The Quarter-Acre Farm

Our rabbit, Kwan Yin, is extremely friendly, which isn’t a surprise given that Jesse toted her around in a baby pack for six months. Every girl in visual range would descend upon Jesse and Kwan Yin, cooing and petting her, which I believe was Jesse’s intent. When Jesse developed an allergy to rabbits, or perhaps to rabbit care, Kwan Yin’s days of living the life of a bunny pasha were over. She now lives in a pen in our yard along with Hestia, a companion rabbit we purchased solely to ease Kwan Yin’s feelings of abandonment.

Some people think of rabbits as pets, some as a future meal. Some think they’re both. It is a good thing rabbits are unaware of the dangerous borderland they inhabit. Imagine if every time someone stroked your hair you wondered if she was loving you or plotting to make stew and line her mittens with your pelt.

My mother once served us kids a rabbit we were fond of—in the guise of chicken. Our bellies full, she sprung the truth on us. It was like being told we’d eaten our Siamese cat, battered and fried. Worse, we’d really enjoyed it.

While Hestia and Kwan Yin are safe from our appetites, they are not strictly pets. When people ask if we plan to eat our rabbits, I tell them that just as knowing how to fish is a richer gift than a fish, there is something richer than a meal of rabbit. A fishing rabbit, certainly, but in lieu of that, a pooping one.

I believe that because I have come to understand the importance of dirt. In the past I figured that while good dirt was better than bad dirt, if a plant had enough water and sunshine it would grow just fine even if it were in sand. After all, look at hydroponics.

Of course, there is more to hydroponics than water, just as there is more to dirt than meets the eye. What is in dirt makes a difference not only to how robustly your crop grows, but also to how it tastes.

I knew a guy who raised a pig for meat on a little piece of property outside of Casper, Wyoming. The guy had a connection with a bakery wholesaler and got their expired cakes and cookies for free, so he fattened his pig on desserts. When the time came for the pig to be butchered, the meat from the porker was so sweet it was inedible. If there’s a pig heaven, I’m sure the pig is pleased.

A study by Laura Parker, an agricultural activist in Northern California, showed that the dirt a pig grew up on, and on which grew the food the pig ate, had strong kinships to the flavor of its meat. In fact, a group of tasters could match the meat of the pig to the dirt it was raised on by sniffing various muds from both the pig’s home and other places.

When I started my year of living off the Quarter Acre Farm, I purchased a mound of soil to fill some of the new raised beds. The soil was heavy, sandy, and closer to beige in color than umber. I filled several raised beds with the stuff and put in my plants. I also started my potatoes in bags using that dirt. The top of the dirt crusted after I watered it, and water ran off or pooled with each subsequent watering. When the dirt finally did absorb water, it became sodden. My potatoes rotted, seeds struggled to break through the crust, the nascent beets didn’t have a chance, and the beans were malnourished.

Good dirt should have substance while still being fluffy. If you compress a damp handful in your fist, it should retain its shape when you loosen your grip, but just barely. It should be dark in color. It should smell good.

Rabbit scat is wonder manure, higher in nitrogen than any other manure, with lots of phosphorus to aid in flower and fruit growth, and potassium for overall plant health. Further, it comes in small dry pellets (some call them bunny berries). It doesn’t smell and it’s filled with a good amount of organic matter. Because of this, the manure is not only feeding the plants but also building the soil.

Further still, a rabbit is productive. For every two tons of dry manure a steer produces a year, a relatively tiny rabbit produces one ton. (Which is why if you can find a rabbit farm raising the critters for pets, food, or fur, they are likely to be more than happy to provide you, gratis, with as many rabbit droppings as you are willing to cart away.) And while you must age steer manure, a rabbit’s manure is “mild” enough that you can apply the stuff directly onto your growing beds. In fact, one can raise earthworms directly under the rabbit hutch. The worms eat the manure and produce castings, which is actually the worm’s manure, which makes it manure squared. All of it is great for the garden.

Rabbit manure and worm castings are not the only ingredients of our soil recipe. We also collect leaves. Our neighbors have an enormous tree that in the spring and summer provides a small planet’s worth of shade. In the fall the tree releases an impressive number of plate-sized leaves. The neighbors rake them up and put them neatly in the street for collection. I sneak out and take bunches of them to put in the leaf-mold pile.

I also add leaves to the compost. They are a high-carbon element and offset the high nitrogen component in the bin. For our purposes, it works to think of this as “dry fluffy” offsetting the “heavy smelly.” They are also a good mulch for the garden, holding in moisture and smothering weeds. If you’ve got extra energy, you can shred the leaves to help them break down faster and to allow air and water to percolate through them in the beds.

I don’t shred because I don’t have extra energy. However, I’ve heard of some fun ways to do it. One guy shredded his leaves by putting them in windrows in the street and running his mower over them. Someone suggested putting leaves in a garbage can and running a string trimmer in it, much like lowering a hand mixer into chunky soup to make puree. I, boringly, but without using petroleum products, pile the leaves and bide my time until the leaf pile has become crumbly black and smells like rain.

We also collect coffee grounds for our dirt making. The coffee house a few blocks from the Quarter Acre Farm puts its (voluminous amounts of) used grounds in bags and gives them to customers. It is a happy day when I manage to lug four bags of coffee grounds to my bicycle, and even better when Louis is there with me and I can compel him to carry them home.

Coffee grounds are in high demand in the spring when thoughts turn to gardening. For a few months I’d see a guy I’ll call “Joe” trying to score coffee grounds; sometimes I’d get them first, sometimes Joe would. I figured we had gardening in common, and I’d often try to start up a conversation as we sprinted for the grounds. But he must have thought I was trying to divert him from his quest, because Joe didn’t just ignore me, he glared. Compost is serious business. Louis said maybe it was more than serious; maybe Joe was using the coffee to mask the odor of a dead body. It was more likely he was masking the odor of his compost.

The last ingredient of Quarter Acre Farm dirt is kitchen refuse. We collect all peels, trimmings, and old fruits and vegetables in a mini garbage can on the kitchen counter. I used to be more open about my avid composting, and our neighbors would bring us their watermelon rinds to compost, but then an acquaintance showed up at my door one day and presented me with a large black Hefty sack ballooning with gasses from the decomposition of fermenting vegetable muck. Confusing the horror on my face with awe, she assured me she would bring more next month. I managed to thank her but told her I had more than I could handle, actually.

When our mini kitchen garden can was full, or when it emitted a cloud of stink when we cracked the lid, we emptied it into the larger bin in the yard. Our outdoor compost bin, which we got as part of a city composting project, is a black plastic box about the size of one of those ubiquitous, neon-colored, plastic playhouses for children. We dump not only the kitchen compost into the outside bin, but also the plant trimmings and bedding from the goose kennel. We do nothing more with it, but you could turn it every week for faster results. Some say you should turn it—some say it vehemently. I’ll say it again: composting is serious business. The most impolite exchanges I have ever read on blog threads between gardeners deal with compost and whether to turn or not to turn—and it all hinges on bacteria.

Thonius Philips van Leeuwenhoek is to blame. He was a Renaissance kind of guy two hundred years after the Renaissance was over. He owned the largest drapery business in the Dutch town of Delft and used very basic microscopes to look at the details of cloth. He also made over five hundred microscopes himself and used them to look at and describe what he called “animalcules,” or amoebas (thereby becoming the “father of microbiology”), and what we would eventually call bacteria. How does he tie in with compost?

Organic matter breaks down in nature owing largely to the work of fungi and bacteria. Some of those bacteria function best at middle temperatures (mesophylic) and others at high temperatures (thermophylic). Turning the compost introduces oxygen into the pile, which the aerobic bacteria like. The mesophylic bacteria create heat as they do their bacterial work, which raises the temperature inside the compost to the point the thermophylic fellas begin to thrive. Like the friend with the outrageously high metabolism who gets twenty times more done than middling me, the higher temp bacteria work faster than the middle temperature ones. Therefore turning makes for faster compost.

However, there are those who say turning the compost mixes up the thermophylically active layers of compost with those layers that are already “done,” actually hindering the thermophylic work and messing up the lower layers of composted material for things like earthworms and the aforementioned fungi, which not only break down the tougher material in nature but also further improve the soil.

What would Thonius say? He is safely out of the picture, leaving us to decide what we will. I won’t weigh in on the science of it. I am lazy, so I simply don’t turn our compost. After dumping the scraps in the composter, we layer leaves or straw or coffee on top of the scraps. This layering seems to keep our system pretty balanced and sweet smelling, and the coffee helps deter pests like raccoons, possums, and rats.

However, we still get a few pests. Our cat, Tiger, thinks the rats he catches and places in my path so that I step barefoot on their plump bodies are fine by-products of composting. Once, Jesse was in the backyard by the composter at dusk and reached out and petted our white cat, Orion, as she walked along the fence. “Orion” hissed at him and bared a row of dagger-sharp teeth. Jesse is the only person I know who has ever scratched an opossum behind the ears. Experiences like that have made us much more attentive recyclers, especially making sure that no rodent-tempting dairy and meat products find their way into our pile.

When I find myself in need of dirt, I go to the composter, fork the barely composted stuff and the semi-composted stuff to the side (this is the one time the newer layers do get “turned”), then dig out the pretty well composted stuff and put it in a wheelbarrow. To the barrow I add leaf mold, rabbit manure, and more used coffee grounds. If the mixture seems too heavy, I fork in some straw or dry leaves to fluff it up. (Note: Do not use hay . . . straw is the dry stems of wheat generally used for bedding. Hay is grass, used to feed animals, replete with seeds, which will sprout in your beds and require more weeding, which nobody needs.) This makes lovely, dark, rich dirt, with the occasional uncomposted eggshell or orange peel thrown in. I consider this a mark of authenticity, much as the odd smirch in a glaze adds to a vase’s beauty. As my old pottery instructor used to say, “If you want perfect, go to Kmart.”

Making dirt isn’t as easy as having dirt dumped into the driveway, but it’s worth it. As they say, a dollar for dirt, a penny for seeds. Especially if you are somewhat of a bumbler like me—forgetting to water or watering too much, unsure what fertilizer to use and how much, growing plants in not quite the right spot, and planting too early or too late in the season—then starting off with good, rich, sweet dirt will make the greatest difference in ameliorating your not-so-green thumb.

Recipe

Beet and Chevre Sandwiches