Free Farm City: The Education of an Urban Farmer by Novella Carpenter Page A

by the strange blue light of my energy-saving headlamp. Lolling around in the dirt, they approached the supple green shoots of my remaining melon plants with their little horns (which are, in fact, eyes) up. Some people think the horn-eyes are endearing, but if the slugs had their way, I would have exactly zero watermelons. These dirt-inhabiting scum balls are the clear-cutters of the mollusk world. They will leave nothing in their wake. If they exercised restraint, they could have a food source for months instead of hours. But this isn’t how slugs operate. And so I committed slug mass murder in order to save a fruit.
    I ripped them in two; then, just to be sure, I squished them between boards. When it was done, I tossed the grotesque, loogie-like pile of dead slugs into the garbage can.
    As I scrubbed my murderous hands I wondered if Lana would refuse to eat one of my watermelons if she knew what I had done. No one is really pure, except maybe the Jains, that sect in India whose members sweep a peacock feather on the ground in front of them as they walk in order to prevent injury to, say, an ant. They do drink water, I’m told, and I wonder how they come to terms with eating all the organisms that live in it.
    It took me a full five minutes of scrubbing to remove all the slug slime from my hands. Like a low-stakes Lady Macbeth, I couldn’t shake the sensation that they were still soiled. But I wasn’t conflicted: I felt great. I killed so that others might live. Death is all around us, even in an innocent watermelon. You just have to know where to look.

CHAPTER FIVE

    A visitor used the word “unhygienic” to describe the almost full-grown chickens and turkeys living in our house. She had a point. Our record player was coated with a golden dust I had never seen before. Bill complained about the noise they made—even he, deep sleeper extraordinaire, couldn’t sleep through their crack-of-dawn racket anymore. When I read something about getting chest infections from living in close quarters with chickens, I finally moved them outside.
    I was reluctant for a reason. We already had chickens. Since they are territorial and had an established pecking order, it was going to be a brutal smack-down for the little ones. So I slowly introduced the turkey poults and the new chickens to the big chickens. First I kept the new ones in a large wire pen. The big chickens thought this was some kind of gladiator event and lined up breast to breast to peek through the wire at the newbies and get in a sucker peck whenever possible. After a few days of this, they all knew one another, and I unleashed my chickens and turkeys into the cruel world of urban chickendom.
    They fared well. A few of them got their asses kicked. One of the big chickens, a beautiful, normally docile Buff Orpington, body-slammed one of the poults and mercilessly pecked its head until it yelled uncle in turkey. That’s how chickens do it. They establish dominance, an order, that every bird agrees upon, and then they get back to what they do best: pooping and eating.
    Back in Seattle, our first chicken was an Americauna named Agnes. She was a lesbian chicken who crowed like a rooster but also laid eggs with bluish shells. At the time—the late 1990s—I was working for a company that published a book called The Encyclopedia of Country Living, by Carla Emery, a how-to guide for would-be homesteaders. I laughed as I thumbed through the book in my cubicle in downtown Seattle. How to dig a root cellar, shoot a pig, and castrate a goat—not things that I would be doing anytime soon. But the sections on how to can vegetables, grow pumpkins, and keep chickens—these were things that even a city person with a backyard could do, I realized.
    Keeping backyard chickens was more than socially acceptable then. Martha Stewart had them; PBS aired a documentary about poultry fanciers; and in Seattle, having chickens in the city was a badge of progressive moxie. Finally driven