Chopper

Progress on my veggie patch is often slow. Part of the “problem” is that I so enjoy hanging out with Sarah and TJ. They generally rev their days up slowly and it’s hard not chew the fat with them while they mill around. By the time they head out it can be pretty toasty outside and less pleasant to garden and there goes the day. I lie down and get up with lofty visions of productivity and then let myself get wooed.

I was set to make serious inroads on one of my planting beds the other morning when TJ made this proposal, “Hey Man, you wanna take a ride and check out this job with me…I’m taking the bike”. The job was the removal of a sizeable Blue Spruce…the bike is a throaty, leather and chrome Harley. Digging another planting bed could wait.

In New York I’d roll my eyes every time an idiot would gun the throttle on his “chopper”, rattling windows and setting off car alarms. TJ’s bike has some rumble to it but not obnoxiously so. He assured me that he doesn’t drive fast. As he put it, “It’s a marathon Man, not a sprint.” And there, in a nutshell, is the Dutton philosophy on life. We helmeted ourselves, I hopped on the back and we headed out. Once we turned off the gravel road onto tarmac he turned on the radio. I’ve always thought it was crazy driving a bike that growls and playing a radio loud enough to compete with it. But cruising along behind TJ, the air was so nice, the 360° view was so nice, the feel of going over hills and taking turns was so nice and Van Morisson pulled it all together so well. I got it.

At an intersection where soy beans meet soy beans, we passed another guy on a bike. TJ gave him the international bikers’ salute. "Not everyone believes in the brotherhood," he explained, "but I do".

Braddock

I am sitting on a spread of plywood in a vacant, windowless art studio in what had been a catholic school. (I'll be crashing here for the next couple nights).



Outside, the ding, ding, ding of decending barricades announces a train going or coming from US Steel across the street. The three or four story school building is now lived in by one person. Jeb holes up in a large classroom on the top floor. There is more space in that one room than he knows what to do with and then of course there’s the whole rest of that floor. Below that is a floor of artist studios and below that is a sizable gallery and below that…

You could say Braddock PA is a wasteland and you’d be right, and you could say it has tremendous up-side potential and you would also be right. 90% of the structures are gone and a good number of those remaining are shells or nearly so. But there are still gems to be found and in all that new open space where buildings had been, lots of things could happen. Anything seems to be possible here and so now and again some young thing with lofty ideas and a lot of enthusiam comes and buys a church or a bank for next to nothing.

Typical Braddock

The Transformasium Crew's current abode with mini greenhouse in the foreground,
U.S.Steel in the background

My history with the place is long and strange. These days it’s a place where I have friends and it’s a place where interesting things happen that I like to be a part of. Specifically, there is a group of four women working on building a community space from a former church. They are unflaggingly enthusiastic, committed to the idea of community, they are creative, kind, funny, quirky, industrious and pretty brilliant. Invariably, when I show up in Braddock they are in the middle of something that I find completely engaging. So I keep showing up to see what they are up to and to help out with the project du jour. Today, the project du jour was a presentation on building deconstruction.

In the rustbelt, tens of thousands of building are slated for demolition. The Church that the four have been working on (what they call the Transformasium) would have been one of them. Instead, the Transformasium crew got the Borough of North Braddock to sell them the place for $20,000. In exchange, the Transformasium crew will take care of the structure and has agreed to demolish the residential wing that was destroyed by fire several years ago.

Inside the Transformasium (and you thought your house was a project!) This is the area that will be the arts/community space, not the part that the crew has been deconstructing.

Not wanting to waste resources, the Trans-crew opted to deconstruct the building rather than demolish it and to encourage other people to do likewise they documented the process and shared their experience. After deconstructing for three days a week for six weeks they fired up the community bread oven, made a dozen or so pizzas and presented to the community.

Part of what impresses me so much about the group is that they are living in such an open manner. None of them has deconstructed a building before but none of them hesitated to present on it. If it's a success they will present that, if it is a disaster they will present that too. It has nothing to do with self-promotion and everything to do with getting information out there to facilitate the revitalization of the area.

The presentation under way

Folks getting the lowdown on the Community bread oven

Smells like Chicken

Getting my ducks in a row to move out here was a slow process. Glacial actually. The average New Yorker would have ironed out the details within a week or two, and this is one of the things that makes me think that I'm just not a New Yorker anymore.

Upon returning from FG I started reading up on “biointensive” agriculture and pouring over seeds catalogs. It took me quite some time to get a seed order in. For someone who’s never really grown food, it’s hard to know how to begin determining how many beet seeds are needed to grow enough beets for three people, how many packages that translates into when accounting for the germination rate, how much space will be needed, which of the many varieties of beets make the most sense (or will be the most fun), etc. Multiply those questions by about 30 different crops and you can start to imagine how perplexed I was feeling. And then there's the fact that the catalog is over a hundred pages long and reads mostly like this,

Open-pollinated WINTER SQUASH
Plant 4–5 seeds per hill. Allow 4–6 feet between hills. Approximate seed counts:
acorn, butternut 280 seeds/oz, buttercup 160 seeds/oz, hubbard 120 seeds/oz, spaghetti 190 seeds/oz. 1/8 oz packet sows: acorn, butternut 7 hills; buttercup, delicata 4 hills; hubbard 3 hills; spaghetti 5 hills...

Galeux d’Eysines (98 days) C. max. Its full name Brodé Galeux d’Eysines translates to “embroidered with pebbles.” Garden writer Barbara Damrosch says “it looks as if peanut-shaped worms were crawling about its surface.” Depending on your point of view, it is either among the ugliest or most beautiful of all squashes. I vote for the latter. This heirloom, hailing from the Bordeaux region of France, was listed by Vilmorin in 1883 as Warted Sugar Marrow. It resurfaced at the Pumpkin Fair in Tranzault, France, in 1996. Shaped like rounded slightly flattened pumpkins, the 15 lb. fruits have salmon-peach skins covered with large warts. Although Galeux is worth growing for beauty alone, its tender moist sweet orange flesh is delightful in soups or baked. Amy Goldman recommends sautéing it in butter or using it in place of white beans in garbure, “a fabulous main course soup” from Bordeaux. Ripened easily from direct seeding both in 2004 and 2007, neither prime squash years. For your autumn pleasure; not a good keeper.
1651GE Galeux d’Eysines ➂
A=1/16oz, $1.80 B=1/8oz, $3.40 C=1/4oz, $6.20 D=1/2oz, $12.00
E=1oz, $22.00 K=4oz, $60.00
1652 GO Galeux d’Eysines OG ➀ OT-certified.
A=1/16oz, $2.00 B=1/8oz, $3.60 C=1/4oz, $6.50 D=1/2oz, $13.00
E=1oz, $24.00 K=4oz, $65.00

All the while I was reading up on diesel vehicles and what is required to run them off waste vegetable oil (WVO). After some research old Mercedes from the late 70’s and 80’s started to sound like a decent way to go. They are fairly ubiquitous, have engines that last forever and are way more affordable than a new car even when considering the inevitable repairs. I spotted a MB diesel wagon on Craig’s List and jumped on it. It had about 300,000 miles on it. I say “about” because the odometer is broken. Also broken are the oil gauge, the engine temperature gauge, the fuel gauge, the lock on the driver’s side door the antenna and the rear window motors. The car goes from 0-60 in around two minutes. That said, it fires right up (when full of diesel) and doesn’t complain too vociferously on hills. It’s also as cute as a button.

When Diesel invented the Diesel, he designed it to run on vegetable oil and to this day you can still run any diesel on veg. As you can imagine, WVO emissions are generally better than running off petroleum, it can be produced domestically, yadda, yadda, yadda. And then there’s the fact that WVO is a ubiquitous byproduct of the food industry and often available locally at no cost.

The Chinese restaurant around the corner from you fries the hell out of almost everything. They fry in the same oil until it looks like molasses and becomes a disposal problem. (If you ever see the stuff that comes out of Chinese food fryers you’ll be loathe to eat there again). Depending on several factors, the restaurant may have to pay to dispose of it’s WVO, or it may sell it for 10-20 cents per gallon. Generally it is poured from the fryer into the 4.5 gallon cubes that it came in or into a dumpster that is reserved just for WVO. The company contracted to pick up the oil generally cleans it, mixes it with a bunch of other crap to make feed, sells it to farmers and then suckers like me who don’t entirely avoid factory farmed meat, eat it all over again.

During times when restaurants pay for oil disposal, they are often happy to have someone pick it up for free and even if they do make a pittance selling waste oil they are often happy to give it to a customer with whom they have a relationship. The oil can then be filtered and dewater at almost no cost.

As it turns out, the guy I bought my car from has been driving on WVO for four years with no modifications to his vehicle. He just pours the stuff straight into his tank. In colder weather he mixes WVO with diesel, 50/50. With that in mind, I found a guy in Queens who sells filtered and dewatered veggie oil for a buck a gallon. I did the math and went out to Queens a few days before my departure to pick up 40 gallons; enough to get me to Ohio.



In cooler weather a car won’t start on straight veg because the oil too thick to flow well and the engine isn’t warm enough to make it less viscous. That in mind, I planned to drive a few miles to let the engine heat up and then pull over to fill the tank with straight WVO. My plan changed when I opened the trunk to pack and discovered that one of the containers was leaking.

It was unclear exactly which container was leaking and the leaker had to go before I piled all my belongings into the rear. The only thing I could think to do was to empty as many them as possible into the tank despite the engine being cold.



After the first 4.5 gallon cube was emptied into the car I turned the key in the ignition and learned that the fuel gauge was broken. I kept filling until it dribbled down the side of the car. When it’s veg, you don’t feel so bad about spills. Car loaded and goodbyes said I crossed my fingers and turned the key. The engine grunted and otherwise stayed stubbornly silent. On the second attempt it fired up, jiggled some and then settled into a low, grumbly idle. Those near the rear said it smelled like cooking. Off I went.

Every so often I would pull into a service area or a gas station and empty another container into the tank. I can’t tell you how good it feels to pull into an Exxon station, fill up with vegetable oil and then leave. It parallels my relationship with McDonalds and Starbucks, where I don’t eat but enjoy shitting.

The drive was long and initially nerve wracking. Not long into the trip I smelled a pretty pungent burning smell. I pulled over and checked everything I could think of and it all seemed in order. I kept on keeping-on and 9 incident-free hours later I pulled into the Duttons’ gravel drive in Navarre. When I knocked on the door to the farmhouse a thick arm emerged and extended a tall cold beer to me. Meet TJ Dutton.

Waking Up

20 April 09

I woke up feeling much refreshed.

I had the post-general-anesthesia feeling of not having slept, but of having skipped over a slice of time. I was warm and relaxed under a down comforter and not inclined to go anywhere in a hurry.

The little space in the room not taken up by me or the bed was stuffed with boxes and cast-off baby paraphernalia. Two walls wrapped closely around the bed, both punctuated with drafty windows that let in crisp, fresh air and birdsong.

It was 6:00 in Navarre, Ohio. Returning to a diurnal schedule took all of one evening.



The bedroom is on the first floor of Sarah and TJ’s farm house. I’ve since installed myself on the second floor, which boasts 5 rooms, 14 windows, wall-to-wall commercial carpeting, cracked plaster and stellar views of rolling pastures. In the upstairs apartment there is no running water and aside from the mini-fridge that I brought, no appliances. Shelving is cinderblock and particleboard and for the moment I’m back to sleeping on a thermarest. Here we go again.





If you thought it would be a cold day in hell before I bought a car and moved to the Midwest, let me explain:

When the 20-something angst of “Should” moved aside, it revealed a more curious and laid-back “Would-like-to”. In that fresher space I nurture a dream of building and fixing things, cultivating crops, being thrifty and useful; typical back-to-the-land stuff.

For years I thought that I would do those things in Brooklyn. Slowly it dawned on me that trying on that fantasy would be easier elsewhere. Maybe the jungle was an interlude between the two - an inhale. During the jungle days I started reading about the Would-like-to life and started planning it as well.

An embarrassing confession: In the Should days, I spent a lot time contemplating ways to save poor people. Me to the rescue! Given how stacked the deck was in my favor I thought it would be profoundly immoral to not focus on creating fundamental social and political change. I had confused my position with my person. The truth about my person is this; I am not a politician or a community organizer. I am not shrewd or dogged. And I'm not sure I like people all that much. That still leaves plenty of room for do-gooding and so here’s another confession; I am not completely without hope.

In a macro sense, I do not think that the human story will end well (nor do I think it is going all that well). Still, seeing as we are all here it would be a shame if we didn’t all live well and lightly. So the better question that I keep in my pocket these days is, “how can I be useful in a way that I love?” An answer taking shape in my mind (and the minds of hordes of others) is back-to-the-land goes urban. In my fantasy that involves growing food on a small scale in an urban area that’s short on resources. My hunch is that it will be both what I enjoy, and what I can do. It is a token gesture towards improving the environment and public health on a local level. In a nutshell, that's what this coming chapter is about for me.

Wendell Barry said that eating is an agricultural act. Michael Pollan (or maybe it was Alice Waters) added that it is a political act. For anyone who hasn’t read any of their work, I'll beat a dead horse for a sec. Start to finish, conventional produce gobbles vast amounts of petrol and organics have their own issues. Organic growers for example often till the soil, then water to promote weed growth, till again to kill the weeds and then plant. While not using herbicides, this practice requires more passes with the tractor and more water. One could argue that industrial production, organic or not, is inherently unsustainable since industrial ag takes about four times the area per yield as some biointensive practices and ships food, on average, over 1000 miles before it is consumed. The point is, if eating is an agricultural and political act, it is also a social and environmental one. If cities make sense environmentally, then certainly cities that produce as much of their food in situ make even more sense. Thus my intereste in urban, organic, biointensively grown food consumed locally.

What does urban farming have to do with Navarre?

It was perhaps 2005 when Chris and I went to a tree dissection lab in New Hampshire. That is where I met TJ and Sarah, two budding arborist/farmers from Ohio. We all hit it off immediately.

Fast-forward three years and one continent. I had spoken with Sarah and TJ only a handful of times and I hadn’t seen them since. But those occasions on which we spoke were all amity. It was halfway through my stay in French Guiana (or so I thought) and I was contemplating next moves. I wanted to learn about cultivation and Sarah and TJ came to mind. I sent them a letter saying, among other things, “I am thinking of visiting you guys and not leaving.” They sent back an emphatic “Yes”.

The two live in an old farmhouse on 23 acres of pasture along with 4 cats, two dogs, one (human) kid and two dozen beautiful cows that all have names and are delicious. The farm goes back in TJ’s family a ways and until recently it was around 600 acres. Mostly, they are in the tree biz, but they also raise beef for themselves and their friends and family. They don't do much in the way of cultivation and would love to have fresh veggies. I want to learn how to grow food and need a place to do it. So they're giving me a roof and turf and I’ll share the bounty. The general plan is to spend a growing season here to learn the ropes in what is essentially a free laboratory and then apply that know-how in an urban setting. Sarah and TJ have demanded only that I wander in and out of their space at will and do whatever I need to to make myself comfortable. They are truly some of the friendliest people I have ever come across.