The "how-to" guide for a new generation of farmers from the author of Farm City and a leading urban garden educator. In this indispensable guide, Farm City author Novella Carpenter and Willow Rosenthal share their experience as successful urban farmers and provide practical blueprints-complete with rich visual material-for novice and experienced growers looking to bring the principles of ethical food to the city streets. The Essential Urban Farmer guides readers from day one to market day, advising on how to find the perfect site, design a landscape, and cultivate crops. For anyone who has ever grown herbs on windowsills, or tomatoes on fire escapes, this is an invaluable volume with the potential to change our menus, our health, and our cities forever. Novella Carpenter grew up in rural Idaho and Washington State. She went to University of Washington in Seattle where she majored in Biology and English. She later studied under Michael Pollan at Berkeley’s Graduate School of Journalism for two years. She’s had many odd jobs including: assassin bug handler, book editor, media projectionist, hamster oocyte collector, and most recently, journalist. Her writing has appeared in Salon.com, Saveur.com, sfgate.com (the SF Chronicle 's website), and Mother Jones . She has been cultivating her farm in the city for over ten years now, and her neighbors still think she’s crazy. It all started with a few chickens, then some bees, until she had a full-blown farm near downtown Oakland, where she lives today. INTRODUCTION Willow and I first bonded over urban farming. We were both growing vegetables, beekeeping, and raising chickens and ducks in the middle of the city of Oakland, California. When we met, at the turn of the century, I had recently started GhostTown Farm, one-tenth of an acre farm on squatted land near downtown. Willow had founded City Slicker Farms a few years before, as a nonprofit urban farming organization devoted to making affordable, urban-grown organic produce available to low-income residents in West Oakland. This is the book that we wished we had when we first started out, a how-to manual that speaks directly to farmers trying to grow food and raise animals in the city. We became passionate about urban farming for a variety of reasons. One is the way urban agriculture connects urban people to the food they are eating. The lettuce someone seeds, waters, and then harvests for dinner makes the freshest, most delicious salad they have ever had. Backyard chicken eggs are a revelation, partially because they are so fresh and partially because you raised the hen who laid this special gift. We realized that many city folks don’t think they can produce their own food, and so they miss out on these connections. By growing even a little food in the city, these experiences become accessible. Speaking of accessibility, urban farming is a way for people of all income levels to eat fresh, local, organic food. I knew that I didn’t have enough money to buy organic produce or meat, and so I decided to raise it myself. An average urban backyard (25 feet by 40 feet), if cultivated intensively, has the potential to grow all of the fruits and vegetables for one person. Growing edibles in the city—even on a deck or small backyard—makes economic sense for people who have more time than money. Due to low incomes and lack of access to grocery stores, urban people fail to get the healthy nutrition they need. A few packets of seeds costing less than twenty dollars can produce enough vegetables for a year’s worth of eating. If government regulations were changed and financial support given, many of the fruits and vegetables consumed in a city could be grown within the city itself, through a combination of backyard gardening, community gardening, school gardens, commercial gardens, and increasing urban agriculture on currently unused municipal land. This would mean everyone would have access to healthy organic food! I say organic because this is the farming method that we encourage everyone to use. Organic means that you don’t use chemically synthesized fertilizers or pesticides—two things that your neighbors in the city do not need to be exposed to. Other aspects of organic farming that we encourage, and explain in this book, are: building soil fertility through crop rotation; proper application of compost and green manures; and controlling weeds and pests by mulching, picking by hand, or using natural sprays or mixtures. Rural organic farms do not necessarily follow practices that are sustainable for the earth, animals, or human beings. Growing in the city also means that you can go a bit beyond organic by growing a variety of crops on one site (instead of growing a single crop [monoculture]), using water efficiently, integrating livestock, and using city wastes to create a more closed-loop nutrient system. This avoids the use of factory-made fertilizers, using fossil fuels for operating farm machinery, or shippi