Tammy Curry greeted me with fresh homemade bread,
slathered with butter, and a glass of cool sweet tea. It was in
the high nineties outside at 4 pm, and I was grateful to postpone our
garden walk for a while. I sat on one end of the couch in her
small living-room, and she lounged at the other end with 20-month-old
Morgan curled around her. Occasionally her husband Jay would try to
wheedle "Monster Man" Morgan away so we women could talk, but Morgan was
having none of it, and to his credit, stayed quiet throughout our
conversation.
Occasionally too,
seven-year-old Claire would breeze in, displaying her stick-on
fingernails or offering to put the dog out. "She's kind of full of
herself today," Tammy told me. "Her picture's in the paper."
Claire's color photo, outstretched arms in front of her 4-H garden plot,
was just a sidebar that day, but the following day it would be the
out-sized feature photo, highlighting an article about Tammy's homestead
in the Mt. Airy News.
Mt. Airy News is not
exactly the big time, and Mt. Airy itself is strictly small time and
proud of it - it makes a living off being the fictional Andy
Griffith/Taylor home of "Mayberry". But one senses that Tammy
Curry, organic gardener, is going places. Soon she may literally
be going, as she and Jay hope to purchase a large farm near Pinnacle,
about 15 miles down Highway 52. It was a working farm up until a
few years ago, Tammy tells me, and includes an 80-year-old farmhouse.
Tammy can envision life there already, commenting, "A certain dog will
have more room to run." Claire, who rejected home-schooling this
year, will stay in her current elementary school after the move, with
Tammy, who is a stay-at-home mother, providing transportation out of
district. Jay, who used to be a computer technician, will keep working
when and where he can to provide basic income. Right now he puts
in shifts at the local candle factory. He's no longer committed to
a career, and the family looks forward to becoming fulltime organic
farmers.
As she said in the News article, "We do pretty well with the limited
space we have and the Community Shared Agriculture and farmer's market."
To me Tammy acknowledges that her CSA income is a key factor. With
several customers paying $300 per year, she can rely
on "seed money" - literally. Tammy told the News interviewer, "CSA
is a relatively new idea in the United States. The idea is that
the producer and the customers share the risks and expenses of food
production. It began in the 1960s in Japan, Germany and
Switzerland. The idea is to reduce financial risks and food losses
for farmers." The CSA movement and one of its more famous American
proponents are depicted in
colorful detail in "The Real Dirt on Farmer John," a documentary film
which was recently aired on PBS, and in an article about the film at
Homestead.org.
Tammy is a sturdy woman
with a clear gaze, a ready smile and a well-developed vision for her
family. Daughter of a Marine father and a hippie mother, who put
Tammy to baking bread as soon as she could reach up to the table, Tammy
is a domestic powerhouse who manages
the homesteading side of the family income.
But how does she balance
all this - two kids, meat 'n' pet bunnies, chickens for eggs and baked
bread and veggies for customers whose boxes must be restocked weekly -
on a postage stamp of rented land?
Answer: very well.
Urban homesteading
carries its blessings and its challenges. An academic treatise, Agropolis (The Social, Political and Environmental Dimensions of Urban
Agriculture) (Earthscan, 2005), is a collection
worth reading. It's full of research papers on how small-scale city
gardeners cope throughout the world. In England, for example, the
allotment system has been a part of urban culture for "donkey's years,"
a curious expression meaning a long, long time. I heard it only in
England, sometimes shortened to "yonks." People who live in a
certain area or on a certain "estate" (what we would call a housing
development or an apartment complex) have the right to rent, if
available, a small plot forming part of a large garden space.
There they may garden at will - orchards, greenhouses, apiaries,
topiaries, whatever strikes the fancy of the lessee. Most
allotment gardeners are retired, though younger folks occasionally take
up the activity, often seeing it as a Cause. Some use their plots
to grow vegetables and fruits for home consumption and some make small
money off selling their produce at farmer's markets. The plots are
generally within a few blocks of home and provide, among other benefits,
recreation and exercise. Very often, the allotment "quilt"
provides a green swath in the midst of urban blight and therefore serves
the purpose of natural beautification. It is rare to see an unused
allotment plot or a neglected one. If you get one, you tend to
hold on to it for yonks.
In Cuba, another hot
grow-spot included in Agropolis, urban gardening has taken on guerilla
status. Cubans, like their Iberian forebears, have always been
inclined to grow flowers on their patios and hang cages with canaries
and budgerigars in their cool window casements. A full-scale
nutrition gardening movement burst forth in reaction to food shortages
in 1989. Despite government embarrassment, the home-growers of
Havana would not be suppressed. They put containers of veggies and
boxes of rabbits and chickens on their roofs and patios. "They
creatively used objects like tires as planters for vegetables, and
constructed small, manageable warrens for raising animals for food.
They struggled with issues such as obtaining animal feed and official
objections...the authors imply that because Cuba once again considers
itself food self-sufficient, there will be a more stringent attitude on
the part of authorities toward this urban guerilla effort to keep
families fed and operate micro-business." (Counterpoise
Magazine, Volume 10, Winter/Spring 2006, review by Barbara
Bamberger Scott).
These examples dovetail
with Tammy's assertion that "anybody can be an urban gardener, even if
they don't call themselves that." Maybe you have a few
containers of tomatoes on the deck or an avocado plant growing in the
kitchen window. You would be, by Tammy's definition, an urban
gardener. Tammy is an idealist.
