June 2009 – forthcoming book ‘FarmCity: The Education of an Urban Farmer’

Photo by Novella Carpenter. Larger image here.

Novella Carpenter is the author of the forthcoming book FarmCity: The Education of an Urban Farmer (Penguin Press). “I studied under Michael Pollan at Berkeley’s Graduate School of Journalism for two years. My journalistic work reflects my interests–in farming, food, the environment, and culture. In a nutshell, I like to tell stories about people who follow unconventional paths.”

Novella blogs her life on her urban farm at ‘Ghost Town Farm’. Here is an early blog entry by the author.

Feb 16, 2007

I first started farming in the city of Seattle in 1998. At the time, I was a book editor at Sasquatch Books, and one of our favorite authors was Carla Emery. She wrote a book called the Encyclopedia of Country Living. One day I was flipping through the newsprint pages of the book (this is how editors procrastinate) and happened upon a section called How to Build a Chicken House.

By that time, I was gardening a little bit. I grew peas and some lettuces, but I hadn’t thought of actually growing animals. Carla inspired me, and soon we had three golden-laced wyanndotte chickens and a little hen house. In a strange coincidence, we later found an old Chinese billboard that read, “Hen”. We immediately hung in on our porch. I loved the eggs and the chickens.

Eventually I moved to California. Now I live and farm in Oakland, CA. I can see downtown O-Town from my back porch, BART seems to run straight across my living room, as does I-980. It’s really spiraled from those early years in Seattle: to bees, ducks, turkeys, rabbits, geese, and I hope, one day, goats or a pig. A mini-cow, maybe?

Her blog site ‘Ghost Town Farm’ can be found here.

See also:

The Urban Farmer – Do farm animals survive by dying?
Interview by Amy Standen – March, 2008
meatpaper.com

Diary of a turkey killer – Last year I decided to grow and slaughter my own Thanksgiving turkey. The six months I spent raising Harold were some of the best of my life — and so were the hours I spent eating him.
By Novella Carpenter – Salon.Com