My friend Dan is eight years younger than I am, lives on the other side of the world, and is the closest I’ve ever come to finding a true kindred spirit. She’s the person I ring in the middle of the night when life goes pear-shaped, as she instinctively and intuitively understands how my brain (and heart) work. I love her to bits.
We have a regular “date” – we chat on the phone or over skype once a week. During a recent conversation, the topic of what we were reading came up. Dan was appalled by my current reading list, which apart from cookbooks is liberally sprinkled with dodgy romances, old detective novels and cheap self-help books (you’d think I’d have figured out by now that the books were discounted for a reason).
“What would Oprah think if she came to visit?”, she asked (since moving to America, Dan has become a member of the Church of Oprah).
And so, she made me buy a couple of new books. One of them, Farm City by Novella Carpenter, is absolutely brilliant – the best thing I’ve read all year. It’s about a young woman who sets up a community farm on a vacant plot of land in the middle of Oakland, California, in an district known as Ghost Town. As Wiki describes it, “the area is known for its violence and blight”.
In the midst of it all, with homeless people living in cars on the street, regular gunfights and shootings, and drugs being sold out in the open, Novella and her partner Bill convert the empty lot – basically as squatters – into a thriving and productive urban farm.
Her adventures go far beyond simply growing vegetables though, and vegans and vegetarians be warned, there’s a lot of livestock being grown and eaten within these pages. She starts with fowl – she raises, kills and roasts her own turkey for Thanksgiving – and then moves onto rabbits, and then pigs (in the middle of the city!). It’s a steep learning curve for both of them, and a glorious read for the rest of us, offering well written prose, humour and above all, blinding honesty. I was torn between wanting to read it as quickly as I could to find out what happened next, and not wanting the story to end.
If you’re interested in Novella’s ongoing tale, she has a blog here. And if you’re after a great read – particularly if you’re interested in self-sufficiency and urban farming – then both Dan and I can highly recommend this book!
Pete was very taken with this iridescent piece of 
Fig Jam and Lime Cordial 