This excellent piece by mtraub at Etsy and Novella Carpenter, author of Farm City:  The Education of an Urban Farmer, speaks for itself and needs no commentary from me.  I'm running it here to provide us with inspiration to find ways to make use of, rather than waste, the excess in our lives. And it doesn't matter if that excess came from our gardens or from Costco. -marina

My parents gave me a copy of Farm City: The Education of an Urban Farmer this past Hanukkah and I was immediately dreaming of fire escape beehives and personal reserves of prosciutto. Novella Carpenter is not just an inspiring force of daring urban farming, but also a captivating storyteller. So much of the sustainability movement is about connecting to the narrative behind our dinner, sweater, or morning commute. Novella"s emotional tales of agricultural experimentation led me to consider the greater picture of my consumption, and with it, the greater responsibility. For the Etsy Blog, Novella shares her story of preserved lemons, a lesson both delicious and resourceful. For more of her adventures, check out her website at novellacarpenter.net.

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There’s this lemon tree in an abandoned lot a block down the street from my house (and urban farm) in Oakland, CA. For months I’ve walked passed and thought, “Damn, that’s a lot of lemons!†Meyers lemons, I could smell them — sweeter than regular lemons. But they were behind a razor wire fence and so that was the end of that. Two nights ago, my partner Bill and I set off on a walk. I told him about the tree and suggested we bring a ladder and get some lemons. Or a bolt cutter to cut the lock that secured the fence. Bill said we should scope out the tree, and consider our options.  

Before long, we stood in front of the gate, the green tree with yellow lemons dangling secured behind the fence. “This fence?†Bill said. I nodded. Then he pointed to the mechanism that kept the door closed: a frayed shoe lace. “Yippee!†I yelled and in a few minutes we were scruffling under the tree, gleaning every lemon we could reach. Passers-by didn’t even notice us, they just shuffled by, headed to the liquor store. I thought at least one person from our down-and-out neighborhood would want to join us (free food!), but they didn’t. Some of the lemons were soft, some had fallen and started to mold on the ground. If we didn’t pick them all, they would have gone to waste. It’s also good for a lemon tree to have its fruit picked. Harvesting stimulates it to make more fruit, to flower and go on doing its job. And so we picked almost all of them.

We ended up with four buckets of lemons, and they filled our kitchen with a sweet tart smell. After scrubbing them in the kitchen sink, I thought about what to do with this sudden windfall. I didn’t make lemonade, I made preserved lemons. I touched each lemon at least two times — once to wash them, another to score them and stuff them with salt. I culled the ones that weren’t perfect, I juiced the softer lemons, squeezing them into the jars to cover the salted lemons. I tossed in some black peppercorns and a bay leaf into each jar.

As I worked, I thought about how I would use these jars of lemons. After five weeks, they would become tender and salty. The rind could be used in cooking — stuffed into a roast chicken, diced and sprinkled over a salad, tossed into olives. The juice — salty, essence of lemon — can be added to jars of tomatoes destined for the water bath. It’s a delicious way to adjust the acid levels of canned tomatoes.

I made 24 quart jars of the preserved lemons. Too many to use all for myself. They’ll make good gifts, but I also plan to sell some of them at my pop-up farm stand. It took me several hours to span time with these free lemons, and now, they were worth money. That’s where the term value added comes. Lemons that were worthless, disregarded, suddenly looked beautiful. After time, they would be delicious.  

This is what we do as a farmers. When I harvest — carrots, beets, greens — the last chore is to clean the vegetables or fruit, to pick off any bad leaves, to wash them, then to display them in a way that makes them tempting. As a grower of food, I worry about the sun and soil, the water and air, as most people would expect. But then there are the moments at harvest when the choices are made, the jewel is polished, and the produce suddenly goes from dirty undesirable to culinary delight. These lemons reminded me of this life lesson again: a little know-how, some luck, skill, and hard work, can make real change.

 

Thanks to Novella for the inspiration to use unexpected resources. You can get a copy of her book, Farm City: The Education of an Urban Farmer from an independent bookseller or Amazon.

Do you know of a nearby urban farm? Tell us about it in the comments below.

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