Farm City_ The Education Of An Urban Farmer Part 10

But then again, everyone at the party was on some kind of Bay Area diet kick anyway. The gluten-intolerant munched on ears of corn in the corner. The vegans had their own grill set up with toasting tofu. The raw-food vegans were sipping on freshly macheted green coconuts. The pescatarians were shoving ceviche into their faces. Defining ourselves by what we eat-that's what we do for fun around here.

I was sure that I could find a freshairian or a locavore to share my pain with but instead decided to leave early. I found Bill, an unapologetic omnivore, moving from grill to grill, stuffing sausages and ribs and veggie burgers into his mouth. I ripped a piece of watermelon out of his hand and insisted that, really, we couldn't stay another moment.

Later that day, I ordered three tea plants-Camellia sinensis-over the phone.

"I want the gallon size," I gritted out as the perky woman took my order. I needed a quick harvest.

"We'll include recipes for how to make tea," she a.s.sured me. The rest of the day pa.s.sed in a painful haze.

On day two, I made several unfortunate discoveries.

With dreams of latkes dancing in my slow-moving, uncaffeinated brain, I made my way out to the garden with a shovel and a bucket. I have a half dozen potato zones in the veggie garden. One sprawled out of a neglected compost pile. I imagined the fat little crusters down below mixing with the dried-up leaves and stalks that had been breaking down over the years. A carbohydrate dream.

In February I had nestled the potatoes, organic blues, bought at the grocery store, at the bottom of the compost bin. Over their round shoulders I dumped fava bean leftovers, hay cleaned out from the chicken area, spent pea vines. As the green potato stalks emerged I bundled them with more straw and green matter. In Matthew Biggs's Complete Book of Vegetables, Matthew Biggs's Complete Book of Vegetables, the British garden writer advised, "New potatoes are harvested when the flowers are blooming; larger ones once the foliage dies back." (He also mentioned that Marie Antoinette wore potato blossoms in her hair.) the British garden writer advised, "New potatoes are harvested when the flowers are blooming; larger ones once the foliage dies back." (He also mentioned that Marie Antoinette wore potato blossoms in her hair.) I knew it was early, my potatoes hadn't yet blossomed, but Mr. Biggs had no idea how carb starved I was. A plate of mashed potatoes. If I could eat that, I would be happy for the rest of the day.

But now that I was digging, the plant, I had to admit, didn't look very healthy. I peered closer. Oh, no. Potato bugs, hundreds of them, were gnawing on the leaves and stalk. I plunged the shovel into the dirt and brought up a generous scoop. Grappling through the dirt, I found exactly two purple potatoes. Small ones. The size of marbles. The mother potato was deflated from this effort, and a few pale shoots slumped off of her girth.

I surveyed the rest of the potato plants tucked here and there around the garden. Instead of a seeing bountiful plants whose secret underground parts would get me through this experiment, I saw only unproductive freeloaders. What I had hoped was an iceberg of carbohydrates, with plenty down below, was reduced to an ice cube bobbing in a swimming pool. It would be a very small crop indeed. I carefully placed the marbles in my bucket and went upstairs to prepare my feast.

While the spuds fried in a dry cast-iron pan, I paced the living room, wondering what the h.e.l.l I was supposed to eat for the rest of the month. During the Irish potato boom, people had plenty of food because potatoes grow easily-and, more than that, they make you feel full. Without carbs, satiety would be a distant memory.

Then I noticed our mantel. For the past two years, some corncobs I grew my first year of squat farming had lingered up there, along with a set of deer antlers and a white orchid plant. Indian corn, grown and saved for decoration. Once mere objects-now, as I gazed up at the multicolored cobs, I saw food. Carb food.

And so I did something I'd never done before. I ate an item of home decor. From a yellow-and-blue-checked ear of corn, I carefully pried out the individual kernels from their cobby home and piled them onto the table. As I loosened each kernel I felt like a prairie woman or an Indian squaw. I whispered thanks to my past self, the carbohydrate provider, who had thought to save those ears. One cob yielded a handful of corn. I deeply wanted cornmeal pancakes. But I didn't have a metate, the traditional stone grinder that Native Americans used, and I wasn't about to destroy my electric coffee grinder.

But I did have a Spong hand-cranked coffee grinder I'd bought a long time ago, out of nostalgia. It's made of metal painted black and red, with a little removable pan that catches the grounds. My mom's artsy friend Barb always hand-ground her coffee. Barb wore bohemian outfits (men's clothes, flowing dresses with skeleton patterns), had red hair down to her b.u.t.t, and once had a pet crow. I remember visiting her kitchen in Idaho as a child. Barb and my mom flitted around the kitchen, laughing and glad to see each other again. My sister and I, standing on a chair, took turns grinding the dark beans for their morning coffee.

When, a few years ago, I spotted a similar grinder at a bas.e.m.e.nt sale of an Italian imported-foods shop, I couldn't resist. And of course, I hadn't used it since. Who wants to labor, precaffeinated, over a hand-grinder for ten minutes in the morning? Yet now this grinder would be my salvation.

I carefully placed the kernels into the Spong. It was as if I were a kid again, standing on a chair and grinding. Only this time, I had my full weight propped up against the table so it wouldn't shake as I watched the kernels mill around in the hopper. But instead of the fetching aroma of fresh-ground coffee, I had the powdery residue of almost pure starch.

I've made cornmeal pancakes before, a family recipe adapted from Joy of Cooking: Joy of Cooking: Add boiling water to cornmeal and let it rest. Add baking powder, salt, milk, an egg, and some melted b.u.t.ter, then mix. Of those ingredients, I had only the hot water and the egg. After letting an eighth of a cup of boiling water soak the yellow grain, I cracked an egg in, whipped it about, and poured the mixture into three blobs on a cast-iron pan. Add boiling water to cornmeal and let it rest. Add baking powder, salt, milk, an egg, and some melted b.u.t.ter, then mix. Of those ingredients, I had only the hot water and the egg. After letting an eighth of a cup of boiling water soak the yellow grain, I cracked an egg in, whipped it about, and poured the mixture into three blobs on a cast-iron pan.

I couldn't believe that the cakes actually puffed up like real pancakes. I ate them with a drizzle of honey and some stewed peaches on the side, with the blackened dwarf potatoes. They were the best pancakes I've ever eaten. I licked the plate. I counted the remaining corn cobs. Twelve.

CHAPTER NINETEEN.

July Fourth has always annoyed me. The endless gazing upward at a few flecks of light, the snarled traffic, people blowing off their fingers. But this year was different. This Fourth of July, I would be reaping the benefits of some work I had done months before.

In a wave of 1970s California nostalgia, my friend Jennifer and I drove up to Mendocino County last fall to pick grapes and make wine. Jennifer was a DIY lesbian who, when Bill and I arrived pale and eager from Seattle, taught us how to power our cars with biodiesel made out of fryer grease. Jennifer and I became friends and now worked together at the biodiesel filling station in Berkeley.

Jennifer had negotiated to exchange some biodiesel she had made for the grapes. When we drove into the valley, the vineyards were a riot of grapevines whose leaves were just starting to get their fall color. Purple fruit, the color of a bruise, hung amid green-gold leaves. The owner of the vineyard sat in his tractor. He was a tall, bearded hippie who grew biodynamic grapes. Jennifer handed him the jug of biodiesel with a look of triumph-she loved bartering. "The brix is at twenty-six," he said, referring to the sugar levels, and smiled. Then, in a rush because it was harvest season, he grabbed the jug of fuel and drove off, leaving us to harvest acres of grapes.

Days before, professional pickers had moved along the neat green rows and selected the best cl.u.s.ters, so we were picking the sloppy seconds. The overripe, the wrinkled, the tattered grapes left on the vine would become our wine.

It was hot when we picked, but the work wasn't hard. We snapped off cl.u.s.ters and dropped them into plastic lug boxes. The grapes were sweet and seedy. It only took an hour to pick hundreds of pounds.

The much harder work would be the crush, but luckily Jennifer and I had invited friends to help. Willow, always interested in gleaning and fermentation projects, had come over. First we pulled off the stems by hand, a circle of us gossiping and telling stories. Though there are crus.h.i.+ng machines, we decided to do the crush in the traditional way. We poured the destemmed grapes into a large tub. Jennifer and I washed our feet and climbed in. There was a sickening moment when toes met grapes. Suddenly, it felt like we were standing in a pool of water. But we tromped and stomped. Our legs got sticky. It was kind of like an exercise machine. The party lasted well into the night. The yield: four five-gallon gla.s.s jugs full of grape juice.

Through the following winter and spring the juice bubbled and fermented in the jugs. Now, on the nation's day of independence, Jennifer and I would make the wine official by placing it in bottles and corking it.

I arrived at her place with only a slight caffeine headache, and we began bottling, using a tube, gravity, and some used but clean bottles. I've never been much of a drinker, but as I filled up bottle after bottle, I was glad that I had planned for the future. Putting up food is, at its heart, an optimistic thing. It's a bold way to say: I will be sticking around. Our wine had been fermenting for eight months. That's long-term planning for eating. Well, drinking.

And, in a way, bottling wine was the perfect way to celebrate America's independence. The Alcoholic Republic, The Alcoholic Republic, by W. J. Rorabaugh, explains that a state of hunger and drunkenness was a way of life for early Americans, most of whom drank four ounces of distilled spirits every day. "The taste for strong drink was no doubt enhanced by the monotony of the American diet, which was dominated by corn," Rorabaugh writes. In the wild West, families subsisted on corn pone, salt pork, mola.s.ses, and whiskey. I, on the other hand, would be living on cornmeal, rabbits, greens, and wine. by W. J. Rorabaugh, explains that a state of hunger and drunkenness was a way of life for early Americans, most of whom drank four ounces of distilled spirits every day. "The taste for strong drink was no doubt enhanced by the monotony of the American diet, which was dominated by corn," Rorabaugh writes. In the wild West, families subsisted on corn pone, salt pork, mola.s.ses, and whiskey. I, on the other hand, would be living on cornmeal, rabbits, greens, and wine.

While I happily contemplated spending the rest of July in a boozy torpor, Jennifer's roommates-amazing cooks-worked in the kitchen, roasting a chicken with new potatoes, pan-searing steaks, tossing salads. When everyone else took a break from bottling to eat real food, I wandered out to Jennifer's garden.

I tried to channel Euell Gibbons, the famous forager from the 1960s, whose books had been on the shelves of most ecologically minded folk of that era. His Stalking the Wild Asparagus Stalking the Wild Asparagus is a beautifully written guide to harvesting cattails and milkweed pods. Nature provided; you just had to know where to look. is a beautifully written guide to harvesting cattails and milkweed pods. Nature provided; you just had to know where to look.

I knew the book because my dad is a big fan of foraging, and he had given me a faded green paperback version the last time I saw him in Idaho, about seven years ago. I had just reached the age of my parents when they started farming and I felt drawn back to the ranch. Bill, always game for a road trip, packed a spare tire and jugs of water for the ten-hour drive to Orofino, Idaho.

After a swim in the Clearwater River, which smelled just as I remembered-like swampy willow water but fast-moving and clear-we drove up to the ranch. I wanted to see the house my parents had built with their own hands: a rough-hewn cabin covered with cedar s.h.i.+ngles and a tar-paper roof. I made Bill stop so I could pick some thimbleberries, berries in the Rubus Rubus family that my sister and I used to pick as children. They were velvety and tart. family that my sister and I used to pick as children. They were velvety and tart.

The circular alfalfa field had gone back to thistles and small trees. The house had disappeared. Burned down. In the clearing where it had stood, the apple trees had gone feral.

After the disappointing visit to the ranch, Bill and I met up with my dad in town. I rarely saw him-only a handful of times the whole time I was growing up-but I could see that he, too had, gone feral. He smelled of woodsmoke and was wearing a wool s.h.i.+rt I had sent him years ago for his birthday. Bald, with a mustache, he walked a little bowlegged, but overall he was fit as a fiddle.

Over hamburgers in a diner in Orofino, he shrugged his shoulders about the house burning down. It and the property had been sold years ago, and he had given up the idea of being a rancher. He had been living in a small cabin without electricity or running water. He hunted for food, went fly-fis.h.i.+ng.

When my sister and I were teenagers, our dad would send Christmas gifts of pine cones and photos of birch trees. These were worthless things to us-we craved the name-brand jeans we could never afford. But now, when I think back on that, I realize that those were heartfelt gifts. He was trying to express who he was and what he cared about.

He handed me the book with one caveat: "Euell sold out," he said, and shook his head. "G.o.dd.a.m.ned Grape-Nuts." As Gibbons had gotten more and more famous, he had been hired to be a spokesperson for the cereal company. This broke my poor father's heart.

Now, as I stood in Jennifer's garden, I thought my father would be proud of me, foraging for my supper, living off the land as he does. I grazed on some red Russian kale, pulled a couple of green apples off the tree, and discovered a few Cape gooseberries-orange fruits that grow in tomatillo-like husks. They were as sweet as honey.

I checked on Jennifer's bees, feeling a bit voyeuristic. Her healthy herd was finis.h.i.+ng up the day's work; many of them loitered outside the entrance of the hive and dripped down the side of the box in a cl.u.s.ter. I was filled with longing for my own lost bees. I had tried to order another package, but the beekeeping supply stores were sold out. One man told me they sold out by January. Colony collapse disorder had hit beekeepers hard that year, so there were no surplus supplies for backyard beekeepers like me. Without bees, I had no honey.

I tried to ignore the good smells coming from the kitchen and went back inside to drink a few gla.s.ses of wine. A man at the party tried the substance we had made and declared it "a witty little wine."

By midnight, we had forced the last cork into the seventy-fifth bottle. Bill picked me up, and we stuffed my share-twenty-five bottles of not very good Sangiovese wine-into our station wagon. That it wasn't good didn't matter. The possibilities were endless. I could use it for cooking. I could make balsamic vinegar. Sangria. Mulled wine. As we drove home along MLK the festivities of the Fourth on our street unfolded: children holding Roman candles, a car that shot out a twenty-foot flame, police and fire engines roaring up and down the streets. I imagined that this is what our street would look like if there was a riot. It was wonderful. I was drunk.

CHAPTER TWENTY.

By day five, my headaches-and body aches-from caffeine withdrawal had subsided. I actually felt terrific. Light, energetic, with a thrumming, exuberant feeling from eating so many greens and salads and farm-fresh eggs. I rode my bike around, trying to remember the taste of the food I used to eat. I had pizza and Chinese food amnesia.

In the mornings, I would wake up and go to my feeding area-the garden. The new ducks and geese greeted me with great quacking shouts. They gorged down a few scoops of chicken food and nibbled at the bok choy from Chinatown I upended into their area. The geese ate first, always, and made a big show, craning their necks up and down-looking at me, then back to feeding.

"What are they?" someone called out from behind the fence. "Swans?"

"No, they're ducks and geese," I said. I peered between the slats of the fence to see a large woman with two children. A few of the ducks, following the sound of her voice to the end of the fence, stood and begged for food.

"Well, bless you and have a wonderful day," the big lady said. The children trailed after her.

I plucked an apple and a few plums, and made plans for lunch. The pumpkins were still small but numerous. I yanked the smallest from the vine; I'd shred it and make pumpkin hash browns. A red-chested hummingbird came down, letting out short bursts of air, then flew back into the ether. It was mating season for the little hummer; maybe he mistook me for a potential compet.i.tor.

I squeezed the green stalk of a corn plant. Still just ear and silk, no substance. The Brandywine tomatoes were causing me much heartache. They were enormous but stubbornly green, and even after a hot day, they never threatened to blush.

I crouched near the zucchini plants and examined them. Beneath the giant turgid leaves, the fruits were still too small to eat. There was an abundance of the yellow-orange flowers, though. I had heard you could eat them, so I gathered a colanderful, with the intention of frying them.

I gave the flowers a quick rinse in the sink and shredded the pumpkin with the grater. When I dabbed the flowers dry with a tea towel, I heard a curious noise. A m.u.f.fled buzz. I checked my cell phone: no. It was coming from the flower. I peeled back the crepelike lips of the zucchini blossom, and out veered one very upset fuzzy black bee. It adjusted to the new light and hastened toward the open back door. My heart beating very fast, I picked up another flower and pried open the blossom. Another furry prisoner buzzed out. Four captives were released before I could eat lunch.

I dredged each of the flowers in egg, dipped them in cornmeal, then fried them. I sprinkled the former bee prison with lemon juice and stuck it in my mouth.

After eating "lunch," I made plans to go to Willow's garden to harvest lettuce for some former Black Panthers. A few months before my experiment in self-sufficiency began, I had encountered the organization, which I thought was long dead. "Join the Commemoration Committee for the Black Panther Party!" a kid with dreadlocks shouted outside North Gate Hall on UC Berkeley's campus, where I was taking some cla.s.ses. He stood behind a table with another man, behind a stack of newspapers with the words THE COMMEMORATOR and an image of a black panther busting out.

What did I know about the Black Panthers? Black power, guns, men in leather jackets, Huey Newton sitting in that big wicker chair. My mom and dad were active in the civil rights movement and had lived in Berkeley and Oakland when the Panthers first started in West Oakland in 1966. I was curious and wandered over.

The two pamphleteers were in the middle of explaining to a young black student that the Black Panthers were necessary for social justice in America. That education was the most important thing for all the kids who lived in the inner city. I nodded my head in agreement.

"Can I help?" I asked the kid and the middle-aged man standing next to him. Remembering the scene from the Malcolm X movie where the blond lady's help is rejected, I figured they would say no thanks, whitey.

"Yes, we're integrated now," the man said, and handed me the Black Panther Party Ten-Point Program.

"Well, I don't have time or money, how about vegetables?" I asked.

The man, whose name was Melvin, beamed. "We could really use some salad for our literacy program."

Melvin took down my name and promised to call. I read the Black Panther Party Ten-Point Program in my car. The list covered employment demands, an end to police brutality, and education and health-care concerns for "our black and oppressed communities." The final program point read: "We want land, bread, housing, education, clothing, justice, peace and people's community control of modern technology." It was followed by the first two paragraphs of the Declaration of Independence, the doc.u.ment that embodied the ideas of the American Revolution.

When I called Willow and asked her about supplying salad for a literacy program-I wasn't sure I could grow the volume of lettuce necessary alone-she told me that her nonprofit garden project had been inspired by the "survival programs" of the Black Panthers, in which they distributed food and eyegla.s.ses to the needy. "h.e.l.l," she said, "we'll plant a Lil' Bobby Hutton memorial plot of lettuce!"

Every week since that meeting, I had been harvesting lettuce from both my garden and City Slicker Farm to share with the Black Panthers' literacy program. For the month of July, though, I couldn't share my bounty. So, after my lunch of fried flowers, I swung open the gate to one of Willow's community farms and yanked five st.u.r.dy-looking heads of lettuce out of the ground. I snipped off the roots, leaving them there on the ground to rot back into the earth, and tucked the leaves into my bag. I chose the red frilly Lolla Rosa, the bright green Deer Tongue, and Speckles, a green lettuce with red spots.

After was.h.i.+ng and bagging the greens at my house, I got on my bike and rode through GhostTown to deliver the lettuce to the office of The Commemorator, The Commemorator, the newspaper of the Commemoration Committee for the Black Panther Party. It was the errand of an optimist. I knew that providing a salad once a week to kids at their drop-in literacy program wouldn't change anything. But I did it anyway because-if I'm honest with myself-it made me feel better. It gave me hope. the newspaper of the Commemoration Committee for the Black Panther Party. It was the errand of an optimist. I knew that providing a salad once a week to kids at their drop-in literacy program wouldn't change anything. But I did it anyway because-if I'm honest with myself-it made me feel better. It gave me hope.

I pedaled up Martin Luther King Jr. Way on my ten-speed, a bag of salad greens gently rocking on the handlebars. I spotted Johnny, the Watermelon Man, who sells watermelon in the summer and greens in the winter at his produce stand. I have never noticed much buying going on; mostly he and some other old-timers just hang out under the awning of the little shop. As I pressed on I noticed a man sleeping in an overturned refrigerator box, arms flung out like a baby. I counted five men and one woman with shopping carts filled with aluminum cans headed to the recycling center.

Acts from people's lives are played out on the streets and sidewalks like Shakespearean drama. On this July day, whole families sat on the sidewalk, chairs placed just so, to take in or be part of the day's events. Just the night before, I had happened on a woman yelling at the father of her son for money he owed her. While she ranted (from the seat of a Hummer), his friends recorded the performance on their cell phones. "You're acting like some kinda Michael Jackson," she hurled, and the Hummer screeched away. The man and his friends cried out at this dis, slapped street signs, and groaned.

A person on a bike gets to be part of this sidewalk theater. I got a sweet "h.e.l.lo, good morning" from a man walking with a cane across the crosswalk.

After thirty flat blocks, the landscape changed. I crossed the border into Berkeley. There's a NUCLEAR-FREE ZONE sign and the giant, gleaming words THERE and HERE, a lumbering piece of public sculpture that has always rubbed me the wrong way.

"There is no there there," Gertrude Stein once famously said. Though she was referring to her Oakland childhood home, which was destroyed in a fire, seventy years later Berkeley, in the form of public art, continued the misunderstanding that she was dissing all of Oakland.

The gold-embossed sign above the door read THE COMMEMORATOR. The quarterly paper has a circulation of ten thousand and specializes in stories for the black community. It was started in 1990, a year after founding Black Panther Huey Newton was killed. The remaining members of the party felt the Panthers' socialist legacy might be lost.

I rang the doorbell, and Melvin Johnson, tall and handsome yet bogged down by the formidable task of running a newspaper, let me in. The office smelled of incense, and on the wall there were hand-painted drawings of various Black Panther all-stars. There were Alprentice "Bunchy" Carter and Mumia Abu-Jamal and an oil pastel of a Black Panther youth group, all painted directly onto the wall.

"Hey, salad lady," called the other Melvin, Melvin d.i.c.kson, a stocky, muscular man with kind eyes. d.i.c.kson was an original Black Panther, in charge of all things culinary for the Bay Area Panthers from 1972 to 1982. After I put the lettuce in the fridge, we often sat in the office and chatted about events and history. I found myself frequently asking him for advice.

"I see kids eating all this junk food in our neighborhood," I said the first day I dropped off the lettuce. "That's why I'm bringing this salad."

"Kids are hyper on that junk food," d.i.c.kson said. "They can't learn in that state of mind. One thing we imparted was a nutritious diet. That's why we fed them three meals." The Black Panthers weren't just about guns and self-defense; they started a free breakfast program for hungry children. Later, in some of their schools, they served breakfast, lunch, and dinner to the students, so their parents could go to work. I thought about how different my neighborhood would be if those self-sufficiency programs had survived.

When I wished aloud that more programs like the ones the Black Panthers started existed today, Melvin sighed. "There just aren't any programs anymore. You've got to challenge them, educate them, get them to try new things."

I knew Melvin was right, but now that I was surviving on lettuce and pumpkins for several days, I do believe I would have killed someone for a bag of red-hot Cheetos.

CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE.

On day ten of the experiment, I stood on the boggy roof of an abandoned carport eating plums. The house was abandoned, too. The tree, planted at the back of the house by some kindly farmer of yesteryear, groaned with fruit.

In order to be truly self-sufficient for the month of July, I found that I had to become a hunter-gatherer of sorts. There was no shame in this-I couldn't grow everything, after all. Even Wendell Berry, farmer extraordinaire, agreed. In the essay "The Whole Horse," he wrote, "A subsistence economy necessarily is highly diversified, and it characteristically has involved hunting and gathering as well as farming and gardening." It was true that eating the same things out of the garden-lettuce, beets, squash blossoms-day after day had gotten a little monotonous. I needed to supplement with some foraged food. According to Roman law, it is perfectly legal to harvest fruit that hangs over into a public area.

I spotted the plums while I was riding my bike. I had never noticed them before, but the 100-yard diet had so heightened my senses, I started to see food everywhere. Every shrub, tree, and weed I encountered quivered with potential usefulness. In every abandoned lot, I saw a potential garden. I could also smell a hot dog a mile away.

These plums were a variety called elephant hearts. They had green skin and bright red flesh, in the shape of a heart. They didn't taste particularly good. In fact, if I hadn't been doing this experiment in self-sufficiency, I never would have gone out of my way to find the tree, s.h.i.+mmy up a wooden fence, make the catlike leap to the garage, and creep across the rotting beams for a few plums. And now that I had gone through that, I found them to be vaguely dry, maybe too sour. But I was hungry, so I scarfed them down on the rooftop.

As I munched, I silently thanked the long-gone home owner who had planted this tree. Whoever had done so probably had to make a tough decision: a beautiful ornamental or a fruit-bearing tree.

"Garden style is a continuing expression of the changing idea of the universe," environmentalist Paul Shepard observes in Thinking Animals, Thinking Animals, pointing out that Italy's Renaissance gardens were orderly and complex, like aristocratic society. If this is true, and I think it is, what does our city landscaping say about us? The barren ornamental pears, the trimmed hedges, the ubiquitous lawn-the pedigreed landscape. I find this environment to be wasteful. "The observer of city gardens cannot fail to notice that not one of the plants that are grown in most urban residential areas, or that appear on planting plans, have the slightest nutritional value," landscape architect Michael Hough writes in pointing out that Italy's Renaissance gardens were orderly and complex, like aristocratic society. If this is true, and I think it is, what does our city landscaping say about us? The barren ornamental pears, the trimmed hedges, the ubiquitous lawn-the pedigreed landscape. I find this environment to be wasteful. "The observer of city gardens cannot fail to notice that not one of the plants that are grown in most urban residential areas, or that appear on planting plans, have the slightest nutritional value," landscape architect Michael Hough writes in City Form and Natural Process. City Form and Natural Process. "However, opportunities for using edible plants are just as great as [for] using those that are purely ornamental. Tree planting along city streets could include fruit-bearing species." "However, opportunities for using edible plants are just as great as [for] using those that are purely ornamental. Tree planting along city streets could include fruit-bearing species."

Here, someone had ignored convention and planted this fruiting plum tree. Maybe he had been hungry. Maybe the tree reminded him of home. Maybe he had imagined plum dumplings or plum jam. Whatever his motives, he watered the tree, didn't cut it down, let it flourish and fruit for all these years. Based on its size, it must have been forty years old. Whoever planted it could never have predicted my existence-a crazy, starved, foraging locavore. The past was feeding me today, and I was grateful.

After I finished eating, I loaded two plastic bags with fruit, let them fall to the soft earth, and climbed down after them. I balanced the bags on my bike's handlebars and headed home. I had a hunch. It involved canning.

On my way, I paused a few blocks from the 2-8 to watch a dice game. Two boys were playing-one fat, one thin. They yelled and rolled. The fat one threw down a dollar.

"Excuse me," I said. "How does this work?"

Without pause, as if he had been waiting for someone to finally inquire, the thin kid explained that the first roll determines the bet. If it's a seven, for instance, then the person who bets is betting that another seven will be rolled.

I watched for a while, and the fat kid lost all four of his ones.

"Can I have 'em back?" he said to the thin kid.

"OK." The skinny kid pa.s.sed him the floppy bills. I wasn't the only one just playing. This kid was pretending to bet; I was playing at self-sufficiency.

I continued cycling, keeping the BART tracks and highways 980 and 24 on my left.