Author Novella Carpenter starts a suburban farm

Abeni and MilkyWay.

LaBrie Family Farm

By Novella Carpenter
Author of Farm City: The Education of an Urban Farmer
April 4, 2010

Excerpt from her blog:

I’m ready to announce it to the world: I’m starting another urban farm. It’s in San Lorenzo (okay, maybe it’s a suburban farm…). One acre, a barn, with fruit trees and fields. My farm partner, Abeni, brought some of the goats up today and installed them in their new digs. Read about it here, at the new blog, LaBrieFamilyFarm.

There’s still so much work to do before we plant, but we’re just going there and working, not thinking about the endpoint. The biggest job was clearing out the barn, which we think was built in the 1940s. It had years of stuff in it, and opossums had taken up residence, so it was pretty gross. But now it’s great, and a good place for the goats to sleep and have babies. There’s a hayloft upstairs, which is perfect for storing alfalfa for the goats and rabbits.

Karim and Jamila, our other partners in farming, are total bad-asses, and macheted down the grass in the fields. Check out how high the weeds were (photo below). The soil is very dark and rich. There are two fields, the north and south, each about a 1/4 of an acre. We’ve seeded a bunch of stuff off-site: tomatoes, herbs, peppers, onions, chard, cucs, and zuchs to transplant once we get the fields tilled. We’re specializing in French heirloom vegetables, but this first year we’ll be field testing a lot of things to see what our main crop should be.

See Novella’s blog.

See the new LaBrie Family Farm website here.