Courtesy Diana Jain

Nicole Capizzi runs a CSA from her 1/2-acre urban farm in Seattle’s Rainier Beach neighborhood. 

Anyone who’s secretly been keeping more than three chickens in Seattle is no longer breaking the law, thanks to new legislation that updates the city’s land-use codes on urban agriculture. But it’s ixnay for the roosters.

The urban-farming legislation was passed as part of Seattle’s push to make 2010 “the year of urban agriculture.” And according to Seattle.gov, the changes were a key component of the “campaign to promote urban agriculture efforts and increase community access to locally grown food.”

“We’ve been working on legislation relating to promoting local food for the last two years, and one of the things we really wanted to do was give people the option to grow food in Seattle,” says Richard Conlin, president of the Seattle City Council and sponsor of the urban-farming bill. “This creates urban farm land use legislation.”

Specifically, the updated legislation—which was passed by a unanimous vote of the Seattle City Council on Aug. 16, 2010—increases the allotted number of chickens per lot from three to eight. It states that coops need to be placed at least 10 feet away from primary residence structures (existing coops will be grandfathered in) and outlaws keeping roosters.

“I am still hesitant to take away an option that currently exists,” Conlin wrote in an email about roosters to council members. “But I agree that this is a nuisance issue we can avoid without compromising our larger goals.” Like chicken coops, existing Seattle roosters will be grandfathered in.

The Seattle legislation also allows for food to be grown in rooftop greenhouses that can extend 15 feet above height limits in certain zones, and it formally recognizes farmers’ markets as retail sellers.

Perhaps the most important aspect of the updated codes states that urban farms of up to 4,000 square feet are permitted within city limits. And food grown on these urban farms can be sold on site.

“I think Seattle is fantastic for pushing these issues and fighting to make them a priority. I’m very proud of my city,” says Nicole Jain Capizzi, who recently returned to Seattle from Milwaukee to start a 1/2-acre urban farm in the city’s Rainier Beach neighborhood. She raises Honey bees and grows a mix of vegetables and flowers for sale through her community-supported agriculture program and to a handful of local restaurants.

Keeping Honey bees had never been an issue for Capizzi (Seattle already had apiary legislation), but growing food on a residentially zoned lot for the purpose of selling it had. Because urban farming was always widely accepted in Seattle—even though it wasn’t technically legal—Capizzi says the legislation didn’t change what she planned to do on her farm, so much as how comfortable she felt advertising it.

“My marketing was really underground—by word of mouth. I didn’t want to make it very public because it wasn’t legal yet,” she says. “But I’m really happy I can now look for customers a little more widely and share what I’m doing and let others use it as an example and an inspiration.”

With full support from the city council and minimal resistance from constituents (Conlin says he received only about 60 emails in opposition to the legislation), Seattle’s farming culture will surely inspire urban-farming communities around the country.

“We hope it sets a model for other cities,” Conlin says. “That cities will look at ours and say, ‘This makes sense, they’ve taken care of their contingencies and they know what they’re doing.'”

Courtesy Audrey Pavia

Red and I tried our hand at ranch sorting.

When Red first came to live with us, we viewed him as just a mellow, older Quarter Horse, the kind you could put little kids and adult beginners on without a worry. The friend we got him from told me that he had royal cutting horse bloodlines (his paternal grandsire is Freckles Playboy, a world champion, and his maternal grandsire is Nu Bar, who sold for $1.1 million at auction), but I figured he probably just didn’t have what it took to be a cutting horse and so ended up as a trail mount.

One of the first things I did when we got Red was join the American Quarter Horse Association so I could look up Red’s owner history. It’s cool being able to put your horse’s name in the AQHA website search engine and see all the people who owned your horse before you. 

The Internet being what it is, I started Googling the names on Red’s past-owner list. I managed to find an email address for a woman two owners ago, and I sent her a note telling her that Red was now living with me. 

I was beyond excited when I got her reply. She told me that Red had lived for 12 years on a working cattle ranch in central California, and was an amazing cattle horse. His career there ended when the ranch was sold, and he ended up passed around to several owners before he landed with me.

So when my friend and riding instructor Lisa suggested we sign up for a local ranch sorting competition in town, I jumped at the chance. I would ride Red and see what he could do with those cows.

Ranch sorting is a lot like shooting pool with cattle. The cows are numbered, and you and your horse have to get a designated cow from the herd into an adjoining pen with the help of a buddy on horseback. Cows like to stick together, so getting the right cow out of the group and into a pen by itself is no easy task. You need a good horse to pull it off.

When it was Lisa’s and my turn to go in there and sort some cows, I felt an adrenaline rush. Lisa was going to “work the gate,” meaning she would stand guard between the two pens to make sure the cow that was captured stayed put while more where gathered in numerical order. 

When the buzzer sounded, I asked Red to push into the herd of numbered steers and he didn’t even hesitate. My normally mellow-to-the-point-of-lazy old horse suddenly came to life. He seemed to read my mind about which cow I wanted and help me drive the critter away from the group and toward the other pen. When we isolated the cow from the group and tried to push it forward, it tried to arch around to rejoin the herd. But Red was all over it. He dashed forward to form a blockade before the cow could get too far from the gate. 

After several runs, we managed to get enough cows in the pen to warrant a third place ribbon. Not bad for a couple of novices. Oh, except for Red, who was clearly a ringer.

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Photo by Rick Gush

Using a soil sifter, I sift my dirt and compost for my potting mix.

I cleaned out the main compost bin this week and am really happy with the results.  I’m doing some seeding and repotting these days, and the compost has allowed me to prepare what I think of as the potting soil of the gods. Plants and seedlings grow particularly well in this mix, and I even give my friends bags full of the stuff. 

My potting soil recipe is simple: equal parts of sifted dirt and sifted compost mixed thoroughly.  The only way to make this stuff better is to let it mature a bit. Two weeks after it’s mixed, the resultant soil is fully chemically active and alive with all the microorganisms that make soil fertile.

Garden supply centers often sell bags of planting mix, but those bags usually contain only organic materials like ground up tree bark. The planting mixes are sterile, which can be good for some seeding situations, but otherwise they are a poor substitute for the real thing. The reason they contain only organic materials is mostly because that material is relatively light in weight, whereas dirt is pretty heavy. If the potting mix manufacturers put dirt in their mixes, the shipping costs would jump considerably, and they’d need to charge more for their product. 

Photo by Rick Gush

I have four areas in my garden, such as this compost bin, where I harvest compost.

Commercial nurseries also often use organic-only potting mixes because they are sterile and because they are much less expensive. When I worked in a snooty upscale nursery in California where they grew a lot of their own plants, they never skimped on this detail. There was a big area out back where dirt was sifted and sterilized before being mixed with various organic materials to prepare the potting mixes used in their growing operation.
 
When dirt is mixed with organic materials it provides not only a mineral fraction, but also an important electrochemical capacity that makes the flow of nutrient materials with the soil solution more robust. When I don’t have suitable compost to use, I do buy bags of planting mix, but then I always add a bunch of dirt to the mix before I use it.

I have three places I make compost with our kitchen waste and another pile where I put the big weeds and branches from the garden work. For a month or two, I pile in all the kitchen refuse and lots of the small garden weeds in one place, and then I switch places and pile in one of the other locations. The down time, when I’m not adding material, is the main cooking phase, and I usually turn the pile a few times during the next two months to allow oxygen to enter the pile.

Then, when the resulting compost is really cooked and dry, I am ready to sift it. I use the sifted out bigger pieces around the bases of the fruit trees and the fine sifted material is used in making potting soil and to enrich the soil in planting beds. I think the secret of compost is the high amounts of humic acids that are produced when organic materials like old plant parts are decomposed in an aerobic manner.

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