A Must Read: Farm City, by Novella Carpenter...
With the up and coming Truck Farm project, which will soon pick up speed, I couldn't help but read this fabulous book by an Oakland neighbor, Novella Carpenter. It's a memoir, I suppose, but it's almost more of a travel narrative through the jungles of urban farming. Though gardening and beekeeping are no foreign hobbies of Carpenter's, her virgin foray into raising her own meat in the Oakland ghetto has the exotic surprises, disappointments, and delights of a globe-trotting reportage. In Farm City: The Education of an Urban Farmer, Carpenter guides us through the creation of her urban farm in a shady corner of Oakland. Fatal shootings occur down the street, police repeatedly whisk her car-dwelling neighbor away, and overgrown vacant lots surround the small house she rents. But it's the vacant lot and...
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