Farm City

It isn't a Fall day, but I'm pretending it is.  I've been sitting in my armchair with football on low in the background, mousaka warming on the stovetop for lunch, and a box of tissues because it seems I've found myself a cold.  Luckily I watered the garden yesterday (lettuce sprouts doing well!).  So, despite all the work I have in so many other vertical categories of my life, I decided to finish a book that my fellow gardener friend Kristin gave me for my birthday last year.  Shamefully, because of all the other reading I HAVE to do, it has taken me almost a year to finish a book for pleasure.  It is called FARM CITY: The Education of an Urban Farmer by Novella Carpenter.  She takes you along on her adventures in urban farming including the joy and heartache attached to raising pigs, chickens, ducks, rabbits, bees, and vegetables.  Carpenter keeps you very entertained as she leads you through how quickly a desire for sustainability can lead to finding yourself doing everything from dumpster diving to massaging a pig's hind quarter with salt in the quest for some homemade prosciutto if you aren't careful!  All this takes place on an abandoned piece of land next to her apartment in a "bad" section of Oakland, CA.  I highly recommend it.  This paragraph caught my attention:

While rooting around the history of prosciutto making, I had stumbled upon this quote from Pliny the Elder, the ancient Roman naturalist, about Epicurus, the famous Greek hedonist:  "That the connoisseurs in the enjoyment of life of ease was the first to lay out a garden at Athens; up to this time it had never been thought of to dwell in the country in the middle of town."  The garden, as far as scholars can sort out, grew fruits and vegetables.  

She goes on to write that the notion that an urban farmer existed before Christ made her feel as if at its very core, there really is nothing new.  And that we are all a part of it.  

Indeed.