Urban Farming in Oakland

Farms aren't the first thing you think of when you hear "Oakland." However, just over a century ago when Gertrude Stein was growing up in Oakland, the city was covered with farms.
 Webster Street in Downtown Oakland in 1889. (Courtesy Oakland Public Library, Oakland History Room)

Novella Carpenter and Willow Rosenthal are two urban farmers bringing back this Oakland tradition. Carpenter is known for her book Farm City about her experiences farming on a lot in West Oakland. She teamed up with Rosenthal who runs City Slicker Farms in Oakland to publish the encyclopedic how-to gardening book called The Essential Urban Farmer.
I went to Novella Carpenter's Ghost Town Farm for her April 1, 2012 yard sale, and found a small farm teeming with life: bees, birds, and butterflies were in the air. The plant beds are on top of concrete, but filled with greens, fruit trees, and various vegetables. Below are some images from Ghost Town Farm. Check out the full photo album on Google+.
Talking with Novella Carpenter, she said that she's been farming in the lot for the last 9 years and purchased it in the last year. The Essential Urban Farmer was written to share her and Willow Rosenthal's experiences over the last decade in urban farming.
In addition to plants, she has ducks in the yard. In Farm City, she describes her experiences raising chickens, ducks, rabbits, and pigs in West Oakland.
At 1 p.m., a tour group from Berkeley's Biofuel Oasis stopped by. This was the final stop on their 4-urban farm tour that afternoon. I spoke with a man on the tour who said they also visited Urban Adamah in Berkeley, a farm in Montclair that had goats, chickens, and perennial edibles, and a Community Supported Agriculture (CSA) farm shared by 20 families in an undisclosed location in Berkeley. Novella Carpenter spoke to the tour group about urban beekeeping.
Bees flying in the Ghost Town Farm bee box.
Novella Carpenter passed around a honeycomb from her bee box.
Exploring the farm, I saw an almond tree, cherry tree, and fig tree along with a wide medley of different types of greens planted in recycled containers re-purposed as planters, which Novella Carpenter describes how to do in The Essential Urban Farmer. After touring the farm, I spoke with a few young ladies who said that seeing Novella Carpenter's work inspired them to plant new crops in their garden that afternoon in Berkeley.

Check out more photos of my visit to Ghost Town Farm on Google+


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