized and composted well enough the vines are growing in every direction with enormous spade sized leaves. "Spookie" comes out with a striped green rind a little like a watermelon and quickly grows from walnut to apple to a thick, dense grapefruit size within just a few weeks; and it's small, only about 6 pounds and probably more suited to the nutrition I can reasonably supply using my own homemade compost and chicken manure, without adding a lot of expensive packaged fertilizers.

Depending on your zone, "Spookie" can be planted between April and June and ripens fast, only around three months total, which can seem early; but once the pumpkins are totally orange and resist fingernail pressure (and the vines die back), cutting the pumpkins and letting them cure in the sun for ten days or so will make sure they last for the months we have to wait until reasonably indulging in pumpkin flavored Listerine. I always wondered how the fakey-fake pumpkin farms kept their pumpkins in huge piles sitting in parking lots or in cardboard boxes without them rotting--because one of the reasons they were truly the perfect food for both the Native Americans and the early colonial settlers was their perfect suitability to long-term storage. I can't wait until mine start to orange-up and start on the pie-making and the latte syrup and, obviously, come up with my own artisanal recipe for hand-baked pumpkin Pringles. 

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?

Mean Girls

Just as for irritatingly thin-yet-buxum teen-aged mean girls with Youtube-tutorial makeup contouring and physics-defying short skirts, "Pecking Order" is a very real concept for hens.

We all lay slightly different colored eggs. 

When we first got our (feathered) chicks, they immediately started sorting out who was going to be queen bee and who was going to most likely develop an eating disorder and credit card debt in an attempt to impress the other two. Our Rhode Island Red quickly emerged as the boss bitch of our backyard clique and she kept the other two sharply in line with sharp pecks to the throat and, I assume, more than one well-placed passive aggressive burn to the self-esteem as they were all foraging during the day.

"I don't hate you because you're fat. You're fat because I hate you."

Whatever. They worked it out. The other two quickly ceded dominance to the red-head, as must we all at some point in our lives, and seemed relatively happy at having secured their places in the social order despite having to wear the same outfits day in and day out. My own backyard version of the Plastics ruled their empty high school, unchallenged, in perfect harmony, bullying sparrows and teasing them about their weight while keeping them from the choice grubs.

Until the new girls arrived.

Unfortunately, even Rapunzel-golden blondes are no match for an angry redhead.

My chicken bible, "A Chicken in Every Yard," cautions that when adding new chicks to the existing flock, as in high school, they are virtually assured to have a hard time of it. A single chick should never be introduced on her own and even in pairs they should be old enough to hold their own before coming into contact with the existing flock. Obviously.

Hi! It's almost certain I'll by crying by the end of 7th period. 

When I picked up the new chicks for this year I made sure to get a pair (I would have gotten three but zoning restrictions in San Diego restrict homeowners of our size lot to a total of five hens). When they outgrew their brooder I moved them into an enormous cardboard box and into the garage, and waited for them to get big enough to hold their own--whatever that would turn out to mean--so I could move them into the main coop. 

The new chicks, a pair of beautiful blonde Buff Orpingtons, grew quickly but sort of topped out their teen-aged pullet size at around six weeks and didn't seem to be getting any bigger. Meanwhile I felt increasingly guilty for cooping them up in a cardboard box with no windows and no access to the sky, like an endless standardized test; so I moved the little chicks out into a separated section of the run during the day. "A Chicken in Every Yard" had said that some people find success in integrating the new flock with the old by giving them a good look at each other every day, but keeping the little ones safe inside a gated area. 

Please don't criticize me, I can still hear you through the bars.

I spent about a month on this doomed plan even though it came with the caveat from Every Yard's authors: we find this strategy to be expensive and ultimately ineffective. Ultimately, at some point the chicks have to sort it out themselves with no adult supervision.

"Damn. Chickens. Let's stay on this side of the island."

That point came after I moved the little chicks box outside once the weather turned warm and sunny, hoping to give them some fresh air when they were confined, and of course, as it must, it immediately rained. The cardboard box was damp and drooping and really not suitable for the little chicks to sleep in any more. "Every Yard" suggested waiting until the chicks were at least eight weeks, and preferably ten to twelve weeks old, and by the calendar my little chicks were two days away from their ten week birthday; but I worried that they were still so small, only half the size of the adult hens. Still, I didn't have another cardboard box and the existing one was just not healthy for them any more, so I took the plunge. 

I waited until nightfall and the adult hens had put themselves to bed on the roosts, as suggested, to gather up the little guys and gently put them on the roost where they would drowsily assimilate with the older flock while they slept. That was the idea. Hens are almost comatose once the sun goes down and their powerful roosting instinct drives them to seek the highest ground possible inside shelter and conk out, Ambien-style. I had often found my hens roosting on the top step of their little ladder if they didn't have access to get inside the coop, and they were like little feathered toddlers up past their bedtimes--just limp little un-resisting bodies that you could gently put into bed without waking them. I felt pretty confident with my ninja nighttime commando slumber party plan.

Yeah, no.

As soon as I opened the coop door with the little blonde chicks in my hands, the redhead woke out of a sound sleep, slasher-film-killer-come-back-from-the-dead-style, and leapt down, literally biting the hand that feeds her, namely mine, and then driving the freshmen out of her domain like an enraged prom queen. I thumped her on the head and went to go retrieve my little cowering pullets, and the redhead jumped out of the coop, nighttime terrors be damned, to follow us. "Knock it off!" I scolded her sternly, like the high school teacher I am, and picked her up and threw her back into the coop. I retrieved my little chicks but the redhead had jumped down out of the coop again, now flanked by the highlighted brunette Welsummer and the raven-tressed Maran, in a West Side Story triangle formation, ready to take me and my dedication to equal opportunity roost space on. 

For God's sake.

Okay. New strategy. I put down my pullets and gathered up the adult hens and threw them into their coop, shutting the door behind them so they couldn't get out. I went and got the pullets and craftily opened the nest box, through which I could see all of my hens sassily already settling themselves onto their roosts, satisfied after a thorough bullying. Normally I find my hens quite beautiful but they have never seemed so ugly than in that moment. I ungently shoved the Maran over from where she had settled herself in the very center of the nearest roost, and put the little chicks on the roost next to her. 

Sigh.

The redhead screamed with rage and leapt from one roost to the other and drove the little chicks down. One of the blondes jumped past me and out of the nest box, screaming and with feathers flying like a pulled out weave. The other one cowered on top of the waterer. The redhead, seemingly satisfied with the submission of the one on the waterer, ignored her and came after the one I was trying to prevent from escaping. Even with a thump on the head the redhead was undeterred and kept coming after her until the little blonde wiggled past me and found a spot on top of the feeder. The two little pullets squatted, terrified, in their corners, and the redhead stared them down with her baleful orange eye; but ultimately sashayed her way back into the coop and took her rightful place at the top of the roost. Goddammit, you little self-important alpha...

Hesitantly I closed the nesting box. The sound of the box shutting seemed to set the girls off again and I immediately heard the sound of a knock down drag-out cat fight. I jerked the nesting box open again to make sure the little chicks were still alive; they must have tried to get off their super low perches and hop up onto the roosts with the adults once the light was gone, because the redhead was chasing them around the coop and viciously backstabbing them. They finally made their way back to their little corners and she left them each alone, after a parting peck. I closed the nesting box again and the scene was repeated again, violently shaking the entire coop as the occupants screamed and shrieked at each other. My inner child started crying omigod she's KILLING THEM in there! but what steel I have developed as a pansy-assed urban farmer pressed back--they're birds. They will figure it out. At some point, they need to figure it out. 

I closed the nest box and locked it, and walked away.

I woke up at the crack of dawn this morning to let them out of the coop and scatter some treats on the ground while they free ranged with as much space as possible; the idea being that if they all had access to busy work , with their heads down next to each other, they would let the aggressions drop. As soon as I opened the coop door one of the blondes came shrieking out in terror with the redhead hot on her heels. The redhead chased her into the enclosed run and mercilessly back-stabbed her all around it before I could open up all the gates and let them free into the backyard, but once I got everyone into the open spaces they settled into their normal pattern of digging for bugs and pecking at blades of grass. Yes, the blonde pullets were again cowering, math-club-like, in the corner of the yard, and every time they ventured over into the sunflower seeds I had scattered the adults chased them out; but over the next hour they sort of found their own space and the adults largely ignored them. Once the adults had gotten bored scratching at what I'd thrown down, they wandered off to other areas and the little ones got to pick up what was left. 

"A Chicken In Every Yard" says that the pecking order of two integrating flocks can be completely upset, with the new hens assimilating into the clique in the bottom, middle, and sometimes even taking the boss bitch spot of the lead hen. I'm crossing my fingers that one of my little mild-mannered blonde nerds rises like a phoenix to throw off her glasses, shed her baggy clothes, and take down that redhead in an epic battle of wills that leaves her shattered, unhappy, and questioning everything about herself. 

I have confidence. 

(For more mean chicks, read "Mean Girls 2".)

Seen a Bee Lately?

Well have you?

My chimney has always been a bizarre hive-magnet. Like clockwork every spring bees moved in as if their only purpose in this life was the singular intention to scare the living hell out of me by spinning an ominous droning hum inside my fireplace grate, like teeny tiny cultists chanting as they waited to steal my soul out of my mouth while I was sleeping. Also, bees would crawl out of the fireplace grate and swarm over it and my patio door handle purposely so that when I'd come home from work I'd first look with dread to see whether or not they were writhing all over the fireplace (they were) and then I'd run to the door to shoo them out hoping the handle wasn't covered and similarly writhing (it was) and decide whether to spend the afternoon trapped inside, miserably huddling by the door, waiting for them to fly off (I would).

I swear to God, Candyman, I did not say your name. Now will you please just go. I'm supposed to get a pedicure later. 

That's a lot, bees. That's a lot to ask. I'm on your side but that's really a pretty big violation of my personal space.

Somewhere in the last few years the bee-chimney occupations ended without me really realizing it. I was just grateful not to come home to little crawling, flying, stinging machines. I've never really returned to trusting bees after they killed Macaulay Culkin in "My Girl."

"Where are his glasses? He can't see without his glasses!"
*ugly cry* Why, cruel world? Why!?

Makes sense that I stopped seeing bees nesting in my chimney around 2013 because in the six years leading up to that, more than 10 million beehives were lost, nearly twice normal rates, to, among other things, a phenomenon scientists are calling Colony Collapse Disorder. Basically, for no known reason, the adult worker bees just pick up and take off, leaving behind a queen and plenty of food. It's sad, actually; there's often capped off baby bees waiting to hatch, sugar syrup all warm and waiting, and the queen, of course, waiting forever for her knights to return. Without sufficient worker bees the colony can't sustain itself and the bees die.

Scientists started noticing the disappearance of bees in 2006; by 2008 the loss was at around 35% in the European Union, 40% in the United States. Theories abounded: pesticides, varroa mites, habitat destruction, environmental stresses, malnutrition were all suspected contributing factors to the decline of bees in some combination. In 2012, European scientists published several independent peer-reviewed studies showing that neonicotinoids (basically a nicotine-based pesticide from Bayer pharmaceuticals that farmers were spraying on their rapeseed, maize, and cereals) were contributing to the shortened lifespans of bees, if not Colony Collapse Disorder itself; the European Food Safety Authority decided in 2013 that these pesticides were an unacceptable risk to bees (who, let's not forget, we rely on to pollinate 75% of every single food source on the planet) and in April of that year, banned those pesticides. Meanwhile in the same year in the United States, the EPA along with the Department of Agriculture (who has absolutely no vested interests in the continued use of pesticides on major cash crops like, oh, say, CORN) formed a task force to really, for reals you guys, look into the issue because it's for serious. Our Congress continues to debate the bill introduced in 2013 (Saving America's Pollinators) asking for these same pesticides to be suspended until their effect on pollinators can be fully studied.  Ultimately, though, scientists haven't agreed on what definitively causes Colony Collapse Disorder or what is causing the huge drop in bee mortality to the point that the words "Bee Extinction" are being bandied around. 

Wait. What?

Damn. "Extinction" is a really big word.

Scientists are also asking whether monoculture and nutrition have an effect on bee health. The California almond orchards alone ship in 1.6 million honey bee colonies every year to pollinate their crops; hives that are fed corn syrup or sugar during the winter to sustain them and then survive on a single crop type of pollen for the spring. Except the University of Jerusalem says that colonies that are kept on farms for crop pollination suffer from nutritional deficiencies because of the low diversity of flowers; and those deficiencies lead to lower life expectancy for bees. The study found that bees will attempt to not only find more varied types of pollen to make up for their nutritional deficiencies, but they also work as a colony to fill in nutritional gaps for the colony as a whole. Wellesley College also found that bees with poor nutrition in the larval stages have poor pollination abilities (foraging and waggle dancing) as adults.  As more and more farms combine into mega-acreages of a single crop, bees face journeys of more and more miles to gain access to different flowers; while drought conditions in California especially have robbed the bees of the water sources they need to make such long journeys.

Honey bees are big business. The government estimates that honey bee pollination alone is responsible for over $15 billion in fruits, nuts, and vegetables. A presidential Pollinator Health Task Force has been given the mission to study the decline of the bee populations and determine definitively the cause, as well as come up with solutions for its reversal. We're at such a crisis with our pollinators that the Federal Budget for 2016 includes $82 million in funding just for studies into pollinator health, including Colony Collapse Disorder. The Federal Action Plan, meanwhile, calls for "all hands on deck"--meaning that while the federal government works to increase habitat for bees on federal lands and continues to look for causes, the rest of us have to do our part to ensure that the little bug that's so intrinsic to the survival of our way of life doesn't vanish. Honeybees, like so many of our food crops we've brought from other countries, aren't native to the Americas; so without them we not only lose entirely kiwis, brazilnuts, watermelon, squash, pumpkins, zucchini, macadamia nuts and passion fruit, but we drastically decrease productivity of fruit and nut trees like pears, cherries, apples, avocado and cashews. Not only that, honeybees help pollinate key foraging crops used to feed beef cattle--alfalfa (hay) and clover; and oil-producing crops like rapeseed (the source of canola/vegetable oil), coconut, and safflower. (You can click HERE for a full list of crops pollinated by bees.) They also help pollinate potatoes. Which means a world without honeybees means making fries without potatoes. Or canola oil.

What are you even talking about. 

There's a few ways we can all do our part to save the french fries and the fruit salads, no matter where you live.

--Plant a pollinator garden. Sunflowers especially are awesome sources of bee pollen and their bright yellow color is easy for bees to spot from a long way off. They're easy to grow and don't take up much space, and will give you a good crop of sunflower seeds at the end of the season as a bonus. Lots of seed companies now market special sunflower seeds with extra pollen just for bees; make sure you aren't getting a pollen-free variety (used for floral arrangements). For resources to plant your own pollinator garden click HERE.
--Leave out a little bee bath on hot days. A dish of water with a stone in the center that bees can land on and walk down to sip the water gives far-traveling urban bees a chance to rehydrate and continue foraging.
--Limit your use of pesticides. Soap and water solution (1 tbl castille or other natural soap to 1 gallon of water) is cheaper, more effective against all kinds of creepy crawlies, and won't harm the bees flying in to pollinate roses. You can also use companion planting in your flower beds; rue is effective against Japanese beetles, marigolds and garlic work well against aphids from the roots of the plant up.
--Call a bee removal expert if you find a hive too close to your living areas rather than trying to dispose of the hive yourself. You can call a pest service and have them come out for a fee, but a quick search of Craig's List in my area popped up about 100 entries for free bee removal services--basically, home beekeepers and beekeeping societies looking for hives. They remove the danger to you at no cost and gain free bees for their backyard hives; win-win.

I have to admit, I have changed my tune about bees. When I was just out of college I went over to a friend's house and while we were enjoying our delicious fresh-from-the-garden mojitos in their freaking gorgeous, flower-filled backyard I noticed a wooden structure in the corner. "What's that?"

"Oh, that's our beehive."

I have never thrown down a drink with more fluster and indignant betrayal than at the moment I realized my supposedly well-meaning friends had actually lured me into their potentially lethal killer-bee killing zone. I was horrified and flabbergasted and though I pulled myself together enough to laugh it off while I hustled my little heels right out of the out and into the in, I could not believe the stupidity of my highly educated friends for not only thinking I'd be okay with eating next to a vicious hive of aggressive stinging insects but for purposely keeping one right by their back door. I liked them a lot, but not enough to ever EVER go back to their house after that.

Face palm.

Yeah. I'm the stupid one now. I have of late been plagued by the obsessive desire to have my own beehive and with it, free raw honey, whipped honey, honey on the comb, beeswax candles, beeswax lip balm, and all the pollination I can get so my Big Mac pumpkins actually turn into something beyond huge water sucking yellow flowers that never fruit. Sadly, when I sneakily tried to slip the idea of bees in the backyard into conversation to my chicken-coop-tolerating next door neighbor, she reacted exactly like I did at the mojito-hive party.

A bee stung me and I'm pretty sure it was probably your bee. 

Okay fine. No bees.

My contribution to the local bees this year is a packet of borage seeds I planted out in my beds.

My companion planting books ("Carrots Love Tomatoes" and "Companion Planting") kept recommending borage as a pollinator plant; once I looked into it a little more I found out beekeepers today actually plant borage specifically to attract bees. It's known as a honey plant, giving about 30 kg of honey per acre; it repels tomato hornworms, and it's not demanding on the soil. You can eat it--it's high in gamma-linolenic acid (an omega-6 fatty acid called GLA that's an anti-inflammatory), decorate ice cubes with the pretty, edible, blue-purple star flowers, and it's supposed to also support endocrine health and the ancient Romans used it as an anti-depressant. I put out a handful of seeds in the corners of my strawberry and tomato beds and they sprouted quickly and consistently with no work at all beyond the initial planting. They haven't bloomed yet but the fuzzy leaves are about the size of my palm and fingertips after only about a month. I have crappy luck with starting from seed so I planted a lot, expecting most wouldn't come up, but they sprouted so easily and are growing so vigorously I'll have to transplant before they reach their full 24-36" height and shade my food plants too much. For apartment dwellers, these seeds would certainly bloom in a pot on the patio.

I think about bees a lot these days. When I hear them high up in the trees it doesn't make me nervous, it absurdly reassures me, knowing they're working furiously to assure their survival and ours. When I see them in my roses, busying themselves industriously around the creamy white petals like little liveried servants smoothing a lady's satin skirts, I leave them to it and save my pruning for later in the day, when they've retired to the honey combs. They dance around my lavender. They get drunk on scented geraniums, indulging themselves luxuriously in pinks and pale violet and fuchsia. They are the bards of my garden, humming the same song they sang for da Vinci and Catherine de Medici, connecting my backyard to the gardens of Monet and Van Gogh. They fill the quiet with the fervent sound of their wings, tiny cupids romancing squash blossoms to each other, engendering life within the cherry petals.

Thinking about bees and how much they used to freak me out, the 90's horror movie "The Candyman" popped into my head--a ghost with a ribcage wreathed in bees who appeared if you said his name five times into the mirror. He'd open his mouth and bees would pour out.

Hmm.

Candyman. Candyman. Candyman. Candyman...

Personal Growth in Heels: from Lettuce Seeds to Ecoterrorist

A year ago, I had messed things up, as usual.

Like an idiot I went to the nursery just to, you know, see what they had--you know, in April, in Southern California. Yeah. They had everything. I immediately started running around with my little cart picking up six packs of pumpkins and cilantro and pineapple sage and tomatillos and about nine thousand packets of seeds because I had one 2'x6' bed in my backyard and it could obviously sustain all the edible plant life necessary for a complete food forest. 

I have to admit the people at the nursery were complete freaking enablers holding the end of my tourniquet so I could shoot myself up with my drug of choice because at no time did anyone stop me and say hey loser. Are you a farmer? Are you a commercial poppy grower? Do you own an estate in Columbia where you anticipate having to support the entirety of a vast army of rebels? Because you will one hundred percent never in life ever be able to find places with enough sun and enough space for like, a fraction of what you have in your cart right now. Unless you plan on stealing this shopping cart and making it into a planter, in which case then yes, you can go ahead and take that tomato plant. 

Worst was all the packets of seeds. Once I got home and started looking more closely at the spacing requirements for all my six packs I realized I had room for exactly one six pack of plants. The rest I dug into odd places here and there and put into pots for the time being and then looked forlornly at my packets of seeds. I distributed about half a packet of green bean seeds into an enormous, ridiculously expensive set of peat pots seed starters and then looked at the other like, ten thousand seed packets and went to go look for a mirror so I could punch myself in the face. Goddammit. I was never going to have blue pumpkins. 

I was just going to have to come up with a solution, so I left all the expensive seed packets sitting on the backyard table to make sure that I didn't forget about them.

Since I usually mess up in clusters, I forgot all about them.

Until it rained during the night. During a drought. In April. It does not rain in April in So Cal, much less during an historic drought but it rained that night in a torrential downpour that promptly ruined all my heirloom seeds.

I swear to God. I'm gonna punch you in the freaking face.

Desperately I turned to google and amid a sea of laughing actual gardeners who just shook their heads at questions posted by dumbasses like me, one guy was like, "Sure. Throw them out in the garden. What do you have to lose?" Clinging to those heartfelt words of encouragement and support, I pathetically salvaged one packet of butter lettuce seeds and scraped them out of the soggy clump in the bottom of the envelope, not so much carefully sprinkling them evenly over the ground as like, flicking them off the side of my fingers in slimy clots. I put them in where other stuff was already growing so I could pretend like I was still successful even as I watched to see how much of a failure I really was. 

They. Came. Up. 

Lettuce. At last. The one thing even I can't mess up.

Except I read something in passing about something called bolting. Lettuce bolted if it got too hot. Huh. Not sure what bolting is. Also, lettuce could "go to seed" if planted too late. This seemed unlikely. First of all, where are there freaking seeds on a lettuce? And also, if it just rained in the middle of a damn drought, it definitely was not going to get too hot for the lettuce to bolt. Whatever that might be. They grow lettuce in fields in full sun in, like, Fresno. My lovely shady backyard is not going to be too hot for a lettuce.

Oh. Bolting MEANS "go to seed."
 Like, become inedible and send up crazy cell phone towers out of the center of the lettuce.

So my lettuce bolted because obviously I did exactly zero of the sun research you're supposed to do to map out the zones of your house, the compass directions, and the hours of sun each area of the garden gets each day. We had about a week of beautiful wonderful lettuce and then it bolted. Each head shot up on stalks about three feet high and sent up yellow flowers that turned into little dandelion fluff. The stalks extrude a milky sap that seeps into the leaves, making them bitter and inedible to protect the plant once it starts trying to set seed.

Ever practical, my husband listened to me wail about the turning of the tides and how fate was intervening in our destinies for a minute before asking, "If it's setting seed, shouldn't you be able to collect it?"

Hmm. Back to google. Aha, YES, you can collect lettuce seed (waiting until the yellow flowers turn to little brown pods and then breaking them open). After a few minutes of doing so I was startled to realize I'd collected at least a couple hundred seeds from a single plant. I went and got an envelope. Holy crap. Thousands. Of seeds. 

I planted our harvested seeds last fall and though birds got them, bugs got them, weather got them, somehow, miraculously, I ended up with a bed full of lettuce again this winter that cost me nothing. An unseasonable hot spell sent them bolting again, and they've already reseeded the bed and the lawn around the bed. Lettuce heads are cropping up everywhere and we're back to gathering seeds, though for what I'm not sure. The seeds are in every inch of dirt on my property by now, blowing here and there on the wind by the dandelion fluff parachutes they sprout. My little son comes out to pop seeds heads open and empty the seeds into envelopes with me. "Let's have a seed sale," he suggests. "We can have like a lemonade stand but with lettuce seeds. For ten or fifteen dollars." 

I'm not sure the demand for heirloom butter lettuce is quite THAT high yet. We do have so much seed though, and I'm a little smug every time I go to the nursery now and shake the $3 packet of lettuce seeds. If that was really how much those seeds were worth I could retire on what I'm pulling out of my lettuce bed. 

"What are you going to do with all of it?" my neighbor Suzy asks. 

"I don't know. Maybe just scatter it into people's lawns at night and run away shouting 'Grow Food! Not Lawns!' like an ecoterrorist ninja." I laugh, but my daughter looks sideways at me. 

"Shh, mom. Now they know our plans."

Forest Bathing to Reinspire Creativity

When I first read about Shinrin-Yoku, the Japanese art of Forest Bathing, since I'm a big nerd I immediately imagined myself languidly draped in the butterfly boughs of the pygmy oaks of the Elfin Forest, with the sunlight filtering flaxen light through my golden hair. 

And wardrobe provided by Harper's Bazaar, obvs.

I tried taking a selfie to capture the moment but it didn't really come out.

Is this it? Am I doing it? 

Even if you don't have a disconnect between fantasy and reality (okay, I KNOW I AM A BRUNETTE!) taking a selfie would actually never have worked. See, Forest Bathing is rooted in the idea that our constant exposure to and immersion in technology is literally making us sick. Too much time in front of the computer, tv, and smart phones in addition to our extremely stimulating daily lives--we drive in five lanes of traffic, we manage tight timetables, we negotiate music and shock jocks and small talk--has left us distracted, impatient, forgetful. We blow off bad judgement from stress and the stress itself as just another part of our urban life; but in fact, scientists with the Neuroscience division of the CDC have found these symptoms so pervasive in city dwellers that they've dubbed it "Directed Attention Fatigue". Researchers at the University of Michigan found that even a few minutes of the intensity of a city street can affect focus and self-control--so what is it doing to us when we live in it?

Talk to a parent in their thirties of a young kid these days and you'll realize that little kids are the canaries in the coal mine for this phenomenon, displaying more openly the stresses we've learned to hide and accept. We all grew up with Nintendo controllers in our hands and had access to computers for typing up essays; but pre-millenial kids didn't suffer from anger and depression as a result of it. Today's kids are "Wired and Tired"--chronically tired, apathetic, or prone to irrational mood swings and rages because their screentime is radically different than ours was, not just in amount of time but in intensity. Hard core gamers of the 90s would have spent after school time on Nintendo games with limited directionality: Mario went forward, backward, jumped, shot fire or ran. Now Mario goes forward, backward, jumps and runs; but also swims, flies, jumps high, propels, propels in mid-air, jumps and then can propel on the downward arch; climbs vines, shoots fire, shoots ice, bounces off walls, can miniaturize, swims as a penguin, breaks through lateral blocks, can pick things up and throw them, can do a spinning downward jump to destroy objects. The Mario universe is interactive, with objects hiding behind the clouds, secret entrances, secret tunnels, mazes that have to be completed in a certain order. Expert gamers learn to look for clues simultaneous to completing the basic shoot-jump-run level so they can find the coins to get into to the final secret levels that only open after you complete the game. Small kids have no problem with this game--why should they? Today's kids have tablets in the classroom and they complete their homework online. They have computer lab time at school and required educational computer games for homework. Grade school kids have phones and tablets of their own. Psychology Today says their chronically high mental arousal levels have left them agitated but exhausted, suffering with memory problems, and with symptoms that mimic ADHD and bipolar disorder.

I'm so sorry, kids. I've failed you. 

Forest Bathing, or what the Japanese call Shinrin-yoku, is the idea that going for a walk in the forest is a form of preventative and healing medicine. The principles of "Breathe, Relax, Wander, Touch, Listen, and Heal" were developed in the 80's in Japan as a way for city dwellers to deal with the intense pace of modern life, and since then, study after study have shown an increase in both physical and mental health. Now Shinrin-yoku is a specific engagement of the five senses, requiring a total unplugging of technology and immersion in a gentle, guided walk through nature (the official U.S. site for shinrin-yoku HERE will send you a free starter kit to help you guide your own forest walks); but Stanford University researchers have also found that just walking for 90 minutes in nature lowered anxiety and depression versus people who walked in urban settings. Patients having undergone surgery recovered more quickly, had shorter hospital stays and had less pain when they had a view of trees. A view of nature helps in the workplace too, leading to lowered stress and higher work satisfaction, better productivity, improved concentration, increased creativity. Most telling, though, is the Japanese study that specifically measured something called NK cells--Natural Killer cells. These building blocks of the immune system help pregnant women carry to term, control innate immunity to HIV, and have been used in anti-cancer therapies. Spending a day out in nature significantly increased these NK cells, and that boost? Stuck around for a week after the trip. 

On a recent trip to Mexico I found myself fascinated with the waves. Yeah, I get it, that's not really newsworthy...waves and beach vistas are actually pretty hypnotic but I'm from San Diego, home of some of the most beautiful beaches in the world, with dramatic promontories, dynamic waves, and spectacular dragon cloud sunsets. This beach was not that. It was plain and flat and straight, with the horizon stretching out somewhat monotonously in every direction. Because of the bay we were in, the waves came in with a predictable height and regularity, and being located on the eastern coast of Baja, the sunset was diluted and moved from pastel shades of peach and pale ochre to a starry night in quick succession. Still, I couldn't stop walking out to the beach to watch the waves. Why? The sea was a different shade of green than the deep blue I was used to in San Diego but it wasn't a gemstone; it was a soft bottle glass green. If you watched long enough the waves would pull back against the tide enough to clear the foam and the wave would rear up perfectly green and translucent enough to see the flat triangular shapes of surfing manta rays silhouetted in the curl before it crashed. The sand was alternately pillowy soft and absurdly fluffy or painfully gritty and crystalline; either way there was no ignoring what was under my bare feet. The drop off from the dunes to the beach to the shelf where the waves crashed was steep, too dangerous to swim; maybe that was why the waves crashed with a thunderous boom like I've never heard before, a violent explosion of salt spray fireworks that diffused to butterfly kisses on our cheeks. I watched and walked and lost myself in thought. I tried to take pictures to capture what I was feeling, the release, the relaxation, but they were just plain and ordinary pictures of a somewhat cloudy day on an uninteresting stretch of beige beach. No one could make a postcard out of this vista, and yet I found myself drawn again and again away from the pulsing club remix of Adele and Taylor Swift songs out onto that beach, with my senses restored. 

I started to understand why gardeners can lose themselves for afternoons at a time; why hiking is addictive; and why watching chickens peck blades of grass while sipping margaritas is totally a thing. A party-worthy thing. A party full of academics and brilliant thinkers, creators and engineers, thing. It'd be great if we all had a nearby forest where we could immerse ourselves for 90 minutes in the middle of the work day five days a week. It'd be great if there was a local Shinrin-Yoku forest therapy group on the block that met conveniently after dinner at the forest at the end of the cul de sac. But it'd be really great if there was some way we could deal with the stress of city life, jobs, driving, technology and horrible people driven crazy by the same forces pressing in on us at all times that was free and sustainable--and it sounds like getting out into the natural world is the cheapest and most effective therapy there is.

My personal hell is people who small talk because they can't stand silence. I hear them while I'm getting my pedicure, chattering away about the intimate details of their lives and their soap operas for 45 minutes to a total stranger. I hear them at the theatre, stage whispering their commentary in the uncomfortable silences. I hear them whenever some unfortunate secretary or waitress gamely asks "How was your weekend?" and it all comes tumbling out. If I get out into the sunshine more often will my vitamin D depletion reverse itself and the increased air quality around green and living things improve my bad attitude toward annoying people, until I just hear them as babbling brooks or a gently bubbling Roman fountain? 

I can only hope. At least if I'm walking, I'll be looking good doing it.

Cuba's Forced Urban AgroEcology

When I think of Cuba, urban farming isn't the first thing that comes to mind. Pastel colored antique cars, certainly; forbidden cigars; garlicky lime-marinated pork sandwiches...but ask anyone my age about the Cuban missile crisis and the longest trade embargo in history and we only vaguely know what we've seen on TV. And by TV I mean that one episode of Seinfeld where they got all excited about smoking some Cuban cigars.

I want this to not be the place I get my information, but I'm pretty sure this episode is literally the only reason I know about the embargo.

In 1958, with armed conflicts between the Cuban government and Fidel Castro's rebels escalating, the United States imposed an arms embargo between ourselves and Cuba. In response, Castro's new regime purchased their armaments from the Soviet Union; the United States in turn greatly reduced the number of tons of brown sugar Cuba could import to the United States, prompting the Soviet Union to buy the sugar instead. In October 1960, with tensions rising in the Cold War, an American-owned oil refinery in Cuba refused to refine a shipment of Soviet crude oil. The Cuban government responded by nationalizing all three oil refineries in the country (which all happened to be American owned) without compensation to the owners; and the Eisenhower administration responded in turn by imposing the trade embargo that has endured for nearly sixty years.

From an American point of view, life didn't change much. For Cuba, largely reliant on a super power that dissolved in the 1990's in the fall of the Soviet Union, life came grinding to a halt. The bulk of Cuba's agricultural industry was devoted to the export of sugarcane, with 57 percent of food production being imported from the Soviet Union. Cuba was reliant on massive amounts of pesticides, chemical fertilizers, and machinery, all supplied by the Soviet Union; but in turn, soil quality was degrading, key crops like rice were declining, and agricultural pests were on the rise.

Ah, the 1990's. Makes me nostalgic for the days Monsanto could spray the endless fields of corn with thousands of tons of caustic pesticides and no one would say boo. 

When the Soviet Bloc collapsed, so did food production in Cuba. Tractors couldn't function without petroleum; crops couldn't thrive without fertilizer; insects took over entire fields. Cuba showed the worst growth in per capita food production in all of Latin America.

With no other choice but to adapt an urban agroecology, the Cuban government turned to its people. Oxen took over the plowing of fields; green crop manures like peas, oats, and clover replaced chemical fertilizers. Policy reforms helped farmers form co-ops and made it easier for small farmers to market their crops. The Ministry of Agriculture started making it easier for urban farmers to grow food on their lots and not only allowing farming on unused state lands but distributing those lands to potential urban farmers, to the tune of over 1 million hectares of land. In short, the government GAVE AWAY over 100,000 farms. Urban farming exploded, with close to 400,000 urban farms total, and production exploded: by 2006 peasant farmers owned 25% of the land and provided 65% of the food for the country. Using 72% less chemical fertilizers and pesticides than under the Soviet partnerships of 1988, Cuban farmers now produce 145% more vegetables, roots and tubers and 351% more beans.

Forced to survive without chemicals, isolated from genetically modified seeds, pushed to develop artisanal insecticides and sustainable ways to enrich the soil, Cuba handed the reins of the cart driving food production over to its people--and thrived. Using unused land and no chemicals, the people of Cuba produced 20kg of green material per square meter.

I have to stop and think about that in terms of my formerly grassy lawn. I probably produced one pound of grass clippings per square meter in a year, maybe, and that's with regular applications of chemical fertilizers and the huge can of Roundup spray we used to keep in the garage, not to mention the water usage that collectively has bankrupted California's water reservoirs.

With President Obama starting the process of lowering the trade embargo, American companies are eager to get into Cuba and start imposing our agricultural model: moving the bulk of food production into a few, large scale commercial farms that will turn a profit, and out of the hands of the small urban and suburban farmers. Export crops like sugarcane would likely again replace consumable food crops. And while the United States uses data from 2008, after three consecutive devastating hurricanes destroyed Cuban crops, to support the idea that Cuba cannot feed its people and therefore needs U.S. trade to survive? The United Nations Food and Agriculture Organization lists Cuba's average per capita food production at well over 3,200 kcal.

Yesssss. But just think of all that lovely pristine farmland that could be put to...better use. 

Cuba's victory gardens inspire me that given sufficient time and rest from chemicals, with natural, sustainable amendments, my lawn and garden will continue to provide more and more of our food and gives me hope for what we urban and suburban farmers may be able to achieve. As the American urban farming movement grows, and with it the demand for local produce in our grocery stores and on our restaurant tables, we come closer to reaching what Cuban urban farming has already accomplished. If we think of Cuba at all, its to picture how quaintly backward they are, with their 1950's cars, trapped picturesquely in the ending of a Godfather movie, all jazz clubs and saxophones and sexy women in clinging dresses. It never occurred to me that in embracing the past, Cuba would have quietly developed a model for nation-wide sustainable organic agriculture that successfully feeds its people. Vintage never went out of style in Havana.