Slow Life with Real Food

Meet Manfred Warmuth. Manfred is the kind of guy who calls to bring over ice-cream, and then shows up with cream, fruit, and a thermos of liquid nitrogen to flash-freeze it all. Manfred will show you how to shell soybeans using an electric drill and an empty 2 liter bottle of soda. Open Manfred's pantry (if you dare!) and inside you will find a fermentation workshop. Just take a walk around Manfred's farm, and you will find yourself among dozens of experiments.

Manfred lives on the west side of Santa Cruz, CA, in the shadow of the University of California. His "farm" is a half-acre urban plot of land surrounded by boxy houses, and it feels a bit like a slightly organized version of the wilderness. I wasn't sure whether to call his place a farm or not, so I looked up the definition of 'farm', and here's what I found:

A tract of land cultivated for the purpose of agricultural production, or a tract of land devoted to the raising and breeding of domestic animals.

Well, that fits! Everywhere I looked, in every little crevice and corner, there was something edible growing or fermenting or being worked on by busy creatures. There are dozens of varieties of plum trees, multitudes of vegetables and fresh herbs, bees, rabbits, chickens, and ducks. To irrigate, he uses rainwater collected from the house's gutters, and stored in huge plastic tanks. The house's greywater is collected and processed in a greywater system: an aereated pond with little waterfalls and a multitude of aquatic plants, which transforms the dish washing, laundry, and bathing water into clean water for irrigating crops and fruit trees.
 
The property is fringed by bee hives. Some are Kenyan top bar hives, and others are regular hives. At any given time he has at least ten Bantam chickens and other breeds (hard to count them when they are running around all over the place), a couple of ducks, and quite a few rabbits.  The rabbits live in a network of burrows under the house, but have access to the outside via a tunnel. All of these animals are considered fair game for the table.

I love to visit Manfred's place. He can make a party out of any occasion, like roasting a fresh lamb, or harvesting honey. His enthusiasm for homegrown is contagious. It makes me want to go home and throw random veggies and salt in a crock and see what happens. It takes a certain amount of bravery, creativity, humility, patience, and curiosity to have a farm like Manfred's. It's fun to see what he is up to, and what his newest experiments are. It's refreshing to be at a farm (or a piece of residential land) where everything isn't perfect or manicured; where an urban farm ecosystem is allowed to evolve naturally, with only gentle direction, free and ripe for observation, study, and manipulation by a scientist's eye.