Urban farming is catching on in New Orleans

Jane Stubbs poses for a photo with her chickens, Breakfast, left, Lunch, center, and Dinner, right, at her home in New Orleans. Photo by Rusty Costanza, The Times-Picayune.

This is a neighborhood that doesn’t have a grocery store

By Matt Davis
The Times-Picayune
July 18, 2010

Excerpt:

“It would be great if everyone on this block had some kind of animal and grew vegetables. We could be almost self-sufficient,” said Frank Carter, an engineering technician who trained with the farm network and keeps 12 chickens with his wife, Laura Reiff, in a 60-by-50-foot foot pen in their backyard in Algiers. Their chicken breeds include Rhode Island Reds, Brown Leghorns, and even a Buff Orpington — ordered via the U.S. Postal Service from a breeder in Texas.

“The post office called us at 8 o’clock in the evening and said, ‘We have your live chickens,’ ” Carter said. ” ‘They’re peeping.’ ”

As well as the chickens, Carter and Reiff grow peaches, grapefruit, peppers, watermelons, blueberries, tomatoes, persimmons, figs and bananas. They also have a bee hive that produced 50 pounds of honey this year.

The chickens are “very entertaining to watch,” Reiff said, although there is still some resistance among the couple’s friends to taking the eggs. Some say they’ll eat only white eggs, not the blue eggs from the Brown Leghorns. Others are concerned about cracking an egg open to find a chicken embryo, which is impossible unless a broody hen has sat on a fertilized egg for at least a month.

Jenga Mwendo runs the Guerilla Garden in the Lower 9th Ward. Once a vacant lot, Mwendo petitioned the city to let her buy it for $4,000 last year, and since then, more than 400 volunteers have developed the plot into a working farm producing fresh vegetables.

“This is a neighborhood that doesn’t have a grocery store,” Mwendo said. “And yet a couple of generations ago, everybody had fruit trees in their yards. We’re just trying to preserve and encourage that tradition.”

Frank Carter collects chicken eggs from his coop at his Algiers home. When it comes to raising and slaughtering livestock, New Orleans also affords unique opportunities for free experimentation. Simply put, the New Orleans Police Department seems to have bigger fish to fry than cracking down on urban farmers.

See the rest of the article here.