Holy half a year, I can’t believe it’s been so long since I’ve last updated readers of Civil Eats about the urban farm! We last left off in the fall when the goat babies were born. Since then, it has been a whirlwind adventure and as we approach spring, cleaning up the aftermath has been the priority.

The little goaties, Fred and Ginger, were an adorable addition to the farmstead. They delighted us with their playful prancing, silly kid games of who could be king of the hay bale or goat house, and jumping in our laps for some quality snuggling. I dare say goat kids are the most darling and precious creatures in the animal baby world. Too bad infancy does not last forever.

As the kids grew, Fred began to show signs of his manliness early on. This sure made explaining the birds and bees to our seven year old a breeze. The mechanics of sexual reproduction were laid out for everyone to see, which led to an inquisition that would have rivaled a questioning by Tomás de Torquemada: “Mom, what’s that thing sticking out of Fred’s belly? Why is Fred always jumping on top of his sister? So is Fred going to make a baby with his sister?” Oh dear god, let’s hope not! Though awkward, the latter question left a poignant reminder that Fred could not be housed with his female relations for much longer unless we were looking to vie for a spot on Montel Williams.

Though he still seemed like a baby, suckling his mama and crying whenever he was set apart from the herd, Fred was becoming a full on buck. He began to emit a smell that left no doubt his hormones were racing towards adulthood. It was one serious stench that grew more potent with each passing day. He would make ridiculous overtures towards his sister and mother, which included blubbering, pawing at their backs, and urinating on his face. Sweet Jesus, can you imagine if that were how a human male attempted to attract his mates?

Separating Fred was no easy task. He broke through fences, crawled under heavy objects, hurdled six foot high obstacles. Nothing was going to stop him from being with his family. That is until I patched the hole in the fence.

The situation was compounded by the unrelenting rains we’ve been experiencing this winter. Our backyard consists of four terraces that descend in elevation approximately 15 feet over a length of 40 feet from the top yard to the bottom. The animal pen is the furthest from the house at the bottom of the yard and consequently flooded due to all the precipitation. The goats couldn’t hang out in such a mucky mess without risk of health problems so we moved them near the house where they found shelter in the half finished playhouse/greenhouse that the husband has been working on. After two months of stinky Fred, the top yard was almost as much of a foul mess as the bottom.

In January, Fred and Ginger finally went to their new home in Vallejo, and Ethel returned from a two month romantic getaway in Lake County where she rendezvoused with a studly buck named Flapjack (Ethel left shortly after the babies were born to get knocked up). The Itty Bitty farm looked like a shipwreck from all of the animals running amok and all of my attempts to jerry-rig various areas to contain my overly curious caprine friends.

At this point, figuring out how to milk my non-compliant goat was taking up all of my time. I took round upon round of beatings to try and squeeze a few drops from my doe Lucy, until I finally broke down and bought an easy to use hand milker called the Henry Milker. The contraption helped me to salvage my milk instead of having a filthy hoof planted in my bucket every morning, but I still struggled with my goat on the milk stand.

Slowly but surely everything is coming back together. I was able to install a French drain in the animal pen with the help of my fellow urban farming friend Esperanza of Pluck and Feather in Oakland. We’ve shifted from using straw for animal bedding to bark mulch, as straw seems to trap the water creating poor drainage and too much anaerobic activity. My fall garden is finally starting to reach harvest stage and the interns have been helping with the spring plantings.

The container tomatoes held out until December and I was able to harvest my Jimmy Nardello peppers in January. The animals are content, with the exception of a few mite and louse problems due to all the wet weather followed by warm sunny spells. Though it’s been great for the garden, it’s also been a boon to the bugs, which is not so great for the animals.

Ethel is due to kid on Easter Sunday. Step aside Easter bunny; goat babies will be taking your place this year. I’m already swooning for the potential cuteness overload. By the way, if you are interested in some irresistibly cute baby goats, I should have a couple for sale by the beginning June. Shoot me an email if you would like to stake a claim.

I’m an eggnog addict. No joke. If there was a 12-step program for virgin eggnogaholics, I’d be its premier member. My addiction is such a problem that I wait until after Thanksgiving to begin consuming the luscious sweet creaminess, even though I know it appears on supermarket shelves around Halloween. My favorite brand–and believe me I’ve tried them all–is Clover’s Organic Eggnog. It has just the right blend of thickness, creaminess, and spice. At five dollars a quart for organic, that’s one pricey habit. So this year, having raised goats and chickens, I figured I was supporting an eggnog factory in my backyard. I couldn’t have been more wrong.

How the tradition of eggnog as a Christmastime beverage came about (prior to the invention of electricity), is beyond me. As I’ve come to find out on an urban farm, chickens don’t lay eggs as daylight diminishes and winter sets in. While our chickens began their laying careers right around the 25th of December in 2009, the following year was a whole different ball game.

In the fall of this year, our ladies entered their first molt, in which they lost all of their feathers and more closely resembled poorly plucked dinner roasts than actual live creatures. The animal yard looked like the aftermath of a raccoon attack. The hens, for once, were silent. And there were no eggs. For months.

After the girls started to feather out again, I waited–with the patience of a six-year-old holding out for Santa on Christmas Eve–for the eggs to start reappearing in the nest. And I would continue to wait.

Thanksgiving came and went and still, no eggs. Now that we had oodles of milk coming in with our doe, Lucy, having kidded in August, where were my freakin’ eggs? It was looking like I would end up with a desolate holiday season, deprived of glugs of eggnog in my coffee or tea, warmed cups before bedtime, or cold, frosty afternoon indulgences. I was devastated.

Though determined to make my own eggnog this year, seeing I had all of the potential producers, I just couldn’t stoop to buying eggs at the store or farmer’s market. Wasn’t this the reason I had started this crazy venture in the first place? How could I purchase what I should have in my own backyard? The thought was unbearable. After nearly two years of daily care for these creatures, I wanted the goods.

Then I remembered that extending the amount of light that the hens get each day could get them back on track. So I stuck a light on in the coop and within a week all of my girls were doing right by me. Now with the girls back on the job and the milk continuing to flow in, I’m on a quest for the perfect eggnog. If you have a recipe for an out-of-this-world non-alcoholic eggnog, please send it to me. I’d be most grateful.

May your garden be bountiful, your milk cup runneth over, and your eggs plentiful. You can take that literally or figuratively, whichever applies, but may your nog last you through the new year.

When I stand at the gates of our 2.2 acre local urban community farm, I get asked a lot of questions. The number one inquiry: What will you do with the food you grow? The simple answer: We plan to share it with the people who planted it. We’ve had the honor to participate in one of the nation’s most progressive urban agriculture projects–a shining example of what happens when neighborhoods unite, governments experiment, and food justice proponents say, “Let’s try it.”

Hayes Valley Farm is the product of an unlikely presence of valuable, viable, underutilized space in the heart of San Francisco. Neglected and filled with trash after the Loma Prieta Earthquake, the site was dotted with needles, blankets, shoes, bottles, and personal artifacts left behind–plus eight inches of invasive ivy. On January 24th, 2010 we were handed the keys and the opportunity to inspire a community to grow their own food and feed themselves. We had one thought in mind: dig in.

We didn’t know exactly how things would progress but now we’re standing at the edge of possibility, and I can tell you that we’ve dug in and are in sync with a need our neighbors and students share.We are permaculture-trained designers demonstrating that bacterial-dominant soil yields better broccoli, and we’re illustrating how planting techniques, such as broadcasting legumes, can add nitrogen to your soil. But there’s a reciprocal and ongoing energy cycle here, and it’s obvious that community members teach us as much as we’re teaching them.

Most of the work we do happens two days a week. We have a “Breakfast Club” of community neighbors and regulars who come to water on interim days, and a Kitchen Garden Series every Tuesday night, where people can come to ask questions about gardening in the city and also enjoy a potluck dinner. Beyond these windows of opportunities, our gates remain largely closed.

With your help, next year we’ll strive to keep our gates open every day, offer more classes, more volunteer opportunities, and more resources for the community. Our event on 10-10-10 this year showed us people were hungry to plant seeds. We had 1,000 people pass through our gates on one day–in trucks and with bucket in hand–excited to pick up valuable compost, mulch, manure, sand, and trees for the The Kitchen Garden Challenge event-based resource sharing opportunity we held together with Kitchen GardenSF.

Opening our gates necessitates more collaboration, more planning, more infrastructure, and more resources. The energy and desire is there–the only ingredient missing is the fiscal support. Alongside our fiscal sponsor, the San Francisco Parks Trust, we’ve successfully moved from experimentation to production. We’ve turned our non-permeable surfaces into a Freeway Food Forest, and the permeable surfaces into veggie beds, terraced curves of chocolate berms, and swales covered in dozens of special varietals of brassicas, legumes, herbs, beneficials, pollinators, and native plants–95 percent of which are edible.

Human energy can create an experimental, vibrant green space in an urban center with very few resources. I believe we’re engaging in a farming experiment, and in doing so, growing our community. Please help us continue to exist and to nurture our land and our neighbors. Our online fundraising pledge drive draws to a close this Sunday, November 14th. To show your support, click on the Kickstarter link here.

This campaign is modeled with a start and an end date, which means we need to achieve the $20,600 goal or else we will not get a penny. Please show your support, and let others know how they can show theirs. At press, we’re now 56 percent of the way there. Our mission is to teach, inspire, and encourage more food production on underutilized land. By 2012, we may crop up in a vacant corner of your neighborhood, as we prove that there’s hope for more creativity where abandoned or neglected spaces sit in our urban landscape.

Photo: Zoey Kroll

Just inside New York City limits, there is a historic 47-acre farm dating back to 1697. Once owned by Dutch settlers, the Queens County Farm Museum was taken over by the NYC Department of Parks and saved from further development in the mid 1970’s. For 33 years, it has provided much-needed open space and has served as a community center, with visitors and schoolchildren of every age and from every borough in attendance.

As is what sometimes happens with historic preservation, often with the best of intentions, the original purpose of a building or its land fades over time when the role it once served is deemed irrelevant (see Wendell Berry’s essay, The Purpose of a Coherent Community, in his book, “The Way of Ignorance”). Through the years, QCFM has always had a strong educational component, but it downsized their agricultural production from what was once a working farm to an annual 3-acre corn maze for their autumn harvest festival, a pumpkin patch, and a livestock area (for petting, not for meat consumption). They also recently started growing wine grapes on 2 acres.

What happens on far fewer an occasion is a historical preservation effort is given the opportunity to re-envision its mission as something similar to the original purpose 300 years prior—a working farm that serves the community-at-large—in order to meet the needs of New Yorkers today.

As consumers of all stripes come to understand the complexities of our food system and the importance of supporting local growers, Queens County Farm Museum has experienced a surge in the level of interest in what they have to offer. Attendance at the farm in 2008 has seen record numbers, and they are now strategizing how best to meet this growing demand. As a start, this year they hired their first farmer in decades.

On one of the first blustery December days, QCFM held its annual meeting, which was open to the public. It began with the usual reading of the minutes, like every meeting held there over the past thirty years. On this occasion, however, there was something new to report. Nearly two years ago, Queens County Farm Museum teamed up with the NYC landscape architecture firm Quennell, Rothschild and Partners, LLP to re-imagine the farm as a working agricultural center that would teach and practice sustainable farming methods.

Over the course of those two years, countless meetings were held with local Community Board 13, sustainable agriculture organizations such as the Glynwood Center, and many other constituents in order to create the most comprehensive assessment. Beth Franz, a representative from Quennell, was finally able to unveil their vision to the public—which included both the short and long-term goals for the farm. They also outlined the potential stages of installation, given the large capital investment it would require.

While plans are still awaiting final approval from the Parks Department, the community members present seemed very pleased with the new potential ventures to the museum, which include:

• An increase of acreage for farmland and vineyard;
• An increase in acreage in pasture for farm animals;
• A new Green Visitor’s center;
• An education hut and path to woodlands;
• The installation of a pond;
• Possibly a cheesemaking facility.

Meanwhile, QCFM farmer Michael Grady Robertson has already begun turning around their production during his short tenure there. Just a few weeks ago he began selling winter vegetables at the Union Square Greenmarket once a week, and has been selling to restaurants throughout the city. QCFM Executive Director Amy Fischetti recently attended the market with Michael and was delighted to see entirely new avenues for growth. “I can see that there are now more selling and outreach opportunities off the farm than there are on the farm. There is a lot of potential, and a lot of demand.”

And with that, a very promising beginning.

Photo: Queens County Farm Museum