The modern yard developed when people who no longer needed farms to grow their own food decided that instead of moving to the city, they would live in the suburbs and have space between their homes and fill that space with yards, little plots of luxurious Almost Nature.

I’ve never appreciated yards, especially grassy ones. A ridiculous endeavor, growing grass is, between laying down the pallets of sod, setting sprinklers and timers, and tiptoeing for weeks just to avoid smashing fickle, fledgling weeds. And for what? Grass grows to be cut. And you can’t even eat it.

Now that I’m all grown up, I’ve promised myself I won’t have a yard. But while living on a farm in Houston, I felt like I had one: a large, green responsibility that never goes away. But instead of imagining a stone courtyard in place of the farm, I actually wanted to nurture the needy flora living outside my window.

The Emile Community Farm sits in the fifth ward, one of Houston’s last neighborhoods to be gentrified. Next door is the old Comet rice mill, which used to be the largest employer of residents in the fifth ward. The mill now defunct, the neighborhood hardly has an economy, at least in the legal sense. According to Ken Crimmons, the rice mill’s owner, residents don’t even have titles to their homes.

Lacking a decent grocery store, the fifth ward is a great place for a community garden. Joe Icet, the farm’s founder, financier, and most willing worker, started the farm in January 2008. By the time Transit Antenna arrived in May, more than thirty raised beds were packed full of crops: squash, zucchini, tomatoes, carrots, leeks, kohlrabi, lettuce, collards, peppers, melons, cucumbers, avocados, sugar cane, a banana tree…an impressive variety. Joe told me to bring the bus on over—dinner was waiting in the garden.

Transit Antenna was the farm’s first overnight guests. A constant breeze kept us cool at night when we would sit at the picnic tables and talk and watch the stray dogs wander in and out of the fence. We had plenty of water, Kentridge loved the compost piles, and Taylor played in the sand. We harvested fresh veggies for our meals. However, in the daytime, the bus felt like a microwave. And our having a pile of manure as our next door neighbor, many flies invited themselves into our kitchen and greeted us in the morning on our bed sheets. Lousy guests for sure, but it’s been said that family make the worst guests.

During the day, I had to get out of the bus, so I looked for farm work to do. I would be lying to say that the squash came to me in a dream all covered in garlic and basil, so I got up early to water them, or that I wanted the pepper seedlings finally to have a home and community, so I removed them from their individual plastic containers and planted them together deep in a bed. My reasoning is more practical. The farm is an experiment in creating a local food economy sustainable by local hands. I was curious how much work it would take to maintain the farm especially when done the old fashioned way: with a wheel barrel and water hose.

So I watched Joe while he worked and hung around long enough to notice things that needed to be done. The beds needed weeding. Some crops had gone to shoot and needed to be pulled. Sprouting seedlings needed planting. The garden needed watering. Crops needed thinning, debugging. Tomatoes needed cages. Cucumbers needed trellises. Collards needed to be picked and cleaned for the local food bank.

The tasks added up in my head. One evening, after Dawn and I had been working on the farm all day, Joe and Nancy, another urban farmer, took us around to show us what needed to be done. At one point Joe turned to us and said, “Hey, don’t feel like we’re giving you a bunch of chores. If you wake up tomorrow and feel like, ‘Hey, I wanna FARM!’ then farm!” He understands how quickly voluntary can feel like obligatory.

Joe gets one step closer to nirvana when people invest themselves in the farm, reaping its benefits and contributing to its upkeep. He could certainly use more help, though he would never ask anyone. He knows the only way the farm will truly be communal is if people feel that by farming they’re doing something for themselves. He’s willing to supply the soil. He says he’s “trading in his federal reserve notes for dirt.” Joe has a cosmic connection to the farm. Most other people are not like him. He admits the single greatest problem of urban farming: “Everyone wants a farmers market, but no one wants to farm.”

And it’s not a big surprise. Watering the entire garden takes about four hours if done well, and about half that if the beds get only a quick drink. Either way, standing in the sun takes its toll. There is a reward, though. After I watered the garden a few mornings in a row and after one drenching day and night of rain, the crops sprung forth in protoplasmic glee. Standing knee deep in the fleshy leave of the squash plants, Joe turned to me and said, “Look what you’ve done! This is your garden!” Anyone who lifts a finger at the Emile Farm receives these warm gifts. They keep people coming back.

Joe has a wide range of friends that visit him on the farm, some he’s met through being in the neighborhood. They come by to talk politics, to work, or just to catch up on each others’ lives. Joe says he sends out text messages whenever he schedules a farm work day or a farm dinner. “Everyone will come out for food,” he assures me.

Considering the alternative, I can see why people spend their time off at the farm. Transit Antenna didn’t leave much, but one day while searching for a Flying J truck stop, we wandered into Deer Park, an industrial community outside of Houston, known for its high incidence of health problems among the young and old. We captured some of what the major chemical companies and oil refineries are doing for our lives. My stomach turned the longer we breathed in the filthy air. We discovered later that the companies don’t take kindly to people being nosy on their property. Lucky for us, the cops didn’t see us at which point they would have discovered we were driving without a license plate (accidentally and unknowingly). Transit Antenna collects close calls.

But back to the farm…we decided to host a potluck, and sure enough, many people from outside the fifth ward, and a few from the neighborhood joined us. While Joe tries to eat well, he sometimes gives in to the convenience of fast food and eats meat on occasion. When we planned the potluck, he said there would be carnivores there. But many of his friends are vegetarians, vegans, and raw foodists (people who don’t like their food cooked).

For the potluck Amy, Dawn, and I each prepared food. I brought a squash recipe my mother gave me that calls for bacon. One herbivore missed the memo. I saw him grazing around the grub table, lifting dish covers and using his fingers to pull pieces of veggies out to eat. He sampled a few dishes in this way before opening the lid to my dish. Lucky for him, before he could clamp his fingers down on some squash, he called out for all to hear: “Bacon?! Oh my God, there’s bacon in this dish! Ugh!”

I understand how he could be disgusted by the swine, especially as it lies there among the succulent, innocent veggies. And I don’t want to be judgmental and say I could never acquire a taste for the microorganisms living on his fingers or in his mouth. Maybe he’s far more radical than the raw foodists and prefers not to disrupt naturally occurring bacteria, like the kind that get on your hand after you stick it in the mushroom compost.

Every day, people from the fifth ward drive by the farm, some curious enough to come in to explore. Getting to know these people was the most rewarding experience of staying on Emile Street. The presence of a crack house down the street made us concerned for our safety, and a few nights we heard someone unload a pistol into the air. After the fourth night, we saw the guy jogging down the street in plain view and decided to do what we had been talking about for three days: move the bus out of the range of stray bullets. But what goes on at night does not occur in the daytime, and there’s a good chance that the Emile Community Farm will attract more residents inside the gate.

Joe says that when “Hurricane Holyshit” comes, it will wipe out the corporate infrastructure that ensures strawberries from California and tomatoes from China get to Houston’s grocers. The trucks won’t be able to make it down the interstate. Then people will need local food and the knowledge necessary to grow it. When the big one hits, Joe says we’ll know where to find him. Just go slightly north of Houston, look for a farm, and remember, “Dinner’s ready.”

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