Baby Jo Strikes Back

For a hen at the bottom of the pecking order, Baby Jo really doesn’t have it that bad. The other hens let her sleep in the coop, and when she recently decided to try to hatch a clutch of eggs in the corner, none of them hassled her.

But her status in the group is painfully obvious when the eating is good. The other hens chase her away from the best clumps of scratch, the biggest pieces of chopped fruit and the juiciest bugs in the horse stalls. She’s the only hen not allowed to eat with the group. It’s sad to see.

But Baby Jo has an outlet. It can’t be easy being the omega, and frustrations no doubt build up. That’s where the English sparrows come in.

English sparrows are the omegas of the wild-bird crowd, at least when it comes to biologists. A non-native species that has driven many less adaptive songbirds to near extinction, U.S. naturalists see the English sparrow as a blight. Those passionate about maintaining bird feeders aren’t too thrilled with these LBBs (little brown birds) either. They come in large flocks, decimate all the seed in a feeder in a matter of minutes, and then fly off, leaving nothing but their poop behind.

Of course Baby Jo has no way of knowing the American ornithologist’s view of English sparrows. Yet, she has somehow picked up on the fact that these birds are below even her on the totem pole. 

Baby Jo regularly makes her stand on our small backyard lawn, where we toss the scratch. This is where she forages for whatever is left after the rest of the flock have moved on to other endeavors. Although she may be the youngest and newest member of the flock, she becomes someone else altogether whenever an unsuspecting English sparrow lands there to scavenge. 

The transformation is amazing. Baby Jo goes from mild mannered barnyard fowl to something out of Jurassic Park. She lowers her neck, juts out her head and runs at the bird like a velociraptor. The poor sparrow takes off with a surprised chirp, no doubt stunned that a giant gray monster is lunging madly in his direction.

I happen to like English sparrows and think they are charming little birds despite their bad public image. So I was tempted to intercede in this drama by putting some feeders up near the lawn. I’d fill them with chicken scratch and let the sparrows eat out of reach of the demon Baby Jo.

But then I realized that Baby Jo probably needs to have someone she can boss around. Chasing sparrows no doubt makes her feel a bit more powerful in the world when she really has no power at all. So I keep throwing scratch on the lawn, always spreading a little bit more every day than I know the chickens will eat.

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Sometimes, I get reader mail from people who are interested in growing fava beans. I always tell them that gardeners just about anywhere except in the tropical climates can grow them. I’m sorry, but you growers in Florida and Hawaii can grow some big plants, but they probably won’t set many pods. Of course, everything comes down to microclimate, so maybe the gardeners who live up on the mountains in Hawaii might be able to grow fava beans with success.

The key to growing fava beans is to have a nice, cool season when the heat-hating flowers can be pollinated and set fruit. In places with really cold winters, fava beans can be planted in the spring and will manage to set the fruit before the summer heat sets in. In places that have winters with perhaps a bit of snow but a lot of days between 50 and 65 degrees Fahrenheit, fava beans are best planted in the fall.

Here in Northern Italy, it’s traditional to plant these beans, called fave, on the second day of November. I’ll confess that I didn’t do so this year; I planted the “early” variety six weeks ago and planted the regular fave a week ahead of schedule. In both cases, I’ll have to wait until early spring to harvest the beans.

The good news for American gardeners is that the availability of good fava-bean seeds in the United States has never been better. Early, late, long pod, short pod, dwarf and a number of named fava bean varieties are available.

When I plant fava beans, I try to mix some fireplace sweepings into the soil, because the extra potassium helps combat the almost inevitable rust fungi that will attack the plants next spring. I also like to create some sort of staking system, because the big mature plants loaded with huge seed pods can become quite floppy, and I’d rather the pods didn’t touch the muddy ground.

Some serious farmers plant fava beans as a cover crop for their nitrifying action. The crop is also often used in rotational schemes because it can be planted after anything; it won’t get whatever diseases or pests might have been bothering a previous crop on the same plot of soil. Fava beans don’t make a particularly large harvest of edible produce, and even those are more often fed to animals than destined for human consumption. But fava beans do generate a fairly high amount of soil nitrogen, and they create a whole lot of compostable organic material.

Although fava beans can be dried and eaten later in soups, many gardeners, including myself, are crazy for fresh fava beans. I’m a goat, and like to eat the beans right out of the pod, but my more civilized wife takes the time to remove the light-green shell protecting the beans before eating them.

In any case, we eat them in many ways, but the traditional May Day afternoon snack of fresh fava beans, salty Pecorino cheese and local salami is divine.

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Courtesy PepsiCo Food for Good Initiative

The Food for Good Farm, a joint urban farm project between PepsiCo and Paul Quinn College, was built on the college’s former football field.

In a place like Dallas, Texas—one of the U.S.’s top burgeoning cities in a state that hosts some of the country’s best ranch land—it’s hard to believe that lack of fresh food would be a problem for anyone. But the southern part of the city has come to be known as a food desert, with access to affordable fruits and vegetable out of arm’s reach.

Paul Quinn College, a small, minority-based college of 150 students in South Dallas, unsettled by the unavailability of fresh food for its students and the surrounding community, decided to take matters into its own hands.

“The closest grocery is 5 miles away from the college,” says Michael Sorrell, president of Paul Quinn College. “There are no healthy dining options at all—the Subway at a gas station in the next town south is the closest healthy dining option to the college.”

With an unused football field left over from the college’s discontinued football program, the college partnered with PepsiCo to start the Food for Good Farm on the original gridiron.

The idea for the farm started in January 2010, merely months before ground was broken on the 2-acre plot in March. The original plan for the football field was to transform 30 yards into a small garden, but by partnering with PepsiCo and its new Food for Good program, the school was able to take the land even further to plant greens, corn, tomatoes, squash and other crops.

For many students on campus, this will be their first gardening experience.

“When the tractors first started showing up on campus, most students had no idea why they were tearing up the football field,” says Patrick Hillard, a sophomore from Ft. Worth, Texas, and student captain of the farm team. “As word began to spread that Paul Quinn College would soon have an urban farm, most students at first thought it was a joke.”

Courtesy PepsiCo Food for Good Initiative

The urban farm at Paul Quinn college was inaugurated on May 5, 2010.

The crops harvested will be divided among Paul Quinn and PepsiCo’s programs. Half of the crops will be sold to area restaurants and grocery stores, 20 percent will be served in the college dining halls at a discounted rate to students, and 10 percent will be donated to food banks and area families in need.

The remaining 20 percent of the harvest will be donated to PepsiCo’s farm stand initiative, a program to provide local growers with the tools needed to start their own farm stand. The concept is first being tested in Dallas’ Jubilee Park Community.

“The produce grown at the Food for Good Farm will be a source for the Jubilee Park farm stand and other local farm stands as the model expands throughout Dallas and the Highland Hills community that surrounds Paul Quinn College,” says Amy Chan, the Food for Good project manager.

According to Sorrell, with 140 more acres of unused land, this new urban farm just scratches the surface of what’s to come.

Beyond the Harvest

More than just a piece of land that will bring physical nourishment, the Food for Good Farm will bring intellectual nourishment as well. Over the next four years, the college will be rolling out a new social entrepreneurship curriculum and degree program that will incorporate lessons learned on the farm.

“We are not trying to turn our students into farmers. We are trying to turn our students into social entrepreneurs and social leaders,” Sorrell says. “When you are in the business of teaching students to be leaders, you tackle the problems that need to be tackled.”

The program will address all kinds of community needs. But given the community’s lack of available, nutritional produce and the nation’s growing malnutrition and childhood obesity problems, the farm seemed like a logical place to start.

Beginning in 2010 all students at Paul Quinn will be required to enroll in a year-long social entrepreneurship study, half of which will be spent working on the farm. PepsiCo will bring in experts to assist students in soil preparation, crop selection and irrigation techniques, as well as in business development and selling the produce locally.

Sorrell notes that with food deserts in communities across the U.S., the Food for Good Farm has the potential to become a national model—all it takes is people’s decision to create change. The students seem to be catching on to this notion.

“Our school is in South Dallas, not exactly what someone would call prime real estate for a farm,” Hillard says. “This project has taught me that no matter what, there is always a solution to a problem that can and will benefit other people. A year ago, we had an ugly looking football field that was not in use. Now, we have the beginnings of a harvest—fruits and vegetables growing between those goal posts.”