Farm City: The Education of an Urban Farmer | MNN - Mother Nature Network

Farm City: The Education of an Urban Farmer | MNN - Mother Nature Network:

It would be easy to mock a grad student who decides to put down roots with her auto-mechanic boyfriend in a sketchy part of Oakland, Calif., better known for its murder rate than fresh produce.

But Novella Carpenter did and readers should thank her for it. In Farm City: The Education of an Urban Farmer, Carpenter comes across as the sort of person you’d hope to meet at a dinner party, nutty enough to be captivating and charming enough to draw you in. From her opening sentence, “I have a farm on a dead-end street in the ghetto,” she had me hooked.

No survivor’s tale of crime and desperation, Farm Cityis a memoir based on living off the land with modest expectations. Carpenter writes about establishing and then subsisting on a garden plot located on an abandoned 4,500-square-foot lot next to her apartment building.

In a decaying city suffering from “beautiful neglect,” Carpenter and her boyfriend join a community called Ghost Town, which is composed of immigrants, outliers and miscreants unfit for the slick precincts of San Francisco or the manicured lawns of Berkeley. They befriend Lana — who says that’s “anal spelled backward,” by way of introduction — and Bobby, a junk-collecting homeless resident.