There is nothing unusual about sitting down to a nice salad for lunch during the summer. What makes the salads prepared by Jim Montgomery and Mateo Rutherford different is that almost every component has been grown, raised or made in their West Berkeley backyard — the purple endive, the lettuce, the tomatoes, the carrots, the green beans and even the feta cheese.
When they skip adding nuts or avocados, then every part of the salad was planted, fertilized, grown and processed at their home. If they added a hard boiled egg or smoked duck meat, those elements too would have been produced behind their house.
“What we take from the garden and animals goes into the kitchen, and garden waste goes to the animals,” Montgomery said. Without pause, Rutherford added, “And the animal waste goes into the garden.”
The approximately 6,000-square-foot yard, just off of San Pablo Avenue, provides generous space for a bustling urban farm. From the street it is impossible to tell that the property holds everything from apple trees to tomato vines, rabbits to goats, and chickens to domesticated pigeons.
The modest 1920 vintage house started life as a single-story home and was raised to have a snug second unit installed beneath it. Montgomery, 39, and Rutherford, 42, bought the property in 1995 with a third partner and immediately began transforming the backyard into a farm and garden.
They started with chickens and rabbits and, after buying out their partner, added ducks, pigeons and goats, once they discovered that they are legal to keep in Berkeley.
The busy farm became their way of reducing the impact of their lives on the environment.
“The value we have as a household is attempting to live sustainably in the world today,” Montgomery said. Pointing out that the mere transportation of food from where it is grown and raised on industrial farms to urban centers necessitates the burning of great amounts of petroleum, he said, “We’re growing a victory garden against having to use so much oil.”
To do this, they try to produce as much food as they need. There are the usual vegetables, such as broccoli and zucchini, and then there are the beans from northern India and the rare yukon, a tuber described by Montgomery as a cross between a taro root and a potato.
Fruit trees offer apples, Asian pears, apricots, Santa Rosa plums and satsuma tangerines. Kiwi vines prepare to create their furry green fruits. Gooseberries and olallieberries explode from the manure-rich soil.
“We eat plants that most people in this country would consider weeds,” said Rutherford. They also grow and eat esoteric and highly nutritious plants like amaranth, purslane and magenta lamb’s-quarter, the young leaves of which have a purple pigment used in makeup.
The tomatoes alone are an amazing feat in gardening. Using tinted sliding glass doors turned onto their long sides, Montgomery and Rutherford created a wind break for the plants that also heats up during the day, giving the tomatoes the warmth they crave to grow tall and set their fruit.
One season, the two men created a cold frame over one vegetable bed to trap heat for tomato plants. Inside the frame, they included a cage that the rabbits could enter from an aboveground wire tunnel. The rabbits’ breath produced warm carbon dioxide, which the plants absorbed. In turn, the plants emitted oxygen for the rabbits. “We picked our first tomato from that bed in May, and we picked the last one the following January,” Rutherford remembered with pride.
Pesticides and chemicals are not used. One visitor examining the broccoli noted in wonder that it was devoid of aphids. “I said, ‘There better be aphids, ‘ ” Rutherford recalled. “Without aphids, we won’t have lady bugs, and we need them to eat the insects eating the vegetables.” On closer examination, the desired aphids were found, along with their orange and black predators.
Oat straw and alfalfa are grown for the two adult female goats and whatever kids they are raising that season. The goats are milked daily, giving two gallons per day in the summer and a half gallon in the winter. The refrigerator in the milking shed almost looks like a supermarket dairy case, its shelves packed with glass quarts of milk, bundles of feta cheese and jars of pickles that Rutherford made from the garden’s cucumbers.
By no means are the animals there as a petting zoo. The birds and goats are part of the working farm. The eggs are cooked and added to recipes, the Muscovy ducks killed, plucked and smoked, the chickens roasted if the flock needs to be culled and the king pigeons made into tasty meals such as teriyaki.
The ducks are smoked using wood taken from the yard’s apple trees.
Montgomery eats meat, and while he obviously has some attachment to the goats and their kids, he does not sentimentalize the animals or the slaughtering process. “It’s not a pretty thing the way food is produced in this country,” Montgomery said. “I don’t want to give up meat, but I want to face the process.”
He tries to place goats born at the house on farms in the Bay Area, but that is not always possible. Slaughtering livestock in Berkeley is illegal, so Montgomery takes the young goats to a butcher in Healdsburg, where he watches the entire procedure in order to understand and acknowledge how meat makes it from the animal to the table.
That they have created their farm in a dense residential neighborhood would seem amazing enough, but both men also have jobs. Montgomery teaches math and manages the finances at a private high school, and Rutherford works as a Spanish-language translator and interpreter. Fortunately, the three renters who also live at the house pitch in with the chores.
The unique nature of their farm, sitting as it does near a busy boulevard in a crowded city, has made it an attraction for institutions and neighbors alike. The farm was a popular stop on the Alameda County Waste Management Authority’s Bay-Friendly Garden Tour in May and will be included in the Urban Sustainability Bike Tour organized by Berkeley’s Ecology Center on July 31.
A local summer camp brings its charges by to meet the animals and to see the possibilities of vegetable gardening. Nearby families cannot resist the farm, either. “Lots of parents bring their kids by in the evening to watch the goats being milked,” Rutherford said. “We put them to work.”
While keeping the plants and animals healthy and productive, Rutherford and Montgomery are turning their attention to the house. They are investigating solar heating options and gray water systems, which take laundry, sink and bath water and filter them for non-consumption uses such as garden irrigation.
Rutherford has also started the Network of Backyard Urban Gardeners, a newsgroup to facilitate produce exchange between like-minded growers. In the meantime, the eggs, milk, cheese and startlingly fresh salads will just keep coming.
Learn more
— For information on the Urban Sustainability Bike Tour see the Eco- Calendar of the Ecology Center at www.ecologycenter.org/ or call (510) 548- 2220.
— Subscribe to the Network of Backyard Urban Gardeners at groups.yahoo.com/group/NOBUGS/join.
