Frijolito Farm Blog

Given the long stretch of rainless days in the 80s and 90s, my 4-year-old son Noah and I watered the gardens last night. I like to involve the kids in any age-appropriate way I can, so that they grow up with a sense of ownership in the farm and the skills to run it. That, and Noah works for lollipops.

I loaded four 55-gallon barrels and one 33-gallon barrel onto the back of the truck and filled them with water while I made some improvements to the hen house yesterday. (Note to self: that works about to over 2100 pounds of water, just about the limit of what our old F-250’s suspension will handle.) Once we got to the gardens, we set buckets on the ground next to the truck. I got up in the bed and pumped the water out by hand while Noah held the pump hose in the buckets and moved it to an empty bucket once one bucket was full.

On the way home, Noah got his first good look at fireworks as we watched the illegal skybursts over North Linden. A stop for gas and lollopops, and our workday was done a little after ten o’clock.

Someone just called me asking if I could take some chicks she has as a result of a school project. There are 3 chicks, one week old, unknown breeds. One is black, one is black and gold, and one is all gold. If you’d like to take these little birds off her hands, contact Heidi Hall at (614) 570-8633 or hhall@columbus.rr.com .

This isn’t the first such call I’ve received. I’m happy to help place little birds. The more small, backyard flocks, the better! But it kind of irks me that schools are encouraging children to hatch baby chickens that they have no way to care for, nor any intention of caring for. It seems irresponsible.

I think they’re also missing a great educational opportunity. The lesson shouldn’t end once the chicks are out of the shell. Children could learn nurturing and responsibility by caring for the birds. When the Girl Scouts first started out in Scotland (I think they called them Girl Guides back then), the girls raised money by selling eggs from hens they raised themselves. And toward the end of the year, the older children, say middle- or high-schoolers, could slaughter the birds for the cafeteria to cook up. It illustrates the full circle of life, teaches the kids useful, recession-proof skills they could use to feed themselves and/or earn a living, and teaches the importance of thinking ahead. Hatching is just the beginning.

Thanks to Greener Grocer’s contribution to the hens’ diet, last year’s hen run is now a jungle of volunteer tomatoes. There are a couple mystery squashes growing in there, too. I thought about moving them to one of the gardens where they could get more sun, but clearly, they’re happy where they are.

Last week as I was loading the tiller into the back of the truck, it fell off the ramp onto its side. The broke the carburetor. I took it in to get fixed. It was supposed to have been ready yesterday, but the repair shop received the wrong parts, so it’s going to take a while longer.

…which means I didn’t get to till yesterday.

…which means I didn’t get to plant.

And now, it’s raining. A lot. Probably too much to till on Wednesday, which is fine, really, because I’m already booked for Wednesday. I was supposed to do some landscaping for someone yesterday, but rescheduled it for Wednesday so I could get some work done in the gardens.

And I did! The owner of the place where I have most of my gardens won’t let me fence the deer out of his yard, so I put a deer fence all the way around one of my plots. I just planted it maybe two or three weeks ago and I see raccoon tracks on the landscape fabric. Anyway, I got that fence up, mowed down the weeds on last year’s sweet corn patch and potato patch so I can till them up…and that’s it. Of course, I went to the feed store and tended the chickens and such, but I didn’t get nearly as much gardening done as I’d have liked.

It’s supposed to rain again Thursday. And Friday. Saturday, of course, I’ve got a market. And at some point, I need to mow the yard. I’d hope to garden Sunday, but I doubt it will be dry enough to till after raining all week.

This is why I shouldn’t start my veggie CSA in June. I’ve got stuff planted–spinach, kale, lettuce, arugula, bok choy, cabbage–and as soon as I can till some more, I’m going to plant beets, carrots, radishes, rutabegas, and potatoes, with winter squashes, beans, and cucumbers soon to follow. (Mayda planted some cukes here at the house, bless her heart.)

On the bright side, the stuff I’ve planted so far is all in beds covered with landscape fabric. It lets water through but keeps the weeds down. I learned the hard way that it’s better to burn holes in the fabric rather than just cutting x’s, because the flaps don’t stay open and the sprouts end up getting smothered. But I haven’t had any problems with weeds there yet. And once I get some money for drip tape, I’m going to lay it down under plastic for the tomatoes, peppers, eggplants, summer squashes, fennel, etc.

I think, while I’m stuck inside, I’ll plant herbs in containers.

I noticed that the place where I get sawdust also has a dumpster full of wood scraps, some of which looked like they’d be suitable as tomato stakes. I’ll have to ask the owner about them.

Starting fresh: since I had a new batch of chickens processed last week, I took the unsold parts that have been piling up in the freezer since last summer and gave them to the Mid-Ohio Foodbank on Tuesday. It came out to 315 lbs. of backs, wings, gizzards, and legs. Then I came home and remembered I still had another small bag of legs and wings in another freezer.

I also found a local purveyor of Caribbean food who gave me dinner in exchange for a couple bags of chicken feet!

My plan had been to make breasts and Italian sausage out of the next batch of birds, but since this batch is nearly sold out–I have about enough for tomorrow at Clintonville and for the CSA shares for the next few weeks–I might not. I could have them keep out some whole birds and make breasts and sausage from the rest, but then there might not be enough to meet the 80 pound minimum for making sausage. We’ll see. It’ll be a surprise. I’ll either have sausage in a couple weeks or I won’t.

I just came across this story about a town in Wisconsin that voted against allowing chickens. “Janesville City Council denies request for backyard chickens.”

Following is a comment I left there: Continue reading Urban Sensibilities Cripple Small Town’s Self-Reliance…

I just got off the phone with a high school student who’s hatching some chicken eggs for a school project. She’s expecting three chicks and wants to find homes for them. She doesn’t know what breed(s) they are, and after my experience mixing Rhode Island Reds with Cornish-Rock crosses a couple years ago, I’m disinclined to take them. I figured this sounds like a good number for a backyard hobbyist, though, so I told her I’d put the word out.

If you want these chickens, contact Benisha Bruce at (740) 632-8284.

I wanted to share this article with you. Detroit and Flint have been the canaries in the coal mine with regard to industrial collapse and de-urbanization. I’ve been watching with interest what role urban agriculture will play. Mayda and I have talked about how cool it would be if the Mock Park area of Columbus/Mifflin Township were declared an urban agriculture zone as an economic development initiative, but Detroit’s going about it all the wrong way.

Essentially, Detroit is now a sprawling, sparsely populated city. It can’t afford police and fire services for the whole area without the tax base to support it, so it wants to concentrate the remaining population into a few neighborhoods. Some of the people don’t want to go. The city is talking about eminent domain to take these people’s homes away from them.

I have mixed feelings about this. I think shrinking is a good plan for Detroit, but I dislike heavy-handed authoritarianism, especially about something as severe as uprooting people from their homes and seizing something that’s such a major investment for most people. I’m cool with eminent domain for the abandoned houses, but I think the people still residing there should be given the option to stay with the understanding that services will no longer be provided to that area. Disincorporate those areas. Put them under county control. Rezone them as agricultural.

Moreover, give the residents first option to buy the surrounding properties, perhaps with the stipulation that they have to demolish or re-purpose unoccupied houses. If they want to further require that agriculture be practiced there, I suppose they could do that, too, though that might be pushing the envelope just a bit. Why should residents be penalized for hanging in there for so long? If they like living in a less populous place, why should they be forced to live in a densely populated neighborhood just because they used to live in one? It’s ridiculous for them to presume they can tell people where to live just because their treasury has shrunk.

Can you imagine Columbus ordering people in Westerville and Gahanna to move downtown and start paying Columbus taxes so the city can pay for the police budget next year? Maybe Detroit could start snatching people off the interstate highways and forcing them to live in these new communities. Really, what’s the difference? They’re talking about conscripting people to live in their new, smaller city, and coercing them into it with the threat of homelessness. “We’re gonna take your house now. You can come live downtown and pay taxes, or you can beat it.”

That really is what it comes down to, because fair market value–what a government is supposed to compensate a landowner when they exercise eminent domain–is not enough for them to buy a home anywhere else. Detroit will probably offer them a break on a house in the new dense parts of the city, maybe even an even swap. If they don’t take it, well, here’s your fifty bucks (or whatever a house in Detroit is worth these days–I’d heard they were going for as low as ten dollars in some auctions where lots were bundled together).

Let’s see if Detroit can manage to create an appropriately sized, well-designed city that incorporates agriculture without resorting to Machiavellian tactics.

Detroit wants to save itself by shrinking

Continue reading Detroit Rezoning to Allow More Agricultre…

Growing food in the city isn’t just a trendy thing to do. Our very survival depends on it. If there are to be cities in the years to come, they must start pulling more of their own weight where resource production is concerned, and food is one of the most basic of resources.

For the time being, let’s set aside the issue of geophysicist M. King Hubbert’s “Peak Oil” theory that postulates that for a given geographical area, oil production follows a bell-shaped curve, and that after that area reaches peak production, efforts to extract oil are both increasingly expensive and decreasingly fruitful, thereby driving the price of oil to the point that it’s no longer profitable to drill. Some of you who slept through Earth Science in Junior High may think that the Earth is like a giant cherry cordial filled with more petroleum than humanity could ever find a use for, while others—the so-called “abiotic oil” theorists—believe that oil just happens, and that the millions of years’ worth of accumulated organic matter from the Carboniferous Period had nothing to do with it. Or, like many, perhaps you’ve simply never given the issue any thought, and you automatically dismiss any topic that makes you uneasy. To all of you, discussion of fossil fuel depletion sounds like the sort of thing brought up by people in tinfoil hats ranting about alien abductions and secret societies, so you tune out. For now, then, we’ll set aside concerns of fossil fuel depletion, despite it being an even greater certainty in the scientific community than global climate change. Instead, let’s talk about something there’s no denying: the economy.
Continue reading Why We Need Urban Agriculture…

Mayda received a letter from the zoning enforcement guy today. (Our Paul Drive house is in her name.) It said we can’t have chickens here, and we have seven days to comply. It was dated Monday. I have less than a week to relocate the hens, disassemble and move the broiler houses, and move all the bags of leaves and sawdust, as well as any other junk in the backyard.

There’s also a certified letter that’ll be at the Post Office tomorrow. We’re guessing that’s from him, too.

We slaughtered the last of the broilers and don’t have any more chicks ordered, so that’s one thing out of the way. I’m just going to move everything over to Woodland.

The problem is that while the section of code he’s citing only prohibits agriculture on properties less than one acre, there’s another point he could use against us at Woodland. If you have between one and five acres, agriculture is prohibited if your subdivision is at least 35% developed. Nobody’s actually ordered us not to farm there, but we haven’t started yet. The code is very clear that we can’t do it. Even just having an acre of apple trees would be illegal there. Any kind of natural resource harvesting other than a garden attached to a residence counts as “agriculture” and is prohibited. This is wrong, and we’ll take up the fight to get that changed on at least the county level, if not the state. But first thing’s first. We need to take care of our own survival before starting any crusades.

I’m thinking the best thing to do is to not fight it here at Paul Drive. Just comply (though that is a hardship with the hens.) Before he gets a chance to nail us at Woodland, I want to request a variance from the Mifflin Township Board of Trustees to allow me to practice agriculture there. They can do that by a resolution. If they won’t do that, the next step is to try for a variance through the county. I’m not sure how best to approach that.

I’m feeling caught between two levels of government here. I need to get caught up on my child support before the end of the year so we can declare one of the kids I’m paying support on as a dependent on our tax return. Makes a big difference–the difference between getting money and owing it. But to earn the money to do that, I either need to go do paying work, or produce stuff on the farm and sell it. But if I go work for money, I’m not here cleaning up and moving stuff for Code Enforcement and the Health Department. And if I actually comply fully with Zoning and quit raising chickens, I’m severely restricted in how much money I can earn at farmers markets, especially over the winter.

We have the land, though, and a few freezers full of chicken, and outlaw hens laying about a dozen eggs a day, and a couple big boxes of egg cartons. We have jars to sprout beans in, and an oven for baking stuff. I’m paid up to do two days a week at the farmers market downtown through December. And I’m sure that at least a few people in either the township or county government must see farms as something other than a dirty embarrassment that all the shiny urbanites have to be sheltered from. We’ll get through this somehow, but I’m not sure we’ll still have animals by the time we get to the other end of the tunnel.

I find it ironic that a Department of ECONOMIC DEVELOPMENT & Planning would be going into a blighted neighborhood and trying to make people poorer. They went after one of my neighbors and gave him a huge list of things to alter that aren’t even visible from the street. They told him the color of his garage has to match his house. This isn’t a homeowners association, it’s the county government telling him this. They said they’re trying to “clean up” (ie, gentrify) the neighborhood. Now they’re trying to put me out of work while I hear scores of people telling me that more people need to be doing what I’m doing. Local magazines praise my work while the local government criminalizes it.

Another thing that troubles me about this is that if I just built a large building and raised the chickens indoors, that would probably be fine. There’d be no evidence visible from the property line that there’s any agriculture going on. My customers pay more, though, because I don’t do it that way. The fact that the chickens are allowed to scratch around out where people can see them–the very thing that makes them more desirable and trusted as food–is exactly what Zoning finds objectionable.

I’m seriously wondering about the market for rabbits. Quieter than chickens, I could breed my own stock instead of having to buy them, and they can eat mostly grass. They have about the same grow-out time and feed conversion rate as broilers. I could do that completely clandestinely by clearing a spot back in the woods and keeping them in movable pens that I can stash in the garage or an underground shed or something when the revenuers show up. But Americans don’t eat bunnies like they eat chicken or eggs. Otherwise, I’m not sure what my backup plan would be.

Nobody owes me a job, but I have a responsibility to earn a living. For those two facts to co-exist, there must be a possibility of working for myself. If I can’t do it by farming, I don’t know what else I could do that I can just jump right into and start earning enough money without investing a whole lot up front. Art? Woodworking? Soap? Candles? They all seem so much more speculative than food.

Maybe I could learn Somali and start a new career as a pirate.