Not to accuse me of breaking it, although often enough … but in expectation that I’ll fix it.  Computer to clothes dryer, apparently, I have the tools and skills.

Of course, I really don’t.  What I have in the family is the most experience in diving in to difficult waters and finding my back out again.  When I do this for the family, I wonder if I’m just enabling them to not learn that skill?

Of course, my wife turns a huge load of brush and straw in to a garden bed in an afternoon, when I’d barely scratch out a square foot of clear space.  She turns daunting in to done while I’m still shading my eyes in fear.  Between us, we’re a good fit for getting most things done, mostly well, most of the time.

Of course, the girls are just kids.  At 12, I find Malakai to actually have a great attitude about diving in to things.  I think this is one of those ages-and-stages things, they are no worse and maybe better than I was at that age.  A few months ago, when Mal’s music player ran through the washing machine, she and I took it apart to dry.  A couple of days later, she put the whole thing back together again when I was out.  It worked, except the battery was dead.  Clearly, the learning to swim in difficult waters is sinking in to her, too.  Also, the joy of a job well done.

It’s just funny-but-not-ha-ha that I get the role that includes belly crawling under the house, sticking my hand in to my elbow to unclog things, and really just about anything that is gross.  I’m also the carpenter, remolder/renovator, bicycle and car mechanic, and head chef/kitchen manager.

My friend Rahul once said to me long ago, “Why would you cook?”  Where he lives, I reckon, food is easier and cheaper from a restaurant or a food stand.  I know that I love the act of cooking, the transforming and delighted mouths, and I love even more when we grow something from scratch that feeds family and friends.  At last weekend’s pie party, we served plum, apple, apricot, and rhubarb pies where the fruit all came from our garden.  It was pretty amazing to realize how much of the ingredients were from our own hands, from the sun and soil in our garden.

In the end, I guess I choose to do-it-myself because there is a feeling that it is the right way to live.  If I didn’t listen to these feelings and intuitions, I don’t know where I’d be now.

Mainly this has been organizing time and getting the girls places on schedule.  Doing all the gap filling, with Debbie doing some, too.  Teacher meetings and various obligations.  Mobile broadband and a flexible schedule are my savior here.  Even then, I ended up taking about 25% of my time over three weeks as PTO (paid time off), which is the abbreviation for “vacation”.  Things are finally humming a bit more, weathering the shifts around us, and I am able to put my nose to other grindstones.

As we move in to the fall at the urban farm, we’re finding ourselves taking the hard 2-year look at what we’ve done, what we planned to do, and where we think we can do.  It’s pretty clear that farming 50′x50′ (15mx15m) can only make a handful of cash, perhaps 20% of the mortgage if we really work the angles.  Downtown restaurants, even in times of flush cash and customers, can’t support a micro-intensive urban farm that charges 4x what other local organic providers do.  It comes down to the amount earnable per square foot, and how much that square foot costs us.

So we’re looking for other ideas and trying to turn our bruised-apple experience in to some applesauce.  The value of house sales dropping like a rock around here hasn’t helped; even traditionally expensive Santa Cruz is down in the market.  It makes the whole business-side of the equation hard to evaluate.

In the end, whatever we can do to foster community and create sustainability in our lives here is a good thing.  Lessons learned along the way are digested, composted, and turned in to something new.

So far, it is the Aruacanas who are laying the most, with multiple large, green shelled eggs. When everyone slows down from feasting on first eggs, we get some pictures to post.

A few minutes ago, Lucky, so named because she lost her rearward facing toe sometime in her first two weeks of life, boldly jumped on to my laptop, then to the top of the LCD. It folded flat (wide open) under her weight, and she flapped down. I had to deflect her a second time a minute later, and since then she has just eyed me a few times with that yellow gaze.

Watching them pick at then choose to skip over spiders and such, I am reminded of all the history of these animals, mammals, insects, and the various speculative stories I’ve read over the years. I can imagine being a miniature being with this cold gaze eying me as food. I can imagine that right now, because I think that is what Lucky is doing with her yellow eye.

So, I am gardening the wiki from within my own garden. The weather is clear and a bit windy, with cloudlets migrating West to East. In my current view are a revealed wild rose bush in all its seasonal glory; we cleared out a big planter box and weeded yesterday to reveal yet another hidden treasure. In the far view, redwoods and tall palm trees are pulled in the wind. One stand of palms are blowing steady, as they might on an island. This is a bit unusual, our winds here in the valley/river bottom tend to be whippy and change directions often. The effect is bucolic and a bit tropical, although it’s only 16C. In a few minutes I’ll move out of the encroaching sun to get some shade. It’s not a bad place to be, if you have to be somewhere doing something.

(Hat tip to Max, who said I should post about this. It’s good to reveal the work-personal balance happening in real time.)

Under the neighbor’s apricot and nectarine trees is a cool, shady spot.  The chicks daytime box was there for a few days.  This is a refrigerator box recut and folded to create an open topped box 24 in./71 cm tall, with chicken wire stretched over the top and two boards providing shade.  The chicks used this outside, with an open water and feed, for about the first week.  This is where the girl crew found the chicks, and it became a sweet spot to just hang out with the chicks.  They crawled on heads, stood in pairs on shoulders, rode around on fingers, and even sat on a few branches.

At that point, we’d had the chicks for two weeks and two days, so they are around five weeks old.  Their size is a good handful, and in fact is about the same area as my elongated fist.  When we get the farm pictures gallery up later, I’ll post some of the pictures from this party.

We found the last place w baby chicks of and 4 girls are on the go. Mo Blog Later.

… which was written on the go, while I was on a last house errand after we strapped my two-year-old neighbor in the back with my six-year-old and her eight-year-old friend.  In the way back of the Volvo wagon was my ten-year-old, in the backward facing jump seat.  Four girls and me in search of the last feed and seed store with baby chicks.

Apparently a subtly growing trend of city folk getting a few egg layers for the backyard has turned into a “chick rush” this year.  We were all set to go at the beginning of April, in fact, we were gearing up for a bike ride to the feed store to choose our chicks, when my wise wife thought to call the store to assure the chicks had indeed arrived.

“They’ve sold out?” she said.  “In two hours?!?”

We called a few near-by feed stores, and the story was the same.  There had been a run on the chicks, with everyone selling out in record time, except for one store that was far away (car trip required).  We confirmed that a near-by store would have twenty varieties of baby chicks on Thursday of this week, 17 April.  We planned to head up there about 9 to 9:30 in the morning.  When we couldn’t make that time window, we decided to skip that morning and check the next morning to see what was left.  We called Friday morning and they had sold out in the first hour of Thursday, with a line of people outside of the store since 7:30, half an hour before the feed store opened. *smacks head*

Determined to not let this stop us, and also to keep our neighbor from rightly telling us we should have gone with the boring old layers from the few weeks before, my wife diligently called all the feed stores, chatting with a few proprietors.  Store after store had the same story as the first one.  A big, county-wide run on baby chicks.  Everyone had at least a two week wait until they thought they could get more, and even some of them had heard from hatcheries that they were out and back-ordered.  (This urban poultry thing is beginning to feel like a zeitgeist.)

Finally, one feed store, literally at the furthest end of the county, had three varieties left and enough to satisfy us.  Myself and the four-girl team began pulling ourselves together for the journey.

The first challenge came when we realized we would need to put one of the girls in the jump seat in the back, and everyone wanted a turn.  That’s fine, but we had three girls wanting and only two legs to the trip.  The girls kept coming at the problem by trying to negotiate who should give-up a ride in favor of the other two girls.  Well, to be fair, this was my two daughters, the sisters, doing that negotiation.  Their friend, it turns out, wasn’t really happy with the options; she wanted to keep things fair and equal.  I helped them see how.  We figured that we had a sixty mile round trip, so I set the trip meter and at the 20 mile mark (or thereabouts) we stopped so two girls could switch.  The one who was in the back at that point also climbed in the back for the return trip.  At the 10 mile mark back from the feed store, we swapped the third girl in to the rear for the last 20 miles.  Sadly, this was my seven-next-Saturday daughter who got lonely in the way back and wished she were in the middle with the bigger girls.  Tamara-who-is-two was blissful about the whole thing, happy to be along on a big girl adventure.

At the feed store, “Aromas Feed & Ranch Supply”, we discovered that in the intervening hours, one entire variety had been purchased.  We ran into a woman we know from here in Santa Cruz, she was picking up three of that variety.  I promptly forgot that variety’s name, since I wasn’t getting any.  We then got to choose out our mini-flock, picking thirteen total from amongst the buff Orpingtons and Araucanas.  Ironically, this one feed store, which happens to be a hundred meters over the line in to Monterey County, had these chicks for the last couple of weeks.  At two weeks old already, they are double the size of newly hatched chicks, and flapping and flying around.  The girls don’t realized they missed the super-fuzzy, super-small stage.  We’ll likely have to get more in a few years, so they’ll enjoy that stage then.

Last night we hooked up the heat lamp over the box, loaded in food and water, and set all this up in our neighbor’s house.  Both families are sharing the flock across the two properties, and they don’t have a live-in cat the way we do.

The whole adventure illustrates one of the small parts of homeschooling that I love.  We were able to pick up and go in the middle of the week for this adventure.  In the process, I could squeeze in a math puzzle (how to split the jump seat ride amongst three), geology (always lots of that to observe around here), and sociology and science (farm management, livestock, chicken lifecycle.)  The friend, Isabel, who came along was unexpected, but present for the same reason.  Her Moms had an NVC event at Cabrillo College, and rather than be bored, Isabel wanted to play with someone.  They called us to see if we were available, and an hour+ later Isabel was joining us on the chick adventure.  Later in the afternoon, we dropped the chicks back at home, and I took all three of the big girls up to the campus where they all attend a City Schools homeschool program (AFE) for rehearsals of their California history play.

Last September we closed a deal to be tenants-in-common on the property next door, with the part under our control approximately 2350 square feet/218 square meters of raw backyard to garden. Since then, it has been work preparing the land, planting, weeding, controlling pests, and making sure we can pay the additional mortgage. In other words, the same plight of all farmers, large or small, for millennia.

This is all part of a multi-year effort toward self-sufficiency. Is that a strange thing to be doing from the middle of an urban center? Typically one thinks of self-sufficiency as something you save for living remotely from people, where it is you, the steel, and the land. Here we have solar, but it is tied to the grid — when there is a power outage, we lose power, too. Our water and sewer are hooked into city services, we pay the taxes and bills to prove it.

On the other hand, the city can bring me fresh water and remove my black water more efficiently here with all these other people to share the costs and benefits, as we all gain from living close to other people. We walk downtown all the time, bicycle around everywhere, and fill our gas-guzzling Volvo station wagon once a month or less. Our power doesn’t go out here nearly as much as it would in the country, and we enjoy the opportunity to light a candle and be in the quiet.

Self-sufficiency is more than a way to save money. It is recognizing that we cannot live apart from our essential humanity, which is very agrarian. There is a natural inclination to be a steward of the land, rewarded in the literal fruits and vegetables of our labor.

At the same time as increasing our own self-sufficiency, we are experiencing a monumental increase in community around here. First is being such close neighbors with a family where we are all new to each other. Still learning our way around our relationship, it is forming as we work through the interesting, challenging, PITA issues of owning land together. Maybe it’s to our advantage that we weren’t friends first, instead we’ll be friends despite the challenges.

Along with Micah, Akiko, and Tamara (“I’m two ana haf”) come their myriad friends and their housemate and her friends. Micah and Akiko are well-connected activists, and we increasingly know disparate people in common. Then we added Melinda living in our studio apartment, who is a great addition to the family and thankfully offsets more of that new-land mortgage. Soon we’ll add a shared flock of hens. Much more musical around here.

This image shows where the new gardening space is. Our house with garden is in the green box, and the new land is in the blue box. Our neighbors/partners are in the red box.

Finally, some garbage at the end for the permanent record …

To get this nonsense off my chest, there are two reasons I’ve been resisting writing about micro-farm life. One is because I don’t have an audience. The parts of this blog that have to do with open source are hooked in to a well-watched feed, the Fedora planet. But that is just a part of this blog; I don’t send all my work there, and that is by design. If I want to write about homeschooling or farming, I’ll do it here and not make all the rest of the open source software world read it without wanting to. If they want to, they can come read more here; otherwise, why increase the noise and make people want to read me less?

The other reason is I want my wife, Debora, to start writing on her urban farm experience, and I guess I was saving the fire for her. Obvious nonsense, not like we can’t both write about the same things, same events. Anyway, them were continued excuses as to why I don’t get out farther on the writer’s tightrope. Meanwhile, she is going to start writing from her domain, and we’ll see if she does write about urban farming.

Reading books. I guess we have to wait until first week of April for the chicks to arrive at the feed store. We decided to follow the feed store route because then the kids get to pick the chicks by personality and such.

Better hurry up. Since dragged the gypsy-wagon-prop turned play house out to work on it, the kids have been using it as a play house again.