1st Anniversary Report

Today is the one year anniversary of the Free Farm Stand. I started this blog in May of last year.is here. It's a time that I can look back and say wow not only did time go by quickly, but so much has happened since I began. Here is a picture of the table at the time I first opened.

I actually had room on the table for plants. I was also able to transport the food to the stand with my bike cart. Now the produce from the farmers market is overshadowing the produce that we are growing. I usually have about a wagon full of produce that I can haul over, but yesterday I wound up bringing the produce not only in my wagon, but with a van (I had about three wagons full of produce plus flats of seedlings I had grown). I also now get one day old organic bread (maybe twenty bags this week) and a lot more people coming by. I think a lot of people are from our neighborhood, but people are coming from all over.

When I started the Free Farm Stand I had a some ideas about what I wanted to do, like to grow a lot of food and give it away and to promote local food growing in our neighborhood. Since we started a lot has been accomplished that I feel great about. A community has been growing and a lot of networks of people have been formed. The Free Farm Stand has been a good place for people to meet each other and share interests together. We have a new gleaning project started and we will see if it really takes off this year. New gardens have been popping up and there is plenty of gardening to be done.

One crazy thing about me is that I can think up a million great projects to do and I can set out doing them, but without people whom I work with closely that can help curb me a bit, at some point I get overwhelmed and over extended. The "free nursery" idea is one of those projects for example. This year I have grown hundreds of starts (with a lot of help too) and have started distributing them at the stand and brining them to the different gardens I work at and giving them to other gardeners I meet. At this point I feel I have to either get someone to help take over that project or cut way back on how many seedlings I start. I didn't realize how much space and time growing seedlings can take. One central greenhouse and a lath house would help, but the plants would still take a lot of attention. I would also like to start growing sprouts again, something I did at the beginning of the stand, but I have temporarily stopped doing because I am focusing a lot of space and time on the starts.

Another thing I am thinking about is that I remember at the beginning of the Free Farm Stand I got so excited about is being an urban farmer and growing and harvesting food that I could give away. I still share that excitement. All the free local organic left over farmers market produce I collect will never make me as happy as the food I am able to grow myself. Or fruit from an urban tree that I picked. At the same time I love to be able to help people have access to free organic healthy produce and it is hard to turn down all the wonderful produce that I get, even though it makes it seem like I am running a regular food program instead of a program to empower people to grow their own food if they can as a way to provide food security. People tell me all the time how much they appreciate the stand and the food they get. Yesterday at the stand I brought some non-local probably non-organic apples that was at the bottom of a box of produce and they were so popular. At first I thought about not bringing the politically incorrect apples (and some endive and onions I also got accidentally), but I figured that it was better than the stuff getting composted. Well I will have to continue thinking about this and perhaps cut down on the amount of free produce I collect and bring to the stand, hoping that we can grow more food to give away.

Yesterday was a great Free Farm Stand day in spite of the heat and the crazy amount of greens we had (a lot of lettuce, baby beet greens, bok choy, mustard, chard, and kale) and the big crowd. I was really excited that at least three maybe four people showed up with lemons from their trees. Christy also brought chamomile from the Corona Heights Community garden (it is growing everywhere up there) and people really enjoyed it. Another person brought the most handsome red celery plant. Another thing the stand does is introduce people to the world of vegetables. We get so many things that people are not familiar with and often they come away liking a new food. Like last week we had stinging nettles. This week there was endive and fava beans. The 18th and Rhode Island garden is at the peak fava bean harvesting season now. We picked 12 1/2 lbs on Friday workday and then on Saturday a woman in the permaculture class harvested probably 12 more pounds of beans and brought them to the stand. We also brought some more fava bean leaves which have become popular.


Two other great contributions to the stand this week was a man named Brady brought some homemade Ancho Chile jam to share (inspired perhaps by the strawberry jam Molly brought the previous week). It was very popular and he sent me his recipe. I suppose if one were to grow any kind of hot peppers they could duplicate this recipe though the smoked chilpote peppers gave it a good taste. And Nosrat brought some of his homemade vegan pesto for me to try out and I shared that too with everyone on bread. Both the jam and his pesto were delicious (the pesto was made with basil that Nosrat got from the stand last week).

A woman who had hip replacement surgery hobbled over to the stand and was really excited about getting the chamomile and other things. She wanted to help so we set her up potting up tomatoes and giving them out. She seemed too be good at giving out garden advice and she seemed to really have a good time. We gave out a lot of seedlings and still have many more to share.
Talk about sharing garden produce there is a lot of talk going around about the SF Victory Gardens project called the Garden Registry. Here is a link in the Sunday's Chronicle someone sent me http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/c/a/2009/04/17/HOL1170KIS.DTL&type=homean and here is the link to the Garden Registry gardenregistry.org . And here is another group that is promoting yardsharing clubs, an idea I am fond of http://hyperlocavore.ning.com/.
The idea of "yard sharing" is something I have been working to bring about alnmost since we started, but it hasn't happened yet. The idea being people form a club or group and work together in their neighborhood growing gardens and sharing the produce. The website is I guess an organizing tool for these clubs that are forming worldwide. These clubs would share their labor and resources and everyone helps each other grow food.This would certainly help me out with all the gardens I am working in. I still think it is funny that all these groups are working towards the same goal, but we seem not to be working with each other exactly. I wonder if I should sign up in the garden registry?

This lead me to another topic that is related. I was just turned on to a piece of land that is owned by the city that is vacant and gets a lot of sun. The neighbor contacted me about growing food there. I would share the water from her house to water the garden. The only hitch is that it is in Bayview, which isn't that far away, but not within wagons distance. Maybe if there was a yard sharing club we could include this property as one of the gardens. Here I go talking about being over extended but thinking of these new projects.

Tater Tower updates: On Saturday I went to the Esperanza Sustainability Center garden on Florida and 19th St. with all the stuff to plant some tater towers. We planted four towers and tried out the two different styles. The most fun experiment we tried was planting some spuds in a beautiful basket I found at the free estate sale a few weeks back. We hung it up against the concrete wall next to the garden.

We also planted two lasagna method wire mesh towers and then planted some taters in a black 15gal plastic pot. There is so much heat in that garden due to the concrete wall, it will be fun to see how they grow. All the other tater towers are rockin. All spuds have sprouted and some are growing lush amounts of green sprouts that we are covering with mulch. I can't wait for harvest time. I still have more spuds and stuff to grow more taters.

On a related note, on Tuesday the Jamestown kids and I installed the first I hope of several hanging upside down tomato plants. At first we built a tripod but it wasn't tall enough so we hung it on an already existing arbor. We filled the two and half gallon buckets with soil (I had poked a hole in the bottom already and put a piece of newspaper in the bottom to hold the plant). I also punched two holes at the top to make a handle with scrap electrical wire. I pushed the tomato seedling into the hole after cutting the newspaper open a bit. It seemed to work and the tomato is still in the bucket. It is has started growing upwards as someone told me it would. If this works it is a great space saving way to grow tomatoes.

The thing is you need some place in the sun that you can hang the buckets from. A very tall tripod might work like the one we tried to build out of rebar.


Over at 18th and Rhode Island on Friday we planted more seedlings and a few more trees. Like I said we harvested a lot of fava beans and there are more coming. It is a pretty hot site and with this hot spell I hope things get watered well. I think with gardens all over we need to set up drip irrigation systems. If anyone knows where to get tubing and parts for cheap or free let me know.