My Wife With Goats

In a city of overgrown parks and weed-choked empty lots, one New Orleans woman and her hungry, hungry goats craft a new career beating back the blight.

Illustrations by Jo Dery

This part of the park was just recently choked with vines so dense you couldn’t see sunlight between the trees. Now light blasts through the electric fence into an area so bare, it’s like a bomb went off. Thousands of pounds of greenery just disappeared, but only up to the exact height the goats can reach. The foliage starts again about six feet up, at a line of demarcation as eerily straight and consistent as the flood line that marked blocks and blocks of houses after Hurricane Katrina.

“I told you!” was all Morgana said as we disassembled the portable fence and moved her goats to tackle a new green mess.

Though we don’t live on a farm, goats have taken over our lives. Nine months ago, my wife Morgana teamed up with ten of them to found Y’Herd Me Property Maintenance, a goat-powered landscaping firm with which she hopes to clear some of the overgrown spaces that have blighted New Orleans since Katrina.

With more than 40,000 blighted properties measured in 2010,…