Martina Fugazzotto remembers the moment she first fell for her boyfriend, Mike Caputo. It was when they butchered bunnies together.
“I took a class where I held a live rabbit in my hands, and I went through the [entire] process…each person did it themselves, and we learned what to do with every part of the rabbit.”
Caputo gamely took the class with her, “and that,” she says, “is when I realized my boyfriend is awesome!”
Fugazzotto and Caputo are urban homesteaders, and they’re part of a growing trend in New York City. Not content with buying produce from green markets, these hard-core city farmers are turning their tiny backyards into sprawling vegetable patches, tending to small-scale livestock, keeping bees and pickling, canning and jamming anything that’ll fit into a Mason jar. Then they blog about it.
You could be forgiven for thinking you’d walked into a big re-enactment of “Little House on the Prairie” — with texting.
“Last time I was in Brooklyn, it looked like every guy there was about to ship out for the Civil War,” says Christian Lander, creator of the blog Stuff White People Like and recent author of “Whiter Shades of Pale.”
He sees the current farming craze as the latest incarnation of the hipster quest for ultimate old-timeyness. “We have this amazing thing of wanting to live in this time that never existed,” Lander says, “where everything is old-fashioned but there are still iPhones.”
Fugazzotto, 28, a social-media marketer herself, is now building a hutch for her backyard. She’ll be raising, and then killing, her very own rabbits in only a month or two. “You keep two parent rabbits — you never eat them, so I’m allowed to name them,” Fugazzotto explains. “But I can’t name the babies. It takes about two months for the babies to get big enough to eat.”
After the slaughtering, the culinary fun begins. “Mike came up with a recipe,” says Fugazzotto, who blogs about her DIY adventures at FarmTina.com. “It’s called ‘the bunnito.’ It’s a burrito made with rabbit meat, and a dollop of sour cream for a tail!”
With her nerdy-hip glasses and American Apparel style, Fugazzotto could be the poster child for a new book out today, “Urban Homesteading: Heirloom Skills for Sustainable Living.” It’s a how-to guide for city folk on everything from growing your own food to building a composting toilet (“think of all those quiet hours you could have . . . at your outdoor toilet, listening to the sirens go by . . .”).
“We need to take a more active relationship with the earth,” says co-author Rachel Kaplan, a gardener and farmer who’s in her mid-40s. A California resident herself, she “thought about New York when I wrote this book.
“My mom lives there,” she says. “And I thought, what could she do with her little deck?”
So many things, it turns out, if you talk to locals like Megan Paska. The 30-year-old blogger is full of tips on how to convert any and all available space into farmland. She’s well-known in certain circles for her Brooklyn Homesteader blog; DIY classes; women’s beekeeping club, the Honeysuckle Rosies; and BK Swappers, a food swap she co-founded — the next one, if you’re so inclined, is Sunday at Williamsburg’s The Brooklyn Kitchen.
Paska thinks it’s pretty funny that pioneer living is hot.
“It’s become a really fashionable thing to do,” she says.
Urban homesteading is hardly a new concept, as Fugazzotto discovered on a personal level when she did a little family-history research. “I found out my great-grandmother, who grew up on the Lower East Side, had a roof garden on a tenement building in the 1930s,” she says. “She grew food for her family — in gun boxes!”
(Yeah, says Lander, but “she wasn’t doing it as part of an art installation. She was doing it to not die.”)
The farther from Manhattan you go, the likelier you are to find garden-worthy spaces.
In Greenpoint, Paska has a four-chicken coop in the backyard, as well as a garden and compost heap, while the roof is home to her three beehives. Meanwhile, it’s open season on the city’s green spaces now that foraging for wild herbs and veggies is all the rage.
“There’s field garlic out there right now, which is very similar to the garlic we’re used to, but maybe a bit milder,” says Leda Meredith, author of “The Locavore’s Handbook,” who leads foraging workshops in Prospect Park.
“Dandelion greens are almost in season. They’re really at their best in spring.”
And everyone seems to want in at Brooklyn Grange, a one-acre rooftop farm in Long Island City, which provides produce to some of the city’s hottest restaurants, including Marlow & Sons, Joseph Leonard, bobo and Fatty ’Cue. “We’re getting more and more volunteers here. There’s a lot of interest,” says head farmer Ben Flanner.
Flanner, 30, is a refugee from the corporate world — he used to be a marketing manager at eTrade. But like many of the other homesteaders, he chucked the office job in favor of getting back to the land . . . even if that land is situated in one of the world’s busiest cities.
“I think it just makes sense for people to use as much as they can in terms of what’s coming out of our waste stream,” he says. “We’re using all the rainwater off the roof, and we’re producing thousands and thousands of pounds of food. We’re composting. We have worm bins going. We have bees, and we’re going to have chickens.”
But not everyone thinks city farming is quite as virtuous as it sounds. “It’s fantastic that people are having this connection with food again,” says Lander. “But it kind of shows how we’ve taken these problems with [global] poverty and wealth and given up. ‘I’m not going to be able to affect this on a macro scale, so I’ll just handle it on my own with chickens. But I don’t have time to volunteer!’ ”
Blogger Erica Reitman, from the site Effed in Park Slope, just thinks it all seems a little pointless.
“I’m sort of entertained by people who decide to live in the biggest metropolitan city in the US, only to pretend like they’re living on some farm in Minnesota,” she says. “We have access to the most amazing farmers markets, the Park Slope Food Coop . . . so I don’t exactly feel the need to start a cucumber patch in my backyard.”
Paska’s heard it all before, and happily shrugs off the criticism.
“I don’t mean to sound arrogant, but New York needs more people like me. It doesn’t need more musicians who think their band is the best . . . It needs more people who are going to bring something new to the city.”
Another homesteader offered a more dystopian rationale.
“Farming is really just one aspect of this survivalist mentality that exists here,” says Brandon Hoy, the wry 33-year-old co-owner of Roberta’s restaurant in Williamsburg, which grows much of its own produce. “I think originally it was kind of a funny joke — we look at it as a zombie-proof compound.”
In addition to their greenhouse, he says, “We’ve got barbed wire, we’ve got flame throwers. So we’re good. We’re set up for the zombie invasion.”