It’s not easy being green. When Novella Carpenter and her boyfriend Bill moved into a duplex in Oakland they started with just a beehive on the deck. She recycles the abandoned waste ground next door into a garden full of fruit trees and heirloom vegetables. Under the empty threat of developers turning the garden into a condo Novella experiments with raising turkeys for thanksgiving, chickens for eggs, rabbits for meat. She becomes yet another colourful character in a neighbourhood full of them. Novella’s accounts of killing turkeys, a buck humping the wrong end of a doe, the infamous water melon theft and dumpster diving with Bill to feed her pigs and chickens mingle with getting to know the area around the 2-8 and its regeneration which will eventually lead to their farm’s demise.
For those of us flirting with self-sufficiency this book comes at a good time. It is a reminder that farming wherever you do it is a combination of hard work, success, heartbreak and back ache.
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