Novella Carpenter, author of Farm City, delivered on her promise to open her Ghost Town farm to visitors yesterday and arrive they did on surely the hottest day in Oakland so far this year. I mean it was fricking hot!! We narrowly missed her chicken slaughter demonstration–ok with me–and yet still landed in the throng. Within a very short time, I was jonesing for a big pool of water to jump into or at the very least, a sprinkler to run through, but she didn’t go there, and instead offered free ice tea (no ice), recycled t-shirts with a picture of a hand drawn goat and the words Goat Town printed on them, and big trays of Grandma’s Peach Cobbler for a donation (a fund to send grandma’s granddaughter to college; grandma lives around the corner and is one of the neighbors she writes about in her book.).

Heat aside, this one time abandon corner lot was swamped and full of good vibes, wanna be urban farmers, friends, moms with children, neighborhood characters, and writers like us (my friend and fellow author Dianne Jacob; we were calling ourselves the ‘hangeroners’) including the food editor of Sunset magazine, who diligently took notes and kindly obliged to our introducing ourselves. At this point we were all in it together, so why not?

After an hour or so of our wandering around on a maze of paths lined with hay, checking out her array of tomatoes, chard, zucchini the size of 2 rolling pins, flats of seed starts, blackberry brambles, rabbits, and everything else she was growing in a jumbled almost haphazard fashion, it was time for the tour. Novella led us through a very narrow side pathway to see her 6 goats, some of them who were hanging out in the outhouse she built behind the 2 story apricot-peach colored duplex she lives in with roommates. This was also where her chickens lived-in coops she built from recycled materials. She’s big on the found and recycled, and everything was a little bit wonky but it worked.

“There are too many goats here,” Novella said before she led us to her back encampment, emphasizing more than once that it was NOT good husbandry, but she was selling a couple of them, plus one was going to be slaughtered for Ramaden by Moses, who owns the local liquor store 1 block over. ”Let me say it again,” she mused about her too many goats.” It is not ok.” Before going in, she gave us a visual tour of her neighbors: “Oh, and that car there,” she pointed across the street to a whimsically painted BMW, “is the new home of my ducks.” She was funny this way, full of good intentions and a kind of make do attitude, without apology. She plans to move the car (“no engine or transmission,” she said) into the garden.

Outhouse Hideaway

Duck House

When young Oaklandish hipsters asked about the local urban farm scene, she deferred to Detroit as the “ground zero of urban farming” and that yes, it was happening here, but she was just doing her thing. Her movement is her own, in a kind of way; she’s just going on and not worrying so  much about the larger discourse, so to speak, that has taken the Bay by the arm. Not to say that she isn’t hyper aware, has roommates, promoted biking to her corner of the world, grows organically, is part of the worker-owned Biofuel Oasis in Berkeley, is willing to share, and is darn right generous with her time. But as real as the Eat Real festival professes to be (delicious street food all weekend, down at the waterfront) I’d say Novella is as real as it gets.