Its been quite an adventure learning how to care for, corral and handle turkeys. The hardest part has been their need to roam far and wide. I have been letting them out of their pen for a few hours. The only concerns I’ve had in doing this is that they tend to trample and munch on the food growing. Eating it makes sense of enough but snapping young plants under their giant feet was painful to watch. I put mesh up and they stood on the mesh, their body weight pulling it down to the ground. I tried putting chicken wire over plants as this works with other birds but again they just stood on it and smashed everything under the wire. So I tried an experiment. I recorded the content sound a turkey makes when they have found a good source of food. I found it on a website of turkey calls. Its described as a turkey purr. So my thought was that if I go to a spot in my yard near some food and away from my plants, I could pick at the food like I am foraging (the chickens respond to this like I am one of the flock and they see it as a cue to forage at that spot) to draw them close. Then I could play the happy turkey purr like, uh, like it was me talking…right?

What happened was that I foraged, they came over out of curiosity and I hit play. They flushed bright red, whipped around and fanned their tails out and down but towards me like ninja fighting fans. They did it so fast it shocked me. It was clearly a defensive posture. One of my males, Nash, then turned around and approached me in a manner that looked like he was going assert some dominance in a whoop ass kind of way. I had to swat him away and think…what just happened? Then I realized. Imagine if you will, that you are at home washing dishes and minding your business when suddenly a disembodied voice sweetly says over your shoulder “I am so happy. I love the good food here.” That was basically what my experiment did to the turkeys. They are not “dumb” dumb. They know I don’t speak their language. So they knew the vocalization was a foreign turkey that they could not see. Turkeys are very territorial so this was not welcomed.

After this, I let go of trying to use their words to tell them to stay in a preferred area of the yard and instead hoped they would just stay in the yard. Usually when I am home I can show myself every 20 minutes or so (even if I just poke my head out of a back window) and for some reason this keeps them nearby. However, if I run an errand or get wrapped up in a work project and lose track of time, they disappear.

Yesterday may have proved to be the end of leaving them unattended at all. I left them for about 30 minutes and found an empty yard. A quick search found them on a neighbors roof. This slightly disgruntled neighbor was just working his way over to my house to inform me. We went to go take a look at the situation just in time to watch them launch off the roof, flap across the property and land on the other side of the fence in to a 76 Station, much to the auto body shop owner’s amusement. I was able to coax the two males back over with the promise of snacks but I had to go retrieve the female, Fern, and walk back around the block with a bulky turkey under my arm.

Contrary to what this level of flock management suggests, I do work and I don’t actually have time to spend chasing turkeys down in Oakland. So I’ve learned this, with the amount of space I currently have available, three turkeys is the maximum number I can accommodate in a flock and I need more spacious digs for them so they can stretch their wings out and walk around within a run. I don’t know how fellow urban farmer, Novella, is able to keep her turkeys from roaming out of her yard but she said the males she currently has do not leave. I am wondering if it has anything to do with the amount of space they may need to get be able to jump-flap up and out. Novella’s coop quarters is a tighter configuration than my own. I also heard from friend and urban farmer, Stefani in Alameda, that her turkeys also escape but she too has a spacious run way type yard. I may have to contact the UC Davis Poultry Extension for this questions. The learning continues…

At a recent San Francisco event, the Shape Up Summit 2008, I had the great fortune of introducing a hugely inspirational individual, Bryant Terry. I had heard about Bryant for the first time in the New York Times article on Food Fighters. Bryant is an eco-chef and food justice activist that co-authored the book, “Grub.” Wow. When I first read through Food Fighters it was a cursory read that left me inspired and hopeful but I had in my mind that Bryant was based in New York. I recall this because I clearly recall a moment of lament thinking about the people out there doing amazing work but they are so far away. This is the same feeling I had when I read about the MacArthur Fellow, Will Allen, who started in Growing Power in Wisconsin. It seems so unlikely that I’d get to speak with these exciting thinkers and doers face to face (in hopes of absorbing their knowledge and creativity by osmosis maybe?). However, Bryant is based in Oakland! He is also a very approachable and down to earth person. Wow again.

In his presentation, he mentioned a zeitgeist occurring around food justice, food culture and farming. Yes! There does appear to be one. It has been a real joy to see it emerge. I feel my own passion for growing my own food and experimenting with alternative systems at home was sparked by something I absorbed from the air, as if ideas are indeed shared through breath. Is that not the root of the word inspiration? Breath.

When I first started planting an edible garden I did it because I was surprised by my ignorance of food. Such a simple and basic thing in my life and yet I felt I understood very little about it. I also wanted to engage in a cultural practice familiar to me through my grandparents, to ground me at home where the dominant culture is Indian and Hindu through my husband and father-in-law. I wanted the sense of connection and rhythm planting food gives with the awareness of temperatures, crop rotations, timing for harvest and planting quantities practical for my household. I found so many great resources available that both taught me applied techniques and expanded my thinking on the greater implications of growing our own food, such as preserving food heritage, seed saving, the energy equation for food, and using sustainable methods that create a healthier community.

These ideas are not new but seem to have gone dormant in industrialized nations. We now find ourselves in this odd predicament of unhealthy diets, processed foods and a lack of access to food. Hunger is as old as animals. I am doubting it will ever go away entirely. However, the skewed access to basic resources in societies where good food is thrown away because it does not meet a market standard of symmetry or color is horrifying. The Bay Area is a place where food can be grown year round. Few places afford this luxury. Of all places where people can give a finger to market forces and grow food to feed their families, this is a prim location. It is a profound joy to meet people who also believe this is possible and are working to make it so. As I prepare to head into the Thanksgiving holiday, I hold close my gratitude for the groups and people like, Bryant Terry, Urban Sprouts, People’s Grocery, City Slicker Farms and the many others working to create a just and sustainable food system.

There are constantly unexpected occurrences in the urban farm. Its a grand experiment in which I am learning how to work out the kinks of keeping food and livestock in an urban setting. I would like to point out that the concept of urban farming is not new. Farming is something people have known how to do for thousands of years. When urbanization occurred it accommodated farming. For instance in San Francisco, many of the Victorian and Edwardian homes have garages out of what was once the barn. Urban dwellers kept all manner of livestock, rabbits, hogs, goats, poultry, horses…you get the picture.The big question is how did they manage?

I just got done picking my Fuji apples early because there was a rat eating them, one by one. Each night would see about half an apple eaten. Being the clever girl that I am, I picked them all off and stored them in a cool unlit place in my basement. The same place I kept my potatoes last year. I calculated that of first harvest bestowed by the young apple tree (11 lbs!), the rat only got about a pound or two. However, I went to retrieve a few apples three days later and found at least a third had been tainted with rat teeth.

Initially, when the apples were on the tree, I felt like sharing was not so bad. At least the rat was eating one entire apple at a time. It was very tidy. In the basement, it had an apple orgy and gnawed drunkenly on apples throughout the entire bin. Plus, it is in my basement! When I vented to my husband, Dipak, I just ended up sounding like the Firesign Theater skit on the cat-squirrel.

I have since moved the remaining apples to the fridge and crossed my fingers that some will last for Thanksgiving stuffing. It does not stop there though. Now that all edible items in the basement are secure from wanton rat teeth, I turn to the turkeys.

I have been letting them roam the yard with greater frequency as they seemed adjusted. Things were very promising when they even found there own way back to their coop one evening. Unfortunately last night I came home to Tompkin on top of the chicken coop. I was able to get him down and secure him in his coop but Nash and Fern were missing (again). I looked all around and then caught sight of a huge turkey silhouette on a telephone wire about 20 feet above me. All night, both Nash and Fern are perched up there. I had to wake at dawn to coax the turkeys down before they fly into the 76 station and wander down Grand Avenue again.

I wish I had the time to peruse local libraries for stories on how people continued to farm during urbanization. I imagine stumbling upon practical approaches for containing turkeys in an urban setting.