Novella Carpenter's Blog

Due to popular demand, I'm going to have another farm tour!

When: Sunday, December 20, 11am-2pm

What: Signed copies of Farm City, Goat Town t-shirts, fried green tomatoes, and hot chocolate made with goat milk for sale. Goat snuggling and tours free.

Where: Ghosttown Farm, 665 28th Street, at Martin Luther King

How: Don't park on 28th Street!! Park on MLK, and walk over. Please. I'll give you the stink-eye if you drive down 28th Street, which is a dead-end street where my neighbors enjoy parking...

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Hello! I tried to submit this to the NYTimes Op-Ed pages, but they had too many damn Thanksgiving opinions, so here it is, on my humble blog…. 

Four years ago, I raised my first Thanksgiving turkey on my urban farm in Oakland, CA. My reasoning was the following: I wanted to eat organic, free-range turkey but didn't have a lot of money, so I decided to do it myself. With this in mind, I did what any urban farmer does: I logged onto the internet and bought a bargain-priced assortment of day-old...

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Those words: back home, make me so happy.

My mom called to tell me she had counted, and I had been to 10 different venues in almost as many days during my east coast tour. I was in denial about those numbers, but looking back on it, yup, she was right. Funny thing was, it never felt like work. Mostly because of the awesome people I met along the way.

First thing I did after I landed in New York City was to go to the New York Restoration Project offices, where an awesome urban farmer and tree...

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No one brought a camera for the turkey slaughter class in Austin, including me. It was more personal that way.

Heck, it was personal on so many levels. First off, one of my best friends in the world hosted the class at her little urban farm in East Austin. Leilani is from the Bay Area and I have been missing her for a few years now as she's settled into life in Austin. Part of settling there involved raising chickens and turkeys. She and her beau, Luke, starting keeping a few Rio Grande...

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I know, I know, first there was the chicken class in Kansas City. And then there is the upcoming turkey workshop in Austin, TX this Saturday. And now, I'd like to announce the Brooklyn rabbit class.

The Complete Rabbit, Brooklyn, NY November 15

Rabbits are the new chicken. More and more urban farmers are discovering the benefits of raising rabbits for meat in the city: bunnies are quiet, prefer to be kept in shady locations, reproduce quickly, and can be fed scraps.

This class will cover rabbit...

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Oh lordy, things are really hopping here. I don't want to toot my own horn, but there's a really neat video that Chow.com did about me and my goats, it's called Novella Carpenter's backyard is a pigsty. Which is true in many ways. check it out here.

I just flew in from a few days in the Inland Empire, aka, Eastern Washington and Idaho, where I was doing a series of public talks and supporting a great new coop grocery store in Spokane. Moscow was very special because so many of my mom's...

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Welp, I'm going to do it. Teach a turkey raisin' and killin' class in Austin. The day before I go on a panel with Jonathan Safran Foer, vegetarian author of Eating Animals (and two great novels). There's another guy on the panel who will be talking about how local food and eating meat is just all wrong. Don't think I don't recognize a paradox: I'm the nutball Californian coming to Texas where I will be the only gal (ahem) on stage promoting meat eating. 

It is fitting, then, that while I'm in...

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God, I love a rainstorm paired with a day of roasting and canning tomatoes. Especially after a few days of traveling.  

The day before I left for a reading in Madison, Wisconsin (for a report on that, see Farm City News), Bill and I went to Ned and Ryan's farm, Blue House Farm in Pescadero, to glean our annual crop of dry-farmed Early Girls. For the past three years now we make the hour drive south, pick unsold fruit, then can it up for next year. It's a gift to our future selves, future...

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I returned to the United States early this week, jet lagged and haggard. Billy picked me up in Miami and we went directly to the Calle Ocho–which is where the best Cuban food in America is made. We then drove back to Orlando where another plane would take us back to San Francisco. Our bellies full of Chicken with Yellow Rice and Cubano sandwiches, we cruised down the highway in a Lincoln Continental (the car of Bill's mom). As we drove, the band Denegue Fever rocked our world, and a...

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So, I'm heading out on vacation in a few hours. Billy and I are flying to Florida, then I'll go over to France. I'll be back in the urban farming saddle September 29. We were lucky to find a housesitter and our downstairs neighbors will make sure the goats get fed and watered. We also have a mighty milking list with all my kind friends who are going to squeeze Bebe's teats while I'm gone. Whew, what a relief. It's so hard to tear myself away but I really really need to rest.

When I come back...

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