Up On The Roof(top Farm)

We've seen what farming on a cement baseball field looks like. This is what farming on a Brooklyn rooftop looks like:

Imagine if every single rooftop in Manhattan looked like this one. Think of the bounty! The fresh air!

Think of the views from above... a green mosaic...

This hearty kale wouldn't look so monstrous if seen from an airplane...

...although it does look monstrous in real life.

I've never seen such happy chard!

With a view like this, who wouldn't be inspired?

I do not envy those sitting in cubicles across the river, even if they are makin' bank.

Perfect serenity:

All photos were taken at Rooftop Farms in Greenpoint, Brooklyn. Volunteers are welcome!

Summer Is Not Over.

Summer isn't over! Yes, I'm wearing more clothes at this very moment than a rugged mountain man might wear in mid-October in Montana. (Remember socks?!? They're so April 2009!) A farmer at Added Value expressed to me that summer was already far behind him, a piece of fluff in a dryer vent. (Like compost, I amended and ameliorated that last part.) I disagree, vehemently! I present you with cold, hard, proof that summer is not over yet.

Exhibit A: The Calendar. Summer does not officially end until September 22. This should be enough to convince the reader that I am right and the farmer is dead wrong. Nonetheless, the following points serve to illuminate summery season signifiers from the LAST TWO WEEKS. Does this look like autumn to you?

• I didn't think so. This is what sunset looks like in summer: golden glow. The sun's heading down, but against her will. She wants to stay and play, so she lingers for as long as possible.

• This is me teaching teenagers about honeybees, surprised by how competent I sound on the subject. Do you see a classroom? No. Because its summer vacation.

Some responses from teens:

-To the drone's loss of genitalia and life when he mates with the queen: "Yo, why she gotta do that?"

-In response to the honey-tasting portion of the lesson: "I'm gonna get diabetes from this."

-To the fact that the worker bees, the majority of the hive, are all female: "That's sexist!"

-Student: "Is this a picture of you as a little girl?" Me: "No, that's a picture of me from March."

• My original intention was to find out the name of this flower and it's growing season to prove that it is still summer. However, technology has, once again, failed to live up to my genius ideas, and there exists no contraption wherefore to download this photo into a flower database and retrieve its common name.

I like to know the names of things, which is why I have been compiling my own flower database of sorts, that will go up once I identify some of the tricky ones with my team of experts. (My dad.) Once I find out the name I will revise this post and thus strengthen my argument! Wha-ha-ha-ha!

• Picnics. Need I say more?

Yes, you say? Fine. Would an elderly painter set up shop outside if there were the chance of catching a chill? I think not.

Whoa, elderly painter 1-2 punch!

• This delectable nectarine, sweet with tangy juices, was grown locally. Booyah.
  

I think I've made my point loud and clear: don't believe the farmer when he tells you summer is dead and gone. Let's not mourn just yet. We've still got some fire in us, don't we? 'Cause if being pumped and rearing to go is wrong, I don't wanna be right!

I've decided to form a team called Summerbusters, made up of highly skilled funsultants with can-do spirits. Don't you want to be somebody's funhero in these waning days of summer? (Funshero if you're a girl.) Delivering 100% pure fun to whomever is lucky enough to hang out with us, bustin' out the funglasses like it's nobody's biznass, you know, normal funsultant work. (Contact me for an application.)

How to Defeat the Evils of Nepotism

As you've probably noticed, I'm quite fond of comparing honeybees to humans. We both exist in complex social systems that aim to sustain us. We both love honey. We humans love to name things. (Do honeybees have names for us? Perhaps certain buzz frequencies that signify "human?") We distinguish between individual things and the groups in which they congregate. A colony of bees. A gaggle of geese. A parliament of owls. An army of frogs. A knot of toads. (The list goes on...)

But what of ourselves?? A family of humans? A culture of humans? A society of humans? We map family trees based on sexual relations that produce babies. Is this the only way to distinguish our kin?

The family tree of a honeybee colony would resemble a thick, round shrub more than a towering oak: a drone might be his mother's lover. Although the prolific deadbeat dad has challenged the patriarchal system of organization, most women in America still change their last names upon marriage to signify membership in a new system of kinship. The idea of family is defined in this way: the Griffins, the McChards, the Plakiai...

The queen bee's mating flight lasts for two to three days and intimately involves between 10 and 25 drones, depending on her penchant for doing the nasty. This rowdy sexcapade is productive enough for the queen to never mate again. She carries the sperm inside of her, and deposits sperm and egg in a honeycomb cell to create a female worker bee, and egg alone to create a male drone. She will continue depositing egg and sperm into honeycomb cells unceasingly for the remainder of her life.

In the bee world, if a mother queen dies unexpectedly, worker bees will feed royal jelly to a handful of larvae. Imagine you are a female worker bee. Your mom just died and you must replace her. You are in charge of choosing the cells in which you will deposit royal jelly. Cell A contains the larvae of some random chick. Cell B contains the larvae of your sister. Interestingly, entomologists have noted that you will almost always choose your sister's larvae. Bees are nepotists!

Natural selection does trump nepotism. Remember that you must feed royal jelly to more than one larval bee. When the virgin queens emerge, they duke it out to the death, and the last one standing becomes royalty.

Nepotism is, therefore, a natural-enough tendency. But I've got problems with it. When I was in middle school, I was a "bad influence." Or so it seemed to the mothers of my female friends. In reality, I was incredibly unhappy, as most teenagers tend to be, and did not need to be excommunicated from my only friends by overprotective moms. (Seriously, if I didn't peer pressure your daughter into smoking weed, somebody else would've. And that somebody might have been a scary old man instead of sweet little me.)

Of course moms are protective of their kids, but calling a 13-year-old on the phone and forbidding her to speak to, let alone be friends with, her daughter is just plain cruel. I'm not the only bad influence to have this happen, either. The result of the mother bee's overreaction is a super-strong, super-small kinship system that excludes anyone who doesn't share a last name.

Does this mean that it is wrong for the worker bee to choose her sister to become queen? Well, this is the point at which my argument falls apart.

We 'Mericans tend to like our circles close-knit, uniform, and exclusive. But kinship need not be familial. When like-minded, inspired individuals work together to create a supportive, productive community, a new kind of family is born. Like a honeybee colony, each individual is important only insofar as she is part of a whole.

When people work together toward a common goal that is both satisfying and fruitful, something magical happens.

We're no longer alone in this confusing world!

In this way, life bursts forth from concrete, life free from nepotism.

At Added Value, when we harvest, cook, and eat meals on the farm together, we say this blessing:

We thank the sun and the air,

the water and the soil,

the many hands it took to grow this food,

and the many hands it took to prepare it.

I love my many families.

Savage Nature

I believe that if I live seasonally, in the way Ma Nature intends the rest of the organic world to live, I will be altogether better. Bountiful, beautiful, bright-eyed summer will find me indulging in juicy watermelon and cool green honeydew, laughing with my silly friends, and splashing around in pools, lakes, oceans and rivers alike. I'll bust out the running man with the no-nonsense enthusiasm of a lemon cucumber vine spitting out yellow, tennis-ball-ish fruit; the butterfly will burst from my crazy legz like a million purple string beans.

During the indian summer, I'll begin to reflect on the untamed euphoria of previous months; the trees will turn fiery and I'll eat fresh pumpkin bread to fatten up for the oncoming winter, during which I will essentially hibernate. Springtime, that magical season of hope and promise, will provide me with the first asparagus of the season, crisp and sweet, and embrace me with happy yellow daffodils and joyful pink tulips. Then it'll start all over again: excess, reflection, rest, growth, repeat. If I could discipline my body and mind to respect this archetypal cycle, I believe I'd be a more productive, happier, healthier person.

2009 has afforded me the oft-forgotten luxury of rolling with the tides, as they say. No obsessive planning. No lofty schemes. I've barely made a decision; decisions have presented themselves in front of me as if to say "I am the only logical choice." I drifted into the cycle in March, that temperamental lamb-beast, and I've cycled through as beekeeper, then writer, then farmer, all the way into the heart of August.

Keeping bees, working on a farm, and writing share a common denominator: the beekeeper, the farmer, and the writer rely on that which is natural and wild to be natural and wild, while attempting to contain the naturalness and wildness within an imposed structure. We must work with nature-- the hive mind, the harvest cycle, the unbridled idea--and manipulate it to produce our intended outcome. (Do I sound Romantic yet?)

From Andre Gide's The Immoralist:

"I marveled at the serene future promised by those robust oxen, those fat cows in their opulent pastures.

Secret treasure, Red Hook Community Farm

The apple trees planted in rows on the favorable hillsides heralded a splendid crop that summer;

First local heirlooms of the season, Union Square Greenmarket

I dreamed of the rich burden of fruit beneath which their branches would soon be bending.

NYC tomatoes sans blight (so far)

From this orderly abundance, from this happy subservience, from this smiling cultivation, a harmony was being wrought,

Little Shop of Horrors collard greens, Red Hook Community Farm, Brooklyn

no longer fortuitous but imposed, a rhythm, a beauty at once human and natural,

Rooftop hive in Fort Greene, Brooklyn

in which one could no longer tell what was most admirable, so intimately united into a perfect understanding were the fecund explosion of free nature and man's skillful effort to order it.

Morning light at Red Hook Community Farm, Brooklyn

What would that effort be, I thought, without the savage mastery it masters?

Bed prep at Added Value's farm on Governor's Island

What would be the savage energy of that overflowing sap without the intelligent effort which channels and discharges it, laughing, into profusion?"

Man mastering savage nature in Brooklyn

On Being Homeless

Overheard in NYC on Sunday, Downtown A Train:

MAN: Excuse me, can I have your attention, I'm sorry to interrupt your day, but I am homeless, and all I'm missing are the shoes. My boss is Jewish. He hired me under the condition that I show up to work tomorrow in a suit and tie. I got the suit. I got the tie. I have six dollars and all I need are the shoes. If you could spare some...

WOMAN: You can buy shoes for six dollars! (screaming)

MAN:...some change, I'd really appreciate...

WOMAN: You better watch who you talk about, when 25% of that group lives in this city! (still screaming)

MAN: WHAT did I say? I just said he was a Jew, I didn't say anything...

WOMAN: Well Good! Then you're alright with God!

MAN: I don't give a f*** about God!

The banter continued, each strange outburst from the woman inciting an "I don't give a f*** about _________!" (Your religion, children, etc.) until he concluded with "Because nobody gives a f*** about me!" and stormed off the train at the Museum of Natural History. (I bet he wanted to see the dinos.)

The whole conversation was so ridiculous and hilarious: one of those essential NYC moments. However, when he concluded "Nobody gives a fuzzybuzzness about me," my heart hurt a tiny bit.

After a long day of getting down and dirty on the urban farm, the skies' water broke and drenched everything, cutting the humidity and freezing all minimally clothed farmers, like me. I retrieved what looked like a spare rain coat from the greenhouse to wear on the long, over-air-conditioned subway ride to Wash Heights. On my way out of work, I spotted the bus and ran to catch it. At this moment, I caught my first whiff.

There is a comprehensive composting operation on the farm that volunteers frequently help turn. I did it last weekend, and it was quite a stinky job. I learned that things that don't really have much of a scent, like iceberg lettuce, absolutely reek when rotted. The scent clings to cloth, skin, and apparently rubber raincoat material.

I sat on the end of the train, in the non-handicapped two seater. The A train was empty when I got on at Jay Street, so I spread out a bit, lapping up the luxury of lounging and legroom. At Chambers Street, however, the stockbrokers piled on, all suits and pantyhose. Every seat quickly filled with people. Every seat, that is, except the one next to me.

You can see where this is going: somebody sat down, smelled me, got up, and I became the "smelly one." Knowing passengers glared at innocent newcomers who thought they'd spotted a hidden treasure, as if to say "Don't do it!" I busied myself. I tried to ignore the fact that a sphere of empty space encircled me. But I saw the looks at my dirty, bee camo-bedecked toes, at my streaked legs, at my mud-covered coat. I heard the whispers of "You probably don't want to sit there." And I'm not claiming that anyone thought I was homeless per say, (although it has happened, namely in San Francisco outside of a Kinko's at 6am,) but they thought I was smelly and dirty, and they were correct.

I wished I could make the stank evaporate, to allow someone to sit in the adjacent empty seat without nasal assault. I considered standing up and offering up my stinky seat, but thought I'd infect more people if I stood. So I sat there, from Brooklyn to 181st Street, stinking away, feeling awful about myself, even though I knew deep down that I did not stink, not the innermost part of me at least. Is this what all smelly people think?

Nobody on the train said anything mean to me, they all just looked at me with expressions ranging from shock to vague disgust to condescension. They say looks can kill, and trust me when I tell you they're not talking about big-boobed blondes.

When I emerged above ground, I stood in the rain and let the caked compost sludge flow back down into the ground, purified of my alleged sins. I hope the homeless museum-goer got his shoes and went to his job with the Jewish boss. I hope he got a chance to take a shower first. If he didn't, I hope the boss wasn't too hard on him.

Sustainable Weekend

A sustainable weekend looks like this:

1. Friday night farm dinner, eaten with "stranger." All produce picked in Red Hook only hours earlier.

a. Massaged kale (spoken in child-molester-voice)

b. Fresh cukes with garlic-basil yogurt sauce

c. Collards and black eyed peas

d. Red Stripe

e. Greens

2. Saturday Farmer's Market in Red Hook

a. Purple kale and Hakeuri turnips

b. Ruby Chard, aka Eliza Chard:

c. non-Funyon onions. (Funyons are on my top-10 Grossest Foods list because they smell like feet, feel like like eczema, sound like styrofoam, etc.)

3. Free reggae Concert in Central Park on Sunday:

a. Play with last night's pinata winnings! Don't let these chotchkies go to waste!

1. Pretend they are members of your army, fighting to save the planet!

2. Imagine what it would be like to fall in love with a small yellow soldier.

3. Marvel at the self-restraint you've demonstrated in withstanding the urge to pull the parachute's string. (2 days and counting!)

b. Watch the happy people enjoying a free summer concert.

c. Get inspired to dig around Craigslist for size 8.5 roller skates!

d. Pump Up The Jam:

4. Ruminate about American consumerism:

5. Don't let the rain get you down! Instead, set up still lives involving reusable milk cartons, fresh produce, and antique books!