I grew up on a farm. Well, that's not technically true. I grew up in a suburb in Sunnyvale, CA, but it felt like a farm. Our humble tract home right off of Wolfe Road and El Camino had a big backyard, nearly a third of an acre, and my grandparents made good use of the land. My sister and I spent a bucolic childhood in that backyard, pulling weeds and squishing bugs for fun and profit. As a Silicon Valley professional, I haven’t lived the farm life for a long time now, but I wouldn’t trade those long summer days melting into luxuriant twilight out on the barn-shaped patio for all the whiskey in Ireland.

I was actually a little jealous when I went back to visit the neighborhood recently. Part of the Peterson Jr. High school field has been turned into a cooperative farm. That’s right, I have farm envy. And it’s gotten worse since I heard Novella Carpenter, author of Farm City – The Education of an Urban Farmer talk about her book on NPR. I shocked myself when I pressed Buy on the one-click order page, but I haven’t regretted it for a moment.

In Farm City, Carpenter describes the trials and tribulations of her Oakland urban farm, named after the near war zone neighborhood, Ghost Town Farm. Squatting on an abandoned lot next to her apartment, Novella with her boyfriend and neighbors turned the weedy, trash-strewn lot into a verdant patch of green in the middle of a concrete jungle. Complete with rabbits, chickens, and turkeys raised for meat as well as eggs, many of her third-world neighbors felt right at home, while others were prompted to ask, “Is this Oakland or Oklahoma?”

From Carpenter’s example, I’ve been inspired - and in this Great Recession, my dwindling unemployment reserves are inspiring me as well. An apartment dweller for years, I recently moved to Daly City with my boyfriend, and our small rental house has a large backyard. I actually spent a sleepless night last week envisioning just how to justify raised vegetable beds in order to catch the most sun for a good yield. With the Daly City fog and sandy soil, we can definitely grow artichokes, and according to Sunset Magazine’s list of climate zones, we can grow just about anything else too.

When you think about it, it’s really a shame that the Silicon Valley sprang up where it did, in some of the most fertile farmland in the world. Before IBM and Intel manufactured computer chips that poisoned the ground, Sunnyvale’s top industry was orchards: cherries, peaches, citrus – you name it. Just throw down seeds and they sprung up in a verdant crop ready for picking and canning at the nearby Libby’s plant. (The Libby's fruit cocktail can water tower still dominates downtown Sunnyvale, saved from demolition as a historic landmark.) A local girl all my life, I’ve profited from the tech boom, but I also pine for my days as a suburban farm girl. 

Unlike Carpenter, I wasn’t the child of 60’s hippies getting back to the earth, I was the grandchild of a woman who’d lived through the Great Depression, a woman who knew how to live off the land in good times and bad. In Sunnyvale we harvested crops from 13 mature fruit trees: three different breeds of cherries, apples, apricots, permissions, plums, cherry-plums, two orange trees, peaches, lemons, and almonds. When summer came around, my grandparents put in rows of strawberries, tomatoes, zucchini and corn. We ate warm blackberries off the back fence nearly year round. And this was all in addition to the roses and flower gardens. My sister and I learned to count change as we manned the makeshift farmers market in our driveway.

Did I mention that my grandmother, Kay from the coal town of Connellsville, PA, was confined to a wheelchair? She’d been crippled by rheumatoid arthritis since she was a kid, but it barely slowed her down. She hated doctors and didn’t trust them. With fingers gnarled like the roots of her rose bushes, and knees like tree stumps, Kay took Anacin four times a day and still rose from her wheelchair with a shovel to kill a garden snake that dared to threaten my sister. My grandpa Sonny, a union grocery man all his life, mostly followed her directions, and was usually found up a ladder in a tree harvesting fruit or mowing his prized lawns. Together, my grandparents were a force of nature that tamed the wilds of our suburb, nourished our bodies and minds from the land, and taught us all about food and life.  

As the Great Recession moves into its second year this harvest season, I’ve been thinking about my grandparents more than usual, both gone now, and planning to start a backyard vegetable garden of my own. Farm City has been an inspiring read - and a glimmer of hope in these darkening days.

As a professional, I’ve been through layoffs consistently through my career. It’s the way the Silicon Valley does business. Hire in good times, lay off in bad – usually right before the holidays. I’ve developed a resistance to the ebb and flow of business, and a pattern of saving to insulate me from the ups and downs, just like Kay and Sonny taught me. (Grandma always had a roll of bills hidden in a coffee can in the freezer. Her babies weren’t ever going hungry like she did as a child.) But as everyone already knows, this economy is no seasonal downturn. We’re in it for a long haul.

During the Great Depression, collective farms sprung up in cities all over the country, providing food and hope to people in need. We’d be smart to remember these days that there’s more than one way to make a living, with our hands in the soil as well as with our heads in a cubicle.

According to Carpenter, the first step to starting a vegetable garden in the city is to test the soil for lead or other heavy metals and dangerous contaminants. Kay and Sonny never had to worry about this step, but its one I’ll be taking soon. The next step is to create a compost heap. Using table scraps, coffee grounds, and garden clippings, by next spring, we should have a healthy supply of compost to fertilize the raised vegetable beds I plan to build. Downloading worms into a suburban farm is a good thing. I can’t wait to get my hands dirty, and I know my grandparents will be smiling down on me.

I can nearly smell the clover that invaded Sonny’s front lawn, and remember sitting in the middle of the patch near Kay’s rose garden, playing with honeybees that never stung.

Amy Benfer also talks about urban farming and Novella Carpenter's Farm City in her Salon article,"How does your city garden grow?"

Rosemary Picado is a technical writer and freelance journalist. She lives in Daly City with her boyfriend and four cats.