This is a great book. It is a very funny account of a couple's, well Novella Carpenter's, efforts at urban farming in one of the roughest sections of Oakland, California. Really a ghetto. But, the whole way though you will just want to start farming in your own neighborhood...hell on the roof of your building, any building. Trust me. And she has included a wonderful bibliography.
How can you not purchase this book: "A word about my backyard: Don't entertain some bucolic fantasy. In the middle of it, Mrs. Nguyen's excercise bike sat on a bare patch of dirt. In the very back of the yard was the chicken coop Bill had built from pallets in what had been a large dog run made with sturdy chain link fencing now overgrown with weeds and volunteer trees. Abutting this chicken area was an auto-repair shop/junkyard, which hosted two dogs; a pale brown pit bull and a dark-eyed Rottweiler mix. A forklift often zoomed around the repair shop, dodging rusting transmissions and barrels of god knows what. A little beyond the auto shop you could see downtown Oakland's non-descript skyline. Not exactly a country idyll."







