Books

Farm City

The Education of an Urban Farmer

by Novella Carpenter

Hardcover, 276 pages, Penguin Group USA, List Price: $25.95 |

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Title: Farm City
Subtitle: The Education of an Urban Farmer
Author: Novella Carpenter

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Book Summary

Chronicles the adventures of a woman who turned a vacant lot in downtown Oakland into a thriving urban farm, complete with chickens, turkey, bees, and pigs.

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December 17, 2009 • From an anti-lawn manifesto, to "sophisticated plant porn at its finest," Ketzel Levine shares this year's yield of great gardening books. She finds that geeky plant lust is officially outre, and memoirs of urban homesteads of produce and poultry are a budding new genre.

Excerpts: Best Books 2009

Excerpt: 'Farm City'

December 16, 2009 • Novella Carpenter's Farm City is a cheeky manifesto on homesteading. She farms in Oakland, Calif., "on a dead-end street in the ghetto." Her field of dreams is the vacant lot next door. Carpenter's addictive prose is wickedly irreverent and unabashedly big-hearted.

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The Week's Best Stories From NPR Books

Unlikely Farmers Make A Homestead In The Hood

July 22, 2009 • Novella Carpenter, attracted to a rural lifestyle but not rural solitude, sets out to raise food — everything from pumpkins to pigs — in the ghetto. Her very funny account in Farm Cityis never preachy, yet inspires.