Brooklyn Grange

The Unlikely Farmer

As far as candidates for urban farmer go, I’m pretty damn unlikely.  Ten months ago, I had never even planted a seed.  Born and raised in Manhattan, I graduated from a prestigious liberal arts college and took an office job working for a big deal restaurateur in New York.  Other than a healthy appetite and a fair amount of righteous indignation regarding the current food system in this country, nothing about me suggested that I’d be raising chickens in a year’s time.  In fact, I ended up among the motley crew of Brooklyn Grange Farmers because I decided to write an article about Roberta’s, specifically about these punk kids who owned the place.  I already knew Brandon as That Bartender Who Never Cards, but I’d only ever seen him slinging drinks, and witnessing the marvel of gastronomic performance art he had created at Roberta’s, I was introduced to a whole new character.  And then there was Chris.  I could tell from day one that he was not interested in my article about the restaurant.  Chris didn’t want to provide quotes: he wanted to build something.

Which leads us to the farm.  Kind of.

I’d spent so many years in the academic system digesting information, analyzing and commenting on it, but Chris and Brandon were doers, and I wanted in.  You couldn’t not want in after seeing what they’d done with the nuts and bolts warehouse that was now a buzzing hive of a restaurant.  When they said they were going to start raising their own food, I said how high.

Most of the work at first was unskilled labor.  Roberta’s regulars and community activists Jeremy and Luis of BushwickBK.com had donated their backyard to the project, and our first task was to clear it of garbage and debris.  In fact, we had some notion that we’d send soil samples up to Cornell and plant directly in the ground, but when we raked up a couple (full) crack vials, the top of a stove and a few contractor bags of insulation, we quickly reevaluated our plan.

So, Chris called up his lumber guy and ordered some wood for raised beds.  We laid down tarps and called everyone we knew who had a drill.

Once we’d built the beds, it was time to order soil.  We found someone on craig’s list selling triple-screened organic soil from an old horse farm at a good price-per-yard.  At this point, I’d been pretty stoked about the garden and had mentioned it to a couple of my friends.  Everyone had been so enthusiastic about coming out and helping that we assembled a crew of almost twenty folks.  Unfortunately, the soil purveyor was not so enthusiastic; not about hitting the road on time, anyway.  Dude shows up three hours late; the “L” in the logo painted on his dump truck was a hand gun.  We were, to say the least, dubious of the pedigree of this soil.

But we figured we’d fill the boxes halfway with the sandy crap we had waited half the morning for and buy some really sweet nutrient-rich dirt from LI Compost for topsoil, so we carried on with our shoveling and bucket brigading.  It was hard work, but it felt good after a winter of being cooped up in an office.

It took an army, but we got the beds filled and transplanted the seeds that we’d propagated under Corona Beer bar lights fitted with flourescents on timers.  I saw more of my friends in the weeks building the garden than I had in a year prior.  We spent afternoons shoveling trash and wrestling with weeds, drinking beer and listening to Sam Cooke’s Chain Gang.

We raised tomatoes, cukes, squash, melon, fennel, beets, beans, peas, carrots, potatoes, onions, broccoli, chard, kale, mustard and a million kinds of lettuce.

At some points, things got rough.  We were up against aphids, white flies and birds.  We fought a sisyphean battle against an over-productive mulberry tree growing directly over our beds. The weather was abysmal; the rain was unrelenting.  Many of the counties in the immediate area had been declared agricultural disaster areas.  We drafted Gwen, an experienced urban gardener and food activist.  She had a green thumb that the plants loved and organized the operation so that it made sense.  I could show up any day after work or on a weekend and check Gwen’s task list for things that needed to be done.  The backyard and shipping container beds grew to a greenhouse and vermiculture tubs joined our compost system.



We started meeting other urban agrarians and hanging around Ben Flanner and Annie Novack’s Rooftop Farm in Greenpoint, a 6,000 sq foot soil farm overlooking the East River.  Ben shared pointers with us and hosted Brandon and his beekeeper friends’ honey harvest.  At some point, the idea of an acre of rooftop farm, a commercially viable farm right here in Brooklyn, was born.  It is going to take an army, of that we have no doubt; it will take favors and fundraisers, invitations and introductions.  We will ask for help from friends, philanthropists and volunteers.  And we will build not only a farm, but The Brooklyn Grange, a network of urban agrarians and producers who, like ourselves, aren’t letting our New York roots stop us from laying down new ones.