Notes of a Wannabe Farmer

"Up until two years ago, when Ammemarie started her home dairy, I had a completely nineteenth-century image of the process. In my mind's eye I saw a grandmotherly-looking woman seated at a kitchen table, turning a large wooden churn. And turning it, and turning it, and turning it. My mind even supplied two for three strips of flypaper hanging down over the table." – Neil Perrin, from First Person Rural, Essays of a Sometime Farmer







The city-dweller will also have to face the stark truth that as he or she would like nothing more than to look out their backyard porch at a well-conceived and self-sustaining homestead, including raised beds of veggies and herbs, a chicken coop out there in the deepest corner, some grains off to the side, and boxes of honey bees behaving themselves cornered up against the garage which is shared with the neighbor, there will be some issues of practicality and imagination that will have to be adjusted. One of the great motions of mind in modern times is the migration into the urban centers where the schools, the restaurants, the jobs are close by – biking becomes a valid option when compared to considering riding from the rural house fifteen miles in along a highway road shared with crop-cutters. Now once we establish ourselves in our tidy corner house on the cramped block – bless it, for it is beautiful and cozy – we now conceive of the backyard homestead, of course. 'If only,' becomes the key phrase inside the mind of the newly motivated urban farmer. 'If only we could have a few chickens in back,' or 'we need to compost everything for our...crops.' 'If only we had raised beds on the boulevards, corn and potatoes, that would be nice.'  In other words, the urban backyard homesteader is a good and proper dreamer. Landed with 40 acres to plant for real, this same dreamer might wonder what in the world to do with all this land, especially if we are merely feeding ourselves! Should we turn this rural plot into a going concern? Now, reduced to a backyard courtyard made of concrete tile, some planting beds about five by one feet extending at the top of the courtyard walls, and a patch of yard about two by twenty feet, we have to think in its opposite, as micro farmers, if you will. Usually at this point the good and proper urban micro farmer just wishes himself back about a hundred years ago when all these choices weren't around for him to pick from. My own father grew up on a family dairy, three other brothers, and the work was haying, cowing, fencing, manuring, or whatever new real crises arose. There wasn't a lot of thinking about microfilming in those moments. Much of the thinking, if I have gathered all of the information accurately, was something more like, 'let's get off this farm as quick as possible and into the cities and our desk jobs! for goodness sakes. Now we've had our generation or two of rest and its time to get our hands dirty again and we all know it. Notes of a wannabe farmer is a little tongue and cheek, yes, but it's also plenty accurate. The urban wannabe farmer is what it is: a looker back, a looker forward, and a looker of his plot as it is, and realizing that there are some small tasks that have to be planned and executed to make this little city block corner house a 'homestead,' and along the way it might be kind of fun...unlike real farming, which is, as I understand it, like, real, work.