free farm stand

We have a new address!

2010-02-14T06:59:00.000-08:00

Please visit the new improved site at http://freefarmstand.org.

This site will no longer be kept up to date. Thanks

Harvested with a Kiss

2010-02-08T17:27:00.000-08:00

I feel good and all ready for the love holiday coming up this February 14^th. I remember years ago in the early seventies a beautiful man, one of my mentors, a poet, gardener, and visionary named Geoff Brown started probably the first free garden in San Francisco on South Van Ness Street near where I now live. He talked about delivering each lettuce he grew to fellow communards with a kiss. The Free Farm Stand and now the Free Farm is all about sharing the love in the same way. This week the love was mostly green and orange as we gave out lots of greens and gleaned oranges and tangerines (and some lemons). Tofutown folks came by with a lot of vegan fake meat that we handed out that sort of made up for the second week of no Acme bread. Steve brought by surplus collards from his plot at Portreo del Sol from seedlings he got from the stand. Hurray and right on! A neighbor brought by some sour grapefruit from her tree which I think can be used for juice. The oranges and tangerines were from Stanford glean. They were going to bring forty lettuces but they got rip off (ripped out literally) the day before they were picked. We were all out of produce around 2 or 2:30pm.

The Free Farm rocked this week as we began Wednesday workdays. Since others in our group are documenting this so well I suggest just going to their link for photos, writings, and even some videos: http://urbanshare.blogspot.com/search/label/St.%20Paulus%20Lutheran.
Here are some photos from the Wednesday workday:

I love working with this new group of people. I am not a Christian, but I relate to all good stories about feeding the poor and miracle making. I stumbled upon this beautiful writing last year by Megan who we are working with and her Urban Share project : http://queerbiblestudy.blogspot.com/2009/07/urban-share.html. She says "Jesus feeds 5000….But what if we could do it too?...using this model of Urban Share we are working on a community garden project to enable churches and other organizations to create gardens to grow food, learn about hunger and meet the need that is so much more than a need for daily bread. Working with local gardening activists we have learned that it is possible to create raised bed, sidewalk, rooftop and [vacant] lot gardens virtually for free by recycling materials that are common in urban environments."

On Saturday I missed some of the Free Farm workday and the lunch which by all reports was fabuloso so I could check out the designs for the new park being designed for the parking lot at Folsom and 17^th Sts. In the Mission. One of the questions I asked is why does the city have to buy the land from PUC (thus the need to write a grant proposal). It seems it is state law and I couldn't quite figure it out, just a crazy system, where the PUC has to protect it's rate payers who also just happen to be the citizens who run the city government. Anyway if they get the grant they can go ahead with this project. I heard that they at least talked PUC down in price to two million dollars for the lot.

I ran into a number of friends at the presentation of the designs that was held under a canopy in the parking lot, so we could get a better sense of what we are talking about. Wow it is a pretty big space! And the abandoned chocolate factory next door isn't even on the plan. Many of my friends that were there also were on the same page as me in wanting a design with the maximum growing area and supporting the idea of using the land to grow food for the community.

There were three designs presented and everyone was asked to put a label on the design they liked the best and got three stars to put on what design element they liked most. I had sent the design team an email with my ideas that included links to functional play equipment (like a teeter-totter that pumped water) and they used some of the photos in the presentation. The three designs are Revolution Park Concept, Mission Creek Commons Concept, Eco-People Park Concept. You can download the three designs here (at the bottom of their page) and also send them feedback by email http://www.sf-planning.org/index.aspx?page=2273.
I liked the Mission Creek design since it seemed to have the most space devoted to farm/garden/growing food.
You can also attend the second design review tomorrow Feb. 9^th from 6-9pm at the planning department (1650 Mission St. near Duboce Ave 4^th Floor room 431).

Check out my links page on the sidebar...it is growing with new friends that are doing cool work. I forgot to mention my visit to the Hayes Valley Farm last week. Wow what a project going on there!

Sukuma Wiki

2010-02-01T20:41:00.000-08:00

Yesterday was a Sunday that was a beautiful cool and cloudy winter day at the Free Farm Stand, with the sun poking out once in a while. It was one of those seasonal days where we didn't have a ton of produce (like the week before) and the most we are getting from our gardens are greens, a little broccoli, and some lettuce. I was able to pick a few more rocoto peppers (they are our winter heroes, like our white sapotes, lemons, greens, and chayotes, though our chayote plants haven't stepped up to the plate yet). It was a skimpy day produce wise and we had a huge crowd. Though we ran out of produce early we did seem to give everyone some good stuff. The thing I felt most positive about is that now the Free Farm Stand has a Free Farm. So it feels like we are doing the best we can to grow our own food and to encourage others to do the same and to share the surplus.

Fruit gleaning is going ahead and Stanford Glean and Page brought by approximately 20lbs of citrus from students who gleaned the trees at Stanford and the fruit that he picked from Holy Innocents. I got some lemons from our neighbor's tree. Lyn grew some more of her wonderful black lentil sprouts. We got a bag full of greens from some kids gardens connected to Urban Sprouts. Treat Commons contributed about two pounds of greens and the majority of greens came from 18^th and Rhode Island. Right towards the end when we ran out of most everything, Clara brought by some greens from the Secret Garden.

Last week someone had left a bucket full of tree collard branches in the garden. This week Mike potted them up and we gave some of them out. I really appreciate these plants and I think all gardens should grow them. Last year Pam Pierce turned me onto growing collards which she prefers over tree collards. I actually like them both a lot. A beautiful traveling farmer from Nebraska wound up at the stand this week who saw the tree collards and got very excited according to Pancho. This young farmer who was taking a break from the cold winter in Nebraska said that he was in Kenya (or somewhere in East Africa) and saw this vegetable. ""Sukama Wiki is the Swahili for "pushing out the week". Most households grow it (especially in Kenya) if they have the space, and it is also cheap to buy, highly nutritious and delicious. If there is no other food in the house, sukuma will be there until the next payment comes in. This is awesome! I was looking for a sukuma wiki for a long time (it can only grow from propagation) and now that I'm going back to Nebraska it would be perfect of our gardens!". I looked this up on the web and one place (http://www.allthingskenyan.com/food-sukumawiki.html) had a recipe and said the same thing about the name "sukuma wiki means 'to push the week' implying sukuma wiki is a food used to stretch the meals to last for the week." Us poor folks on tight budgets need foods like these. Pancho also had the impression " that it was an "up lifter", I guess it is a synonym of "pushing out the week". That is what is going on here in San Francisco in a spiritual sense…a green uplifter.

The news that is most exciting is that on Saturday we had the greatest work day at the Free Farm. Some of our core team started early by picking up some compost and bringing it to the site. We decided to start each work day with having a huddle and talking about what we planned to do that day. Since this was our first really highly organized day we came up with a list of responsibilities that needed taking care of on a regular basis and people volunteered to help. One neighbor who has lived near this empty lot for ten years offered to keep his eye on the property and be a security person. He expressed how grateful he was that we were putting the lot to good use finally. Then we went to work and the entire lot got totally cleaned up. A number of people moved all the stray bricks and rubble into a neat pile, compost piles were started, garbage bagged up, and construction materials put together in neat piles. I was impressed with how many syringes and needles that were found especially along the edges. I had two flats of strawberries that got planted and our first rows for vegetables were staked and laid out. At previous meetings we decided we wanted to serve lunch to our volunteers so every week a different person cooks and brings it to the farm. I really believe that besides growing a farm together, we are growing community, and taking a break together and sharing a meal is one way that helps with that process. At the end of the day we put away our tools away and held one last ceremony. We walked around and checked out what we accomplished and thanked ourselves. I think we all felt pretty high when we left. We don't have a website just for this farm yet but check out Welcome's blog on this project http://urbanshare.blogspot.com/search/label/St.%20Paulus%20Lutheran

I also had a wonderful workday on Friday at the 18^th and Rhode Island garden. We planted more fruit trees and it looks like we are going to eventually have a food forest there.

The F Word and the G spot

2010-01-25T21:04:00.001-08:00

On Saturday I attended a meeting held by the San Francisco Planning Department (in conjunction with Park and Recreation and PODER) the purpose of which was to "envision a new open space in the Mission". The city is writing a grant to purchase the parking lot on 17^th and Shotwell/Folsom Sts. So the meeting was all about neighbors designing their ideal park. One thing I found funny is that the planning department gave a power point presentation offering some different design possibilities and I noticed that they had used a photo from the Free Farm Stand blog. Then the guy mentioned a food sharing project in a park in the city. I guess the word is out about our project. I must admit I am just a dreamer and don't know if my dreams can become real. Which comes to the F word. At the meeting everyone broke up into break away groups and we each had the responsibility to come up with our design for the space (.74 acre in size). Of course the problem with these meetings is that everyone comes to the table with their own agenda (including myself) and what they want. I don't know how the planning department figures out how to get everyone's ideas included in the design, when there is only so much room to have things happen. It doesn't always work like at Treat Commons that I helped work on. It became a children's playground more than park with lots of trees and nature. Anyway, I suggested in my group the idea of putting a farm there to feed people in the neighborhood. This is the idea I have talked about before where neighbors work together to grow food to combat hunger or to grow flowers to give to shelters and soup kitchens. What I think of as a collective or family approach to land use. I use the F word here for farm as opposed to community garden (which reinforces private property and individualism rather than community). I love gardens and the word garden (green G spots), don't get me wrong, but whenever people talk about having space for community gardens, which everyone is all for, I think of a few rectangular raised boxes like at Treat Commons Community where I garden with an impossible waiting list. So there were a lot of great ideas out there and a some conflicting ideas (the people who want more playground and an emphasis on sports and athletic activity and making it a place for children and those who want more green and gardens). I think my idea of a neighborhood farm that served the Mission might have got lost in the shuffle, though everyone wants a community g spot. Is shoveling shit as much exercise as tossing basketballs and running around a court or climbing on monkey bars? Can we change a culture that has nature deficit disorder? Climbing a tree vs climbing a play structure? I suggested in my group that we try to think outside the box. Like designing a swing set that pumped a well since the land is sitting on a creek. If anyone has creative ideas on how to get away from what we normally think of as playground and can come up with ideas for incorporating kids getting exercise into real work that can also be play, I would like to hear them and pass them on to the planners. There are probably people doing this somewhere in the world already, designing innovative playgrounds that could be integrated into a farm. On Feb 6^th they are having another meeting at the site. People can stop between 11AM and 2pm and drop off their ideas anytime.

It's interesting that this week while thinking of the F word, I talked to two people that visited Cuba and visited the "community garden" scene there. Apparently there are urban gardens/farms everywhere in Havana and elsewhere. The Cubans call them organiponicos. From what I understand from talking to my friends who went there, the government pays a few people to grow food for the neighborhood which they sell at a very low rate. Maybe we could have a variation of something like that here. There are certainly a lot of people needing jobs and plenty of people wanting to be helpful and would probably volunteer. I read online that some neighborhoods grow 30% of their vegetables. Another thing I read is that "the Rotunda de Cojimar organiponico received an award for producing an average of 4.5 lbs. of produce per square foot at the 1.5 acre market garden. Levels near this were not uncommon elsewhere." My friend said the gardens grow food really intensively to maximize yields and they are mostly all organic. Here is a photo of one such Havana garden my friend Bob took:

Talking about farms and big projects happening around town Hayes Valley Farm has just opened (http://www.hayesvalleyfarm.com/index.html). They had their first work day yesterday. I have been out of the loop with this project except I saw on the Permaculture Guild Volunteer Dashboard a place to sign up for their newsletter. I didn't know they had a website until Clara who is the Garden Anchor for the Secret Garden told me she was surprised that a photo of her and a man who occasionally visits the farm stand was on their web page as a design element. I also noticed another photo from our blog too. I am glad we are available for great snaps.

I always wonder where the food goes when I visit or hear about a farm or garden. It seems that with this project it isn't quite clear yet (and it may be a while until they have some harvest), and maybe that is something they are still working out. In one place it says "A portion of the produce grown on site will be donated to project volunteers and local meals programs.". So maybe the rest will be sold? As I get it all the things they plan to charge for like classes and fruit trees that they want to propagate and sell will go back into the project, which I assume will also go into paying salaries to keep the core staff running the project. I hope they at some point start saying "no one turned away for lack of funds" and keep the door open and hassle free for the person with empty pockets that comes by that wants to learn something or wants to plant a tree. I find it exciting that this project is happening and can't wait to see how it grows. They have a list of their workdays on their website and I notice they don't conflict with ours which is great.

Last but not least in the world of farms, our small partnership of non-profit groups have named our new farm at Gough and Eddy the Free Farm. I must say that one of the thing that excites me most about this project (just like the Free Farm Stand) is that I just love the people that I am working with. I feel so lucky to have a group of people that I can work and grow with. We had a nice workday on Saturday. We don't have a website up yet, but you can read about what goes on there right now by checking out this blog and or the Welcome/Urban Share Community Garden blog (http://urbanshare.blogspot.com/search/label/St.%20Paulus%20Lutheran). The Free Farm has the same mission as the Free Farm Stand and it is pretty simple and the same as the mission of Welcome. They say it is a "communal response to poverty". I would also say it is about growing food (and hopefully flowers) and sharing the wealth with those in need. Creating community along the way and having a joyful and prayerful time in the process. Below are photos from our last workday (a lot of photos of moving dirt to create a ramp and to level out the demonstration garden. You wouldn't know it that it had been raining on and off and we eventually got rained out). Please come out and join us and share lunch to boot (Saturdays 10am-2pm).

I haven't said much about this week's Free Farm Stand. It was truly a miraculous day! I had come dressed to the teeth in rain gear because of the 90% rain prediction. And it did not rain a bit (maybe a drizzle at the start). We had an abundance of produce including a record amount of greens and broccoli from two gardens, grapefruit from Stanford Glean and huge amounts of left over produce from the farmer's market. Wendy came by with some produce from her Urban Sprouts project. We also had a huge crowd and I must say I love all the people that come…it feels so friendly and community to me. I have become friends with two relatively new attendees to the stand. The last two weeks they brought citrus from San Jose, and this week they brought the most delicious fake chicken patties from a business they run importing these things from Germany (Tofutown).Boxes and boxes of the product. They had enough to share some cases with my friend Wayne who was visiting who works with Food Not Bombs who will use them in their soup or something. I think they were a big hit (and I didn't complain that it wasn't very local).

I also want to mention that the Access Cafe gave us their left over organic vegetables to hand out too. I unfortunately forgot to mention on last week's blog that this donation based café reopened on Saturday. I had met Kristen when I was first starting the Free Farm Stand in April 2008. She was one of the main organizers of the Really Really Free Market and had the idea of starting the donation based Access Café. She was brutally murdered in New Orleans after starting the café and now it is resurfacing again. I heard that it was pretty packed and that it was really lovely (flowers on the table and waiters), and that they didn't hit you over the head about making a donation (a jar on the table for donations). When I went to pick up some of the extra produce I saw the big sign they had made up and read that some of their inspiration came from the No Penny Opera with which I was involved years ago (and is still in existence as a non-profit that runs the Free Farm Stand). Although I am still mostly an old school free devotee, I respect everyone that is trying to make the world more beautiful and is interested in food justice and serving the poor. Donation style may not be the way I would do things, but hey it still seems to inspire people and they serve up a good thing with love.

San Francisco Dreamin' ...

2010-01-18T12:39:00.001-08:00

on a winter's day

This week we had one of the fastest free farm stands in a while. We set up and gave away what we had in an hour. It started to rain right when we started giving out the produce and there was a pretty good line. Fortunately people didn't have to be in the rain that long because the line moved ahead quickly and it never rained that hard. We actually had a good selection of fresh produce for a winter table. We had a lot of Meyer lemons that were picked locally and oranges from a tree growing near Sebastopol. I picked some White Sapote fruit from my backyard tree that I hope people have the patience to let them ripen (it is hard to know when to pick them and they might take a long time to ripen). Our friends whose mother lives in San Jose came by with more bags of really lovely citrus (lemons, calamansi, and tangerines)."Calamansi, calamondin, Philippine lime – this versatile citrus fruit is the secret ingredient to many mouthwatering Filipino delicacies".

There were also lots of greens from Potrero Hill and Mike and Ruth cut greens and beautiful oak leaf lettuce from Treat Commons right next to the stand just before we opened. How fresh is that? We also had boxes of Earthbound lettuce in plastic boxes and organic crookneck squash from Mexico, both that were very popular. I wonder if some people noticed the difference between the just picked lettuce and the "industrial organic" lettuce or how many people understand that we are trying to promote growing your own and eating local as much as possible.

I am still amazed that the local food growing movement remains so strong in the city. It really seems like a case of collective dreaming where some of us are dreaming the same things at the same time. For example the Hayes Valley Garden Project (for lack of a better name) is planning on building a greenhouse to propagate seedlings and trees to distribute to gardeners and wanna be gardeners (though I am not sure if they want to do this for free or not). That is our dream too. I also attended the California Rare Fruit Growers Scionwood Exchange on Saturday. It was great to see so many familiar faces and talk "shop". It is also significant that more people than ever are interested in fruit trees and fruit tree propagation.

I should also mention something amazing happening in the Mission. The city is in the process of buying the parking lot at 17th and Shotwell and turning it into low income housing on one half of the lot and the other half will be for a park or open space (1 acre!). They are open to the idea of having a new kind of community garden rather than the traditional garden with private plots. In speaking to the planning department I suggested the idea of a farm that is is run by a local a neighborhood non-profit group that grows food to feed low income people or grows flowers for a hospice or shelter. They seem open to any idea and on Saturday January 23rd they are having a public meeting to get input from neighbors. I urge lots of people to attend and suggest that the Mission needs a farm. See sidebar for more info (DATE: Saturday, January 23, 2010
TIME: 11 AM
LOCATION: Marshall Elementary School: 1575 15th Street (at Capp)

The coming rains and storms may slow us down in the next coming weeks, but we are going full speed ahead in planning and turning an empty lot into a farm. This is the most exciting project to come along for me since the Free Farm Stand first opened. A chance to grow food to combat hunger and get people inspired to grow more food in the city. Last Saturday there was the first workday at the site and it sounded like it was quite a success. I was there today and a lot was cleaned up and a dirt ramp has been built going down to the main farm area (it needs more work). On Sunday I got lot of inquiries from people that want to help. Right now Saturdays will be the main workday from 10am-2pm and eventually Wednesday we will add another workday. One of the main things we need right now are large amounts of organic matter. Aged manure or compost would be ideal. Free manure is easy to track down but we need a large truck, like maybe 20 cubic feet bed size, to go to where it is, pick it up, and deliver it. Please keep in touch as time goes on we will be letting everyone know what we are trying to manifest for our urban farm. Our what we need sidebar will have a list. Here is a website that has some information on the project with some more photos.: http://urbanshare.blogspot.com/search/label/St.%20Paulus%20Lutheran. We had a fantastic meeting today of our new core group, a collaboration of the nicest people I have had the privilege to work with so far, including Pastor Megan from Welcome Ministry who made the original outreach to get use of the land from St. Paulus Church. We still need a name for the farm and the front runners so far are the Free Farm and the New Digger Farm. All ideas are welcome. All dreams are welcome.

Breadbasket Case

2010-01-11T20:51:00.001-08:00

I am back at last from Peoria Illinois and am really appreciative of our non-frost climate (though before I left I did lose some delicate plants in pots to cold). Coming back I found the gardens growing happily with kale and fava beans and white sapotes on my backyard tree. I heard that the farm stand before Christmas that I missed went well and learned that I can get away sometimes and others can take over for me. Hooray! How many times should I repeat myself for the thankfulness I feel for not only having the opportunity to be of service in the world, but to get the chance to meet such great people in the work I do. It really makes it all worth it.

I have been back a week and already I have been caught up in a whirlwind of activity. Some things are going fast forward as I will explain later. There was a great work day at 18th and Rhode Island on Friday. Last week David and Kevin planted a lot of new fruit trees and that made me happy. Apples, pears, jujube's, and persimmons. Plus Golden Rasberries. There are lot more trees coming and I think the plan is to have 100 trees planted total, all planted close together and kept small. So Friday was the day to plant two cherry trees and a pomegranate. Besides our adult volunteers we have been getting now a number of parents with kids showing up. I enjoy working with them and especially getting a chance to plant a tree with a young child. It is a real blast. The gardens were growing fairly lush and hadn't been picked in a while and we harvested 25lbs of kale, chard, collards, lettuce, cabbage, cauliflower, and broccoli. The broccoli was so sweet I think due to the cold weather.

I also picked 5lbs of the most beautiful and tender kale from Esperanza Garden. And delicious.

The Free Farm Stand was another lovely event. Someone has been dropping off an Eatwell Farm CSA box at my house every week and that is such a beautiful gift to share with people. We also continue to get a shipment of "industrial organic" left over produce from Veritable Vegetable that this time of year is especially welcome…organic organs, mandarins, avocadoes, and mangoes. Though the amounts of produce are decreased, we had a nice selection, including some handsome Brussels sprouts on their stem. A woman came by with citrus from her mom's trees in San Jose including Calamansi (the Philippine name for Calamondin fruit) and tangerines. It is a small round orange or lime like fruit that tastes mostly sour, with a touch of sweetness in the skin. She said her family uses it a lot in cooking, throwing it in everything and also making juice with it. The tangerines were very sweet and juicy. Nosrat who lives right around the corner came by with a bag of Rocoto hot peppers from a plant I had given him and some sorrel. I really get tickled when I find out that a plant I gave away is growing happily in a new home and then to get some surplus produce from that plant is double the excitement and really what the stand is all about. I noticed when loading pictures this week how man kids there were. Wayne and Cristina who took the photos did a great job, and especially Wayne captured all the cute babies I can't help but share.

We also had a fairly good plant give away table and Mike showed up and took over potting up seedlings and giving them away. We mostly had lettuce and chard seedlings (the different colors of chard came from seed that another neighbor gave me from his father in Sebastopol. He actually came by later in the day and I told him I was giving away plants grown from his seed. I am looking for people that may like to grow seedlings for the Free Farm Stand and the gardens where we grow food to give away. Please contact me and I can provide seeds, soil, and some lessons and seedling care.

The best local garden news is that the Free Farm Stand may have a farm in the city. On Saturday I looked at a vacant 1/3 of an acre lot on Gough and Eddy Sts. that is owned by St. Paulus Church. Megan from Welcome Ministry and Case who is a Lutheran Service volunteer are working to develop the site to grow food for people in need. They have a 3-5 year use agreement from the church and there are plans to talk to them further about their plans (none for the lot right now). They have invited us to help them out to grow food to give out at the stand and to people in the neighborhood (mostly seniors and low income families). I am working with several people to see if we should jump right in, even though it is not in the Mission. It seems like an opportunity not to be missed especially since it seems so far like we are on the same page together. On Saturday we came up with some preliminary plans and they have already begun some volunteer work days on Saturday (this weekend they will be making a ramp to access the garden area more easily. I won't be there but probably in coming weeks I will be shifting some of my time there). One great thing is that there is a lot to do there and we can employ a many volunteers who want to learn how to grow a lot of food. We will also be in need of a lot of things like tools, wheelbarrows, glove, plumbers, electricians, handy persons, etc. Here are some pictures of this lot that has so much potential:

This lot is not far from the Hayes Valley farm that is supposedly moving ahead. This is the vacant lot at Laguna and Oak (where the freeway was torn down). I have heard they (I know some of the people involved but I don't know if they have formed a group yet or have a non-profit organization) got approved for a big chunk of change from the Mayor's Office and they will be building a greenhouse and developing an educational site (permaculture oriented?), besides growing food eventually. I was told that there are different ideas of having some sort of Farmer's Market there. One idea is having a conventional farmer's market there the other is an alternative market of some sort (I even heard the idea of having all economics represented). Sunday I was asked what I thought about setting up Free Farm Stand Two there.

There is also a Homeless Connect Garden that I is being developed on Octavia and Lilly (http://www.nowpublic.com/health/sf-garden-communities-octavia-lily-st-garden-sf-homeless-p). So that part of town may soon become a breadbasket of the city.

Holiday in Vegetable Land

2009-12-14T17:14:00.001-08:00

I loved the produce table this week with all the variety of super local fruit and vegetables on it. It was like taking a holiday in vegetable land. According to the book Cornocopia II there are "approximately fifteen thousand species of plants recorded in literature as having been used as food by man." The author of the book Stephan Facciola says that "most of the world is fed by approximately twenty crops...". Here at the stand we strive to grow everything we can, the more diversity the better.

We had Yacón root (more on that later), Jerusalem artichoke, Purple Sweet Potato (just harvested from the garden), yellow and green zucchini (this may be the end of the harvest though the plants are still alive and growing despite it being December), winter squash, pineapple guavas, four kinds of sprouts, including red quinoa, red clover, black beluga lentils, and wheat sprouts, sunflower greens, Rocoto peppers, kale, chard, collards, lettuce, and oyster mushrooms. The mushrooms were picked from the FARM garden next to California College of Arts. They were really delicious (I sampled them to make sure no one got sick…actually I cooked one by cutting it up and sauteing it in Earth Balance margarine ). I have never gotten into growing mushrooms or eating wild ones before, but now I am hooked (a friend picked some chanterelles for me a few weeks back and that is actually what first got me excited). Mushrooms are great for our gardens too.

The selection from the farmer's market was not bad either including grapes (where are they from this time of year?). We also had some industrial organic definitely not sustainable mangos. It was a nice day despite the slight rain we got and again the amount of produce was low and it wasn't off the hook with a huge line that never ended. We had a lot of great volunteers helping as usual which I am so grateful for.

I have been giving away Yacón root starts for a few weeks now (someone came by a while back with extra roots) and it is a good vegetable to grow if you have the space. Pam Pierce writes about this plant on her blog, which by the way I highly recommend as regular reading: http://goldengategarden.typepad.com/golden_gate_gardener_/2008/04/yacon-or-bolivi.html. It is a perennial plant and is in the same Daisy family as Jerusalem artichokes or sunchokes. It has both a storage root that is sweet that you eat and a propagation root that you plant to clone it. Wikipedia also has a lot of information about the plant, including other parts of the plant you can use (like the leaves) and information on its religious and medicinal connections. Yacón is also known as the Bolivian Sunroot and is another plant grown in the Andes region, like the Rocoto peppers we had on the table too. Both plants are great to have around for winter harvest (the Rocoto pepper is still growing and fruiting).

We should all be giving praise and thanks for the rains that came to town the last few days. Speaking of getting out into the elements, on Saturday I put on my rain gear and grabbed some shovels and headed to Mission High to participate in a fruit tree planting there. The Fruit Tree Planting Foundation (http://www.ftpf.org/) donated 15 or 16 trees and berries to the school to plant with the students. I was amazed at the big turnout of kids on a rainy Saturday to plant trees. The people from the foundation and the staff at the school were great too. Planting fruit trees and berries is one of my favorite things to do (even in the rain). Can you imagine fruit trees growing in a high school, not just in a garden adjacent to the school, but in a court yard within the building? I can imagine romantic scenarios of two high school sweethearts kissing under a persimmon tree like in the Garden of Eden.

This local food growing excitement and interest in urban homesteading that is taking over right now is like a sort of sixties revolution all over again. It's a green love vibe, a red wiggler be-in, a sustainable and organic daisy chain, a local do it yourself tuning in (and a turning out of the compost). Time magazine just came out with an article on humane manure (http://www.time.com/time/nation/article/0,8599,1945764,00.html), holy shit!

I pray that this current revolution doesn't get totally sold out, that we can focus our work on sharing and caring for others. I heard that the Homeless Connect garden on Octavia and Lilly St broke ground last week. I don't know what the vision for that project is, but it has to be good just in the fact that they are reclaiming some earth by pulling up a parking lot. I also heard that the city has ok'd putting in some kind of sustainable, permaculture oriented garden/farm at Laguna and Oak where the freeway has been torn down. As I understand it the land can only be used temporarily whatever that means (they want to leave open the possibility of developing the land). I also heard that the city is giving $50,000 seed money towards this project, some of which is going into salaries for people to manage the project. Part of the plan is having a farmer's market there for San Francisco farmers only. Another idea is to have all economic models represented at this garden. One the traditional capitalist model, one that is based on barter or a different currency, and one that is based on the free economy (I was actually invited to help set up another Free Farm Stand there). This could be an exciting project to see develop, but there are a lot of questions I have that I hope will be answered eventually.

I am leaving town Saturday December 19^th and will return Jan 4^th. When I get back I hope to have some fresh energy and clarity in the New Year. I sense that there will be even more food growing locally than this year. The stand this year has given away now 6200 pounds of hecka locally grown and gleaned produce (this is produce that I know who grew it or picked it within 100 miles of the city). Over 1000 pounds of vegetables were grown on the once vacant lot at 18^th and Rhode Island St. and that is only a year that we have been developing that garden.

Vanessa will open the stand next Sunday the 20^th of December and then we will be closed December 27 and January 4.

Look out for the blue moon coming up the last day of this month.

Free Standers

2009-12-07T23:10:00.000-08:00

Last night winter was knocking on our windows and doors with a short burst of hail and later we had a small amount of cold rain. I thought about all the seedlings and potted young plants I have started and how I wish I could put more of them under cover, like in a green house. We did pull off another Free Farm Stand with cool and cloudy weather but it was dry, though we didn’t have as many people as usual. We are definitely in our winter season mode with less vegetables being harvested and less gleaning of left-overs from the farmer’s market.

We did have an impressive amount of greens that we harvested on Friday from the 18^th and Rhode Island garden. We also harvested a handful of small zucchini. I am really impressed with this variety called Soleil (though it is a hybrid) that produces non-stop, is easy to find and pick, and gets less mildew than other varieties. I hear tonight there will be a frost so that might do in the rest on the plants.

Mentioning 18^th and Rhode Island, we had a great work day on Friday. Mike a park director down the hill brought all these neighborhood 2 and 3 year old rug rats to help in the garden. I had seven varieties of potatoes that I thought it would be daring to try planting at this time of year. So the kids and parents had fun planting making tater towers until their attention span went elsewhere.

Jeanie who I volunteer with at Martin de Porres gave me a basket full of pineapple guavas that we gave out (it is always fun to turn someone on to a delicious fruit they haven’t tried before…especially kids). Lyn dropped off three bags of delicious sprouts that she grew. My sprouts are behind schedule because of my distracted mind. Being that we had relatively so little produce for the number of people showing up we ran out early like last week, like around 2pm we started getting pretty low on most things except bread. Then as we were closing up Clara and Bianca showed up with some greens from the Secret Garden and out of nowhere two people came by to take them.

Being the end of the year I am shifting to a more contemplative mode and have been thinking about all the garden/local food growing opportunities that popped up this year. People are calling who want help turning their backyards into gardens, schools are ripe with potential projects (there is a fruit tree planting coming up this Saturday at Mission High), new lots ready to turn into urban farms, existing gardens needing help, a fruit tree orchard itching to move into a park, etc. The bottom line is there a lot that we can do and a lot of dreams to be sowed and harvested. A lot of food can be grown to feed hungry people.

On Saturday I just happened to pick up the Bay Guardian, partly because the cover illustration and feature article caught my eye:” Out of reach: Organic, sustainable slow food is wonderful -- unless you're poor or a farmworker ( http://tinyurl.com/ycf4ejr). The illustration reminded me of my friend Lauren’s drawing on her web site Produce to the People. On hers there are arms and hands outstretched reaching for fruit in trees and some hands are holding the fruit they just picked. In the Guardian the arms and hands are reaching out for carrots that can’t get to. This article, especially the first paragraphs reflects some of my thinking and was one of the main reasons I started the Free Farm Stand: “Though organic grocery stores and farmers markets have sprung up on San Francisco’s street corners, it remains to be seen whether our current mania for sustainable, local food will positively affect the lower classes, be they farm workers or poor families.” I think we all do what we can to improve the current mess we have going now and I have always thought like Gerrard Winstanley and the diggers of 1649 that the “earth is a common treasury for all to share”. They dug up the commons or vacant lands and grew food on it to share with everyone.

Plans are starting to get firmed up for the rest of this month. I am leaving town on Saturday December 19^th and will return on Monday January 4^th next year. So we will be open rain or shine December 12^th and December 20^th (I have at least two people committed to opening that Sunday I will be gone).We will be closed December 27 and January 3 I also am trying to focus right now before I leave on things other than gardening so don’t know how available I will be to work with people. The cold weather is not for gardeners, but gives much needed chill to our fruit trees.

Sunny and Sharing

2009-11-30T09:55:00.001-08:00

I am still feeling an abundance of gratefulness as we swing into the last month of the year. Also, I'm am in a reflective mood as we head towards the New Year. Things are certainly slowing down produce harvesting wise and the fava beans are coming up announcing the coming of winter. We had sunny 70° weather at the stand yesterday which seemed confusing to say the least. Despite the glorious weather it seemed we had less people than usual (though there was still a line down the sidewalk for the first hour). We certainly had less produce and because we are a seasonal program we will be having less food for the next few months at least.

To boast the produce on the table, I have started growing sprouts and sunflower greens again and I am excited that I grew five pounds of red clover sprouts. This is with only two cups of seed approximately. I grow the sprouts in five gallon buckets, though they can be grown by anyone at home with a jar and some cheesecloth or plastic screen.

Sprouts!!!

We also had five pounds of greens that we grew at 18^th and Rhode Island, the main garden providing food for the stand at the moment. I did harvest about a dozen Rocoto hot peppers from Treat Commons, and both those sunny gardens are producing lots of the perennial African Blue Basil. We ran out of food early, though at some point towards the end, a woman showed up with a bag of Hachiya persimmons from her tree. I love Hachiya persimmons and I hope that everyone knows that they need to let the fruit ripen before you bite into them, unlike the Fuyu persimmons that you eat when they are firm. When we have free bread it is fun to see what shows up on the table. Autumn came by again with leftover olive samples from the farmer's market and there was a jar of plum jam left over from summer. I will be bringing more summer jam to share in the last week we are open before all the big holidays. Cristina shared some kale"chips" that she made Also, Sara showed up with a bag of figs from her tree that also needed some ripening. Since we were finished early and she came a little late, I wound up with the figs, some of which I gave away.

We need a campaign to plant more fruit trees everywhere in the city…really our parks and vacant spaces should be planted with fruit that ripen at different times and nut trees on the sidewalks. Can you imagine a time when you live in the city and people recognize the time of year when different fruit comes into ripening? We are now into persimmon season moving into citrus time.

I am still on my mission of trying to manifest two projects that will help promote local food growing in the city. One is getting the orchard/garden extended in Parque Niños Unidos and the other is trying to find sunny land to start a free neighborhood garden center. I remember years ago I had friends who would keep on their refrigerator a list of things they were trying to manifest. They believed that by just keeping things in mind and putting the thought out there that things would manifest themselves given time in their lives. I believe in that myself as hippy dippy as it sounds.

Please take note: From December 19th to January 4th I will be going out of town to visit the Midwest and the Free Farm Stand will be closed during those two weeks.

A Tsunami of Thankfulness

2009-11-23T16:24:00.001-08:00

This year I have been feeling especially thankful. The Free Farm Stand has provided me with more opportunities than ever to feel appreciative and grateful every week. I am especially thankful for everyone that has helped make the stand a success, all the hours people have put into setting up and taking down the stand and giving out the produce, helping us grow food or pick fruit, people that have brought produce to share, farmers who share their surplus at the end of the day, neighbors who come to "shop", landlords who have let us use their vacant lots to grow food for the hungry, sunny skies, and neighbors who have been more than generous letting us share their water connection. I am also thankful for having the opportunity to help out in the world and for friends and family, for bees, for earth, for sunflowers, beets, and great harvests. Really this could be a non-stop tsunami of thankfulness.

Again greens ruled the day at the stand. Another field at Green Gulch got gleaned before it was plowed under and the farmer's market had tons of different greens left over too (I had left over arugala and one box of greens that I took to the food bank this morning). Also we harvested eight pounds of kale and chard from seedlings that we planted that were donated from Green Gulch and are now happily growing at 18^th and Rhode Island. The other gardens are pretty shady now and are not producing much. We also had a fair number of zucchini and basil that has been growing uninterrupted for over a month or so. Pretty crazy growing these things so late into the year. Pam brought by the last apples on her tree (I still have a couple on a tree in my backyard), some salad mix, and a few herbs. I especially like the Mexican tarragon she brought: you only only need a leaf or two cut up small in a salad to give it an interesting taste. I am looking forward to the new edition of her book Golden Gate Gardening that she said is coming out in February (with a lot of changes and updates). Molly brought some fresh picked cactus fruit that looked yummy and nopales that look dangerous.

the big Zapallo winter squash that I fell in love with last week

I also gave away small jars of honey from our backyard hive and that was very popular. I like sharing the honey with everyone, it is really a taste of the Mission neighborhood we live in and it seemed like an appropriate special thank you gift to give to everyone for the holiday. Not everyone read my comic that I had posted explaining why a vegan is dealing with bees and giving away honey, but I guess we do the best we can.

As we were closing up Jess came by with the bike cart and tools I loaned her for the garden work day at the new garden on Dolores St. She said it was a successful day, enough people came by and they mulched and made a bed and planted some different things.

I haven't heard from any ex-myfarm folk this week. Here is a blog about one woman's experience with myfarm that is interesting: http://brynnevans.com/blog/2009/10/28/the-failure-of-myfarm-good-intentions-poor-execution/.

In contrast to the myfarm model of promoting local food growing, last Saturday I attended a small meeting of friends who are all on the same page about growing food to feed hungry people. We actually met to talk about fund raising, but didn't get far in that regard. The exciting part of the meeting for me was to just hang out with some beautiful and inspiring people that basically want to do the same thing together: distribute local grown organic produce to feed people in need, glean fruit trees that need picking, and helping people to start new gardens to grow food as a way of feeding ourselves and others (be they neighbors with backyards or vacant lots, shelters, soup kitchens or churches that want to have gardens). It is a breath of fresh air to focus with friends on the idea of tikkun olam or repairing the world. Believing that "the world is a common treasury for all to share" like the Diggers of England taught us.

Our first project that we want to work on together is to set up a free neighborhood garden center that I have written about before. Sort of like the Garden for the Environment with a greenhouse that will provide a place for us to propagate seedlings and trees to distribute to all the gardens in the neighborhood that need them, a demonstration garden, free garden supplies, a seed library, a place to drop off compost rather than putting it in green bin to be shipped out of the city, free worms, and a garden educational center.

Our first step is to find someplace (in the Mission is our first choice of location) to house such an operation that is visible from the street and would hopefully be easy to drive into to drop off garden materials. We are on the look out for land that we can use or rent temporarily until we find a place to eventually buy. If there is anyone that wants to help research or scout out places, or has some ideas please contact me.

The Greens Festival

2009-11-16T11:35:00.001-08:00

While the Green Festival was happening South of Market, the Free Farm Stand was having it’s own “Greens Festival”, greens as in chard, kale, mustard, collards, and amaranth (and no green as in money). Here is the scoop. A field at Green Gulch Farm was about to get plowed under so a number of Zen students gleaned the greens and we scored 40 boxes of fresh, delicious and nutritious organic greens. I takes a lot of time and work to glean a field of greens and I am so appreciative of the work my friend Joanne and her fellow zen students do. I dropped off more than half of the greens at two pantries on the Friday and Saturday and a two boxes were distributed in low income neighborhoods in Oakland. We also had some chard that was gleaned from a former myfarm garden in the city (I think 4 boxes) and later in the day another myfarmer showed up with some baby chard and other greens. Because there were so many greens I postponed harvesting the many greens growing in two gardens right now. As you might remember last week, 14lbs of greens were harvested from just the Permaculture Garden and I think there are that many more ready to be picked now.

Our greens festival was very well attended and there were lots of things going on. Tom came in from Santa Rosa with a lot of different squash, including the huge and handsome blue Zappallo winter squash that was too big to put on the table. I told Lauren this squash was so beautiful I was thinking of sleeping with it (I didn’t). Tom wrote this little piece about this squash that I am sharing an excerpt with you here :

Iris and I collected the seed to grow this squash in the little
town where she was born in the Peruvian Andes. It was
grown by a friend of ours here in Sonoma Co. Like all winter
squash it can be prepared in many ways. I am including an
easy receipt for cream of zapallo soup in Spanish. …
the sharing of food and recipes amongst people
has got to be one of the most ancient and honorable ways to
build friendships and community. Sure this large squash is
intimidating, but think of it as an opportunity to share and to grow.

I have some seeds that Tom scooped out and I dried to plant next year. We also had some small kabocha squash from 18th and Rhode Island and a box of mixed squash and gourds from Green Gulch. Bryce scooped out the seeds of the squashes, many which were dark orange inside, and shared them with people to take home and roast and eat. At least one person took seeds home to plant. I told him that unless the flowers were isolated the bees will pollinate them and if other squashes were growing nearby they were cross pollinated resulting in something different from the parent. You might not get something edible, but maybe a decorative gourd like squash.

All the greens were given out except one box (people were taking home a lot of greens). I took the extras home and made a lot of baked kale, one of my new favorite ways of cooking greens. I had mostly Dino Kale (also called Tuscan or Lacinato Kale) which works best, but any kind will be good. I strip off the leaves from the stems unless they are thin and tender or I want more fiber and like to chew. I wash them and let them drain a bit. I put the kale in a bowl and mix with a small amount of olive oil (or olive oil with crushed garlic). Then I put them on a baking tray. I try to make one layer of leaves if I want crunchy “kale chips”. Or you can pile on more leaves on the tray and have baked kale. The oven should be pre- heated to about 300-350˚, the hotter the faster they bake but you have to watch them more carefully. You take them out whenever they are as crispy or chewy as you like.

I actually started eating large amounts of kale starting Saturday. I made kale salad for a pot luck, which is another good easy way to serve kale. I had some left over so I brought to the stand thinking it is a good dish to share with people and show them a way to use kale. Pancho served it right next to boxes of kale and talked to everyone about how it was made (I think he is a good saleman especially to the Spanish speaking crowd).

Here is the recipe:I just took 1/3rd cup of lemon juice, 1/3rd cup of soy sauce or tamari, 1/3rd cup of sesame oil (not toasted) and mixed with two bunches of curly kale that were washed and drained. Any kind of kale would work, but tender curly kale is our favorite. On top we sprinkle roasted pumpkin or sunflower seed. I also like to sometimes add ground toasted sesame seeds.

When the kale salad ran out Yasue who gardens in Treat Commons brought leftover salad that she had made for an event Saturday night. It was hands down the most delicious quinoa salad I have ever eaten and I must get the recipe from her. I actually didn’t know that it had quinoa in it, maybe I just scarfed it down too fast to notice, but it looked like coleslaw with red and green cabbage, carrots, seaweed in it and some special dressing mixed in. Earlier my friend Craig who has a taco truck with solar panels on it and plans to run a vegan restaurant out of it, came by and parked across the street. When all the salad was gone he pulled out another green salad with all kinds of things in it and that was soon all eaten. Then he cooked up some really yummy noodles with vegan sausage. Though it was getting towards the end of the day for the stand, somehow a lot of people came by and ate all the food. Pancho was surprised by all the local kids who were playing in the park coming by and asking for salad and then really eating it.

While the greens festival was happening, across the street there was something else going on besides the rockin' solar powered vegan taco truck. Someone had dumped the entire contents of someone's apartment in the parking lot and the site became an instant free store. Some of our shoppers went over and brought the stand more baskets to put produce in. I heard stories of good finds and saw some of the treasures people had dug up. It was a non-stop scene for hours of people picking through junk. I really believe every neighborhood should have a free store that is well stocked and taken care of.

On Saturday I went with some friends to Berkeley to attend the California Rare Fruit Growers monthly meeting. I was particularly interested in the topic for the meeting which was fruit tree propagation. Although I have had some luck grafting plums, pears, and apples, I really want to learn how to propagate avocado trees. It is easy to grow avocados by seed, but you have to graft them if you want to get reliable fruit of good quality. Also, if you want to have avocados year round you need to propagate different varieties.

This club that I am a member of is really the best resources for meeting pother fruit growers and learning the skills of growing fruit trees. If we are serious about growing more local food we have to learn these skills. I lucked out that at the meeting I was able to pick up a branch of an Bacon avocado tree and I am going to use that to try splicing or grafting it onto some young seedlings I have grown. I also got a personal lesson from one of the old timers there that has had success propagating avocados. I am going to have a very small workshop Wednesday afternoon at 1:30pm at my house where I will show a video about grafting avocados and then we will try it ourselves. I am interested in having people attend who are really serious about learning these skills so we can grow fruit trees and distribute them free to our neighbors.

Before we went to the meeting we stopped by the edible schoolyard and participated in a work day there. The school, MLK Middle School, is truly an inspiring place, and it is hard to believe it exists, it is almost surreal. Just the amount of land they have to grow food on for a school is amazing (apparently some of the land was formerly a parking lot). I was blown out that in the city they have a deer problem chewing the lower leaves of the espaliered trees. I also got to meet Wendy Johnson of Green Gulch and author of the fabulous book “Gardening at the Dragon’s Gate”. Wendy told me every public school in Berkeley has a garden though I don’t know if they take the garden as serious as they do at the Edible Schoolyard. We have a lot of catching up to do with Berkeley here in San Francisco and I think that will mean digging up some parking lots just to get space to grow gardens (I don’t think we are at the point where we can dig up streets). There are a lot of locals talking the talk like the mayor, but I am waiting for the walking part. It is up to us to make this garden revolution happen in San Francisco. I know of a number of people wanting to plant a garden either in a backyard or some other place or who need help maintaining existing gardens. People are often writing me because they are excited about the Free Farm Stand and want to help. This is the way to make the stand more real, by growing more food to share with those in need.

Parking Lots into Garden Plots

2009-11-09T12:26:00.001-08:00

Recently people with backyards have been showing an interest in growing gardens and sharing their surplus with those in need. There was a lot of garden activity this past weekend and I loaned out a lot of tools and distributed seeds, garlic, and seedlings to help support backyard and vacant lot gardeners growing food. I have been thinking for a long time that we need a free garden resource center in each neighborhood, where there would be a greenhouse growing seedlings to give away, manure, compost, worms, seeds, supplies, and tools to borrow. Also, there would also be a demonstration garden that would show people the possibilities of what grows in their neighborhood and to inspire people to grow some food. There are a lot of things people are getting rid of including redwood lumber, pots, straw bales, that could be collected and given away to people wanting to start or maintain existing gardens. Finding the land and then acquiring it for this dream is the challenge.

It is an inspiring time for me as a long time gardener and person interested in fighting hunger and food insecurity in our world. Projects are popping up all over and people are dreaming big. Already in this city more people are gardening and also talking about redesigning our cities. Making them less car oriented and more people bike friendly. So can you imagine Market Street being closed to car traffic and not only having places for people to stroll, bike, hang out and sip tea, but also to garden and grow food to feed poor people?

Just today I read a short fabulous article "Plowing Detroit into Farmland" in the NY Times: http://ideas.blogs.nytimes.com/2009/11/09/plowing-detroit-into-farmland/?partner=rss&emc=rss.

"Already, Urban Farming, an international outfit that has made Detroit its headquarters, is said to boast some 500 small plots under cultivation to supply free food to the city's poor." I looked up the organization Urban Farming, Inc. ( http://www.urbanfarming.org/index.html ) and discovered they have similar goals as the Free Farm Stand: "Urban Farming's mission is to create an abundance of food for people in need by planting gardens on unused land and space while increasing diversity, educating youth, adults and seniors and providing an environmentally sustainable system to uplift communities." I say right on!

I don't know if I want to grow as large as that organization and have such a grand advertising presence as they do, but maybe that is what is needed to get land to grow more food in cities, especially in San Francisco where there is no excess cheap land like in Detroit.

Here is a funny link along the same lines that a friend told me about that is about a proposal for Farmedelphia: http://bldgblog.blogspot.com/2007/11/farmadelphia.htmlhttp://bldgblog.blogspot.com/2007/11/farmadelphia.html

I like these images from this site:

I think it is worthy to day dream about these things, especially in context of the Free Farm Stand. Yesterday we again had a long line , but this time not so much produce, maybe because it is a seasonal thing and we are moving into winter. While dreaming this up I should include the creation of a neighborhood canning center so we can preserve some of the abundance of summer.

I was pretty excited that we did have 14 pounds of greens that we grew at 18^th and Rhode Island. We also harvested the I missed last week's work day there and in just that short time the greens had really grown a lot. They are the vegetable for most of San Francisco and all gardens here should grow some. Spike brought by some mustard greens from her garden and Steve came at the end with some beautiful collards that he had grown with seedlings from the stand. It was a green day.Here are some photos from that garden taken on Friday before the Sunday stand. At the end of the slide show is a picture of the harvest on our table:

We also had very little bread and it was nice that Danny of Sour Flour brought two of his beautiful and delicious loaves of home baked bread. He is teaching bread making classes for free and from my talking to him he knows a lot. I am always picking up tips from him, like how he gets the pattern on his round loaves, by putting the dough in a floured round basket to rise.

On the sidebar under Volunteer Opportunities and Upcoming events there are lots of places that need gardening help. It is a way you can be more than a consumer and help grow some of the food we are sharing.

Kissing Cousins

2009-11-02T10:32:00.001-08:00

My original idea for writing a blog was to keep in touch with people and let them know what is happening each week with the Free Farm Stand. I have been documenting my experiment with promoting local food growing and to give a report each week of what is growing in our gardens, how much we have been harvesting, and what is happening in general in our city with the local food growing movement. At this point it is starting to feel like I am repeating myself when I'm publishing photos of the same stacks of beautiful organic locally grown vegetables each week or describing what happened at the stand.

So I only took a handful of photos this week (if I do document this weekly event with photos I need someone with fresh eyes to do it), but here are two photos that are different. As I was hanging out at the end of the day in the garden, totally exhausted, an intense orange butterfly decided to hang out in the garden too (maybe she was tired too). I called some friends over to check it out and we all were amazed at how beautiful she was.

Then someone else pointed out another handsome (though destructive) visitor to the garden, chewing happily away on some parsley.

This caterpillar I know will turn into a monarch butterfly and that they like to live in parsley patches before their transformation.

We have all heard this said before, but when I was just chilling in the garden at that moment with all my animal and plant friends I felt a real connection with them all. If anyone got a chance to see the PBS documentary last week on TV called the Botany of Desire (a video version of the book) they might have been inspired like me, for it really made this point clear. That there is a relationship between man/woman and plant and non-human animal and that relationship goes both ways. We are kissing cousins.

So the point being that we need to learn to live in harmony with each other, we've got to work it out. The Free Farm Stand itself is an experiment in trying to build the networks that will sustain us as neighbors and community.

I must mention that some really cool things happened imho this week at the stand. One thing is a neighbor showed up with a big bag of meyer lemons that he just harvested from his tree and then later he came back with more of them. I also was tickled by a woman that brought some beautiful Granny Smith apples (and some red ones) from here tree just down the street. Another great thing that happened is that a woman sent me an email saying that she had spent $1500 to get a garden installed in her backyard by My Farm. Then that business folded and she had this big backyard that was overgrown and there was a lot of produce that could be harvested. She was feeling pretty lonely working in the garden by herself and she didn't know what she was doing. She wondered if we had people that could work with her and share the surplus at the stand. I really lucked out seeing that I knew two people that lived near her. I thought they might want a bigger space to garden in since they just had tiny plots in the community garden in that neighborhood. So I contacted one person and she contacted the other and now I think they are working together and rejuvenating her backyard garden. What surprised me the most is that she showed up with a few bags of greens to share right when we were getting a little low on super local produce. I think she told me there were 50-100 My Farm backyard gardens and that a lot of the people that paid for the service are in the same boat as she and that they may want help too. Plus there are all the people who signed up a year ago to get a free Victory Garden in their backyard that never got one. I am overwhelmed thinking how can we get all these places growing food and sharing the surplus?

I just realized that what was wrong with My Farm right from the beginning is the name My Farm. I think we need to move away from "my" this and that, because that is such a hoax and brings false security. On Sunday at the stand I also met an ex-myfarm gardener and he was also aware that there are a lot of gardeners that need volunteer help, that the gardens are all setup with drip and good soil, but the gardens need garden care and maintenance and guidance.

The work day in our backyard on Halloween was mostly a bust. I did wind up gardening mostly by myself, though Christina showed up to help me get all the palm fronds I pruned into green bins. Maybe I didn't get the word out or just because it was Halloween no one was available. Well this Saturday I will be extracting honey from our hive and maybe if enough people show up we can also get some gardening in too.

Here is a link that I got from the permaculture group called What's on My Food: http://www.whatsonmyfood.org/food.jsp?food=RI . It is helpful in getting us to think about the choices we make when purchasing organic or non organic food. It also made me appreciate the organic produce we have at the Free Farm Stand. How lucky can we be that as bottom feeders we can eat a little more worry free.

Squash Appreciation Day

2009-10-26T12:49:00.001-07:00

Now is the season to enjoy winter squash, planted in the spring, grown in the summer, harvested in the fall. The table at the Free Farm Stand was heaped high with winter squashes (and some of the last summer zucchini), some grown at 18^th and Rhode Island garden and some grown by my friend Tom in Santa Rosa. We should sing an ode to winter squash because they are so wonderful!

We should strive to be like winter squash
they are a humble vegetable
like the lowly pumpkin squash magically transformed into
a high class carriage to take Cinderella to the ball
they are rock steady and patient
as they grow sometimes to large proportions
they are one of the three sisters
whose righteousness comforts and nourishes us
they feed us their fleshy insides and also their blossoms and seeds
they can be who they want to be and choose to be different
in sizes and shapes and colors
though their sexual expression is dependent on our friends the bees
the luffa squash scratch our itchy backs like good friends do
the gourd can play sweet music and is a multi-talented artist
Winter Squashes, Pumpkin, Hubbard, Delicata, Sweet Dumpling, Golden Nugget, Buttercup, Kobacha, and Turban
we love you all and think you de vine

Besides the squash we had more apples from the gleaning trip two weeks ago and others brought fruit too. Christina got some grapefruit from San Jose, Pam came by with apples, and so did Lauren who also had local figs, and lemons came from some local anonymous harvester. It just goes to show that one can keep their eyes open and find fruit growing everywhere that potentially could be harvested. Someone told me they saw pomegranates growing on Dolores St. near 20th St. that I would like to check out. Towards the end Clara came by with a lovely basket of vegetables from the Secret Garden, including some delicious figs that were finally ripe. When we were almost out of apples, someone came by with organic apples from Whole Foods, all with their organic label on each apple. They disappeared pretty quickly. Also, Danny showed up with a baguette and a loaf of sour dough he baked (he is the guy from Sour Flour who is into baking bread and giving it away). I talked to him about making a whole grain loaf and he is working on it. We also had stacks of super ripe organic dry farmed tomatoes left over from the farmer's market. A lot were given away but many were to damaged and too hard for people to take home. I haven't come up with a way for people to process soft tomatoes like that…they would make delicious sauce, but then it would be needed to can the sauce once it was made. That would take jars and equipment and then how do you distribute it and get your expensive jars back?

There was a lot happening in the park including a Healthy Family Days event that we were actually a part of. The organizer of that event served free healthy food in the clubhouse that we invited everyone to go to. They were serving among other things a vegan squash soup made by the Sexy Soup Lady and everyone said it was very tasty. I also hosted two bicycle tours to the stand. The Homo Homestead tour was fantastic and I enjoyed meeting them all. Joolie who organized it brought us a big bag of greens and herbs that she had grown in her nearby garden. The Garden City tour that is part of a workshop on how to get land in the city to grow a garden in came by while we were closing up shop. I spoke to them about the history of the park and garden and the current work we are doing feeding those with compromised budgets and promoting food growing.
Below are photos from 18th and Rhode Island on Friday, mostly pictures of some of the harvest. I forgot to mention that we had our largest harvest yet of potatoes, 9 pounds that we gave away on Sunday. They were mostly small in size, but looked great.

This coming Saturday the 31st, even though it is Halloween, I am planning on having a garden work day cleaning up and planting my backyard garden that has been pretty much neglected for a while. That will be from 10am-2:30pm with lunch being served around noon. We will be weeding, pruning, bottling honey if we have time, and planting. Then on the following Saturday Nov. 7^th we will be extracting honey.

Fall Meditation

2009-10-19T14:37:00.001-07:00

I believe we can transform ourselves and our world by deepening our relationship with nature and the eternal power of creation. A seed contains hope. We can begin by planting just one seed or one garden. The seeds I have been thinking about at this moment are fava beans. I am doing some late research into trying to obtain some different varieties of this plant this year. The huge book Cornucopia II, A Source Book of Edible Plants is really wonderful and lists fava bean varieties like “The Sutton” that is a short growing kind whose pods can be eaten whole even when mature. If anyone wants to check out this book they may come over to my house to read it, I don’t think it is at the library, but it is probably at the fabulous library in the Arboretum. I haven’t quite gotten into the winter time seed catalog reading, garden day dreaming mode yet, that will come in a couple of months. Someone reminded me that I should not only spend time doing but being.

I have a lot of garlic that needs a winter home to grow in...it prefers some daily sun to grow well in (I ordered way too much). On our Friday workday at the Permaculture Garden we planted a lot of this garlic, several different kinds. The rain will help them come up. I have already started planting sugar snap peas, lettuce, and broccoli. I put a big pumpkin on the super local table, this one was the biggest one we grew on Potrero Hill, what I now consider the banana belt of San Francisco. We gave out more apples that came from Apple Hill near Placerville and this week they were beautiful red ones as well as the yellow green Golden Delicious type. Lauren brought boxes of soft but handsome brown pears from gleaning two weeks ago. I harvested nine pounds of sunchokes from the Esperanza garden and the last of the tomatoes from the other gardens. My friend and neighbor came by with over a pound of gorgeous Rocoto peppers…I originally gave him the seeds for these and I don’t know how many plants he has, but the peppers really looked good and I am sure they were very popular. The Farmer’s Markets are selling more greens and that means we are starting to get more of their left-over’s. Some farmers are packing it up for the winter. Green Gulch Farm had their last day this Saturday and we won’t be getting more starts or greens from them for a while (hopefully I will make a new connection with them in the spring). This is what fall season is about here and I am enjoying it as the weather starts to cool down and feel crispy.

I am also feeling a bit reflective and joyful. I must admit I amazed at the way this project has grown this year and how it has generated a lot of excitement. I heard from one of regular volunteers who goes to USF on Masonic that they have opened their own Free Farm Stand for the students and also for the neighbors, a part of their garden project: http://usfgardenproject.com/.

Our stand has also drawn such a large crowd and line, but so far we have continued to have enough produce for everyone. I am actually not going out of my way to collect more produce though my heart is often tugged in that direction. I really like encouraging local food growing. There still are places for people to garden if they want. I know of two backyards that need attention (besides my own). Also, I am still looking for a space to put a green house so we can grow seedlings and trees to give away to neighbors and schools, churches, and shelters.

Someone left this article from the Examiner in my mail box that got me totally excited: http://tinyurl.com/ykopmok . The mayor is ordering city departments to pay a 13% surcharge on city employee’s travel that will go to planting fruit trees throughout the city to increase local food production. The Dept. of the Environment will oversee the fund. It all sounds nice when you read about it, but my sense is that from the start this effort is plagued by bureaucracy. The estimate is that the average cost per tree will be $200. Why so high when bare root trees are only about $30 at the most? Most of all why can’t I get anyone in the city to help me plant the fruit trees I have already collected and have money for in the park where we host the farm stand? They want me to put up a costly fence which in my opinion is not necessary. Again I feel like if we want real change we have to make it ourselves, we can’t count on government to do the right thing. If we want to engage in the political way of bringing about change it means spending a lot of time trying to make our voices heard and gathering a lot of attention.

Here is an example of where our city government is messing up and we should probably speak out about it. On Wednesday October 21 at 2pm in room 416 at City Hall the Building Inspection Committee will be voting on whether to require a permit for single source greywater. In other words discouraging people to recycle their washing machine water by having to jump through a bunch of hoops and pay fees. One can attend this meeting or at least send an email voicing your concerns to Ann Aherne: ann.aherne@sfgov.org (she'll make sure every commissioner gets a copy). You can write the same to Steve Panelli, Chief Plumbing Inspector, at: Steven.Panelli@sfgov.org.

I ran into a friend of mine named Susan at the recent bee club meeting. She told me she just opened a small specialty nursery featuring edibles, herbs, grasses, and native plants. It is chemical free and is supposed to be an alternative to most standard nurseries. Although I am not a big fan of businesses, I would like to support her effort because the city needs a good nursery that features edibles and she seems open to carrying things that may be unusual if she can get them. I haven’t been by there yet, but we should all check it out, especially people in this neighborhood:

Independent Nature

1504 Church St at 27th

415 6421708

open 11 to 6 daily except Tuesdays

News flash! I just learned in an email from my friend Leif that he and Nicole Lobue are guest chefs this Thursday at Mission Street Food and the profits will go to the Free Farm Stand. I didn't know this was happening...it will probably be great food if you don't care about the meat being served or that there isn't anything vegan on the menu.

Glorious Gleaning Galore

2009-10-12T16:14:00.001-07:00

I remarked to someone yesterday that the line of tables of produce and boxes of fruit and tomatoes was almost as long as the line of people going down the sidewalk. I still believe small is beautiful, but I haven't yet figured out in my lifetime how to keep projects small. Our project continues to be personal and friendly and non-institutional, but we just have a lot of people coming and we happen to have a lot of produce some weeks. Actually it is really wonderful that one thing we are doing is making a lot of connections with people and as a result hooking up with a lot of resources for food that might otherwise be wasted.

We were off the charts this week in pounds of produce because of all the gleaning that happened, the amount of surplus food collected from organic farmers, and the big harvests from local gardens. I do think the harvest season is the winding down and in the ideal world we would be canning and storing all the summer bounty. Below is a chart of the amount of just the super local food that we either grew or picked this year:

On Wednesday two friends drove down to Davis together to meet another friend who lives down there to glean tomatoes on a farm somehow connected with the University. They had a big field of organic Roma tomatoes that the machines picked and there were a lot along the edges that were not picked. There was also a huge pile of tomatoes that was the dump pile of tomatoes that were slightly blemished or damaged. In three hours the three people picked over 500lbs of tomatoes and brought back to San Francisco (taking both from the dump pile and the picking them). My friend Gary who drove down there said there were a lot left that they didn't pick if anyone wants to go down again. One person made four gallons of tomato sauce that she gave me that I thought about canning and bringing to the stand, but I decided to give it to my friend who was making chili at Martin de Porres Sunday morning. The rest of the tomatoes I brought to the stand and a lot of them were given away, but people choose the more perfect tomatoes and a lot of the blemished ones were left over. I don't think they will be taken if I give them to the Food Bank so I might compost them or try to sort through them and make some more tomato sauce. If anyone reading this wants to cook down some tomatoes contact me soon. The lesson is that we can only give away so much produce if it is slightly blemished and like all wholesalers the produce we collect has to be in somewhat good shape if we are going to store it for any length of time.

Besides the tomato extravaganza, we also had approximately 800lbs of apples and maybe 100 lbs of pears from last week's pear picking. Three gleaning groups went up to pick apples on a piece of land in Placerville, a place known as Apple Hill. Besides all the apples brought back from two groups of gleaners, I have another fifteen boxes of apples brought today. We only gave away some of the apples and the rest will be stored for next week and some will be delivered to the Julian Pantry and other food programs.

Besides all the apples we brought from outside the city, there were apples neighbors brought from two or three more local trees (some that we picked last year) and then three others brought apples to share. Page brought a lot of produce from his Stanford garden and we had a record harvest again from Esperanza garden. The highlight of that harvest was the huge trombone squash and the eggplant (I love growing hot weather vegetables!). We also had vegetables from a local gardener who dropped off a bag of beautiful vegetables from her garden (and apples). I thought the different colors of cherry tomatoes was very impressive, especially the ones that Steve brought from his father's garden in Sebastopol. Did I mention the 20 or more boxes of organic strawberries that came from Veritable Vegetables, the big organic vegetable distributor in San Francisco?

On Saturday I participated in a garden work party at Lisa's backyard. About eight people showed up and we cleaned up her yard, making a huge pile of woody plants and invasive vines and a pile of leaves and weeds. There already was a planting bed in the backyard that we put manure in and then some people planted it with some vegetables starts I brought. It was a great day and everyone seemed to enjoy how it went. Lisa made lunch for everyone and I brought some strawberries for dessert.

I couldn't make it to the Sunday garden work day on Dolores St. but I heard it worked out well. The two garden anchors and Aliza were there and two other showed up. They cleared away a tree that had been cut down and made an archway to the garden. They also got some plans together for the garden.

Another great connection that was made is that Ania contacted me about these two new garden sites wanting to know if she could install grey water systems there. She just graduated from a class at OAEC on grey water and wants to practice what she learned. So she and her friend came out and talked to Lisa and Alisa and took measurements. It looks like Lisa place may work out.

Every week it seems I meet some new person doing something great or learn of something going on that excites me. At the end of the Farm Stand as we were closing up a man named Danny came by with a warm loaf of fresh bread that he had just baked. He blew my socks off telling me he likes to bake bread and give it away for free. He also likes to train people to bake bread. Being a baker myself who rarely bakes anymore it really turned me on with what he was doing right now. His bread was very tasty, a chewy sourdough. You can't beat fresh baked bread right out of the oven. Another amazing thing is that he just started baking five months ago and he will be celebrating in November baking and giving away a 1000 loaves. I suggested he bring some loaves to the Free Farm Stand next Sunday and he might do that. His website and blog is fun to check out too: http://www.sourflour.org.

Hello and goodbye harvest moon!

2009-10-05T14:43:00.001-07:00

One thing I have been thinking about recently, especially when I am schlepping so many boxes of produce around, is how much abundance there is, at least in my world. Last night I shared with some friends a large kabocha squash that came from the garden on 18^th and Rhode Island and it was so delicious. We baked it with some oil and it had a special earthy sweetness that made me feel like I just tasted the fall season. Wonderful things are in abundance everywhere and this blog is really one extended gratefulness prayer for : the beautiful people that help run the Free Farm Stand, the Cinderella Pumpkins that Tom grew and shared with us yesterday (if anyone got one tell me how it tasted), the amazing pears that Lauren and friends picked on Saturday, for produce neighbors brought, for the left-over produce from the Farmer's Market, the pounds of producel from the Permaculture Garden, for the people that come to the stand and help make it a sweet scene, for the Green Gulch donated seedlings and greens that are grown with so much mindfulness and care, for the sweet amaranth seed spread that Sara harvested, made and brought to share with the bread, for so much plenty.

I decided this week to count the number of people in line just when we started letting people shop. We had 45 people in a line that snaked out onto the sidewalk and my guess is that we had at least over a hundred people getting produce yesterday. Although I write about abundance, seasons change and we actually had less produce that we have had in the past. I know next week is Green Gulch's last day at the market and then they stop coming to the market during winter. Our city gardens will be growing less soon and I imagine the same is true of local farmers who come to the market (thus less leftovers for us bottom feeders). Saying all this we still had plenty of produce to share.

I was especially jazzed that Lauren and her roommates went up to Clearlake to glean pears and that she showed up with boxes of red and yellow pears. They were tasty andthe red ones were especially a work of art. Here is what she wrote me just now about the trip:

" Ed (the pear guy) said he had 8 acres of land and there were about 700-800 trees, half, the red and Bartlett, had been picked before we got there, but we still gleaned through there and got probably around 300 lbs of fruit (and there was still more). The half that hadn't been harvested yet were Bosc, which we also picked around 300 lbs. of (I haven't weighed it all yet) were not as ripe (I'm going to bring them next week to the farm stand). The trees were pretty low, although some we couldn't reach the tops of without a ladder, but since there were so many we didn't use ladders anyway, we just picked the lower fruit. We didn't make even a small dent in the amount of trees or fruit that there was. He said we were more than welcome to come back again after they had harvested the rest of the Bosc and glean what they didn't pick. He bought the land a year or two ago I think, and is working on getting certified organic, so the trees haven't been sprayed since 2007. Currently he's breaking even by selling them to a brandy maker. Not sure what his plans are after they go organic."

There were also some boxes of apples that I think Jay came by with from the apple tree in Golden Gate Park (I missed the apple festival held around the lone apple tree there). At least two people brought by lemons to share from trees in their backyard and I just saw a photo of someone with a basket of plums that they must have brought. Nave brought some pears and apples from his parents place in Sebstapol. I was especially tickled that Chris (?) brought by a bucket of lettuces that were grown in the garden next to the California College of the Arts with seedlings they got from the stand.

This is going to be an abundant week for fruitful garden and gleaning work. This Wednesday there are friends of mine going up to Davis to help glean 500 pounds of extra tomatoes from the Russell Ranch Sustainable Agriculture Facility. Here is what the email I got says:

"the field have already been harvested with a machine harvester but more than 500 pounds is still left intact on the vines at the edges of the fields. A group of pre-school and elementary school kids with the Green Moms of Davis will be coming to help pick as well so come help inculcate them about gleaning! Gleaners are welcome to keep the tomatoes they pick and all left-overs will be donated to the food-bank."

If anyone wants to drive up there and pick I can send you more information.

This weekend, both Saturday and Sunday there are two different garden work parties happening. Two women want help putting in gardens in their backyards and want to share some of their surplus produce at the stand eventually. So here is the information:

The first work party is on Saturday October 10 from 10am-3pm at Lisa's backyard 1422 Guerrero Street between 26th and Cesar Chavez St. The Garden Anchor is Catherine (urbanedibles@gmail.com) and for more info you can email her or Tree (iamtree99@gmail.com).

The next work party is Sunday October 11th from 11pm-3pm at Aliza's backyard which is located behind the green door to the right of 529 Dolores near the Dolores Café on 18th St. The Garden Anchors are Jess (arnett.jessica@gmail.com) 707-9717 and Rachel (rachel.cassandra@gmail.com).

Things to bring and what is needed

*Vehicle to pick up stuff not suitable for bike cart
* mulch, manure, cardboard
* Someone to fix bicycle cart for moving tools, etc.
* Bring gloves, trowels, and clippers if you have them
* Someone on Sunday that knows how to use a chain saw…a big tree that was cut down needs to be cut up. We have a chain saw.
*Snacks and refreshments to share

I know of two more backyards in the Mission whose owners want gardens to grow food. This is a great opportunity for people who want to garden to have a place to do that and to give back to the community at the same time.

If anyone is interested in getting out of the city and going to Gold Country (Placer County) next Friday or Saturday I am helping to organize an apple picking trip up there. Again contact me for more information.

Heart Lessons

2009-09-28T14:23:00.000-07:00

Today as I was walking Bernal Hill for my daily dose of exercise and meditation two bumper stickers on parked cars seem to grab my attention. “What are you grateful for today?” and “Girls kick ass”. I love thinking about things I am grateful for and there is no short supply. I also have been thinking about all the great feminine energy that I have been around recently. One example, the Free Farm Stand has a cash crop of fabulous helpers these days and a lot of them are strong beautiful women. Not to say there are no strong beautiful men who have been helping, there are, but the women are out there in full force these days and they are mostly running the show.

On Saturday I attended the sweet memorial celebrating the life of Barbara Collier, one of the main love engines who ran the Martin de Porres soup kitchen and community. I could summarize some of that event as being about both gratefulness and kick ass women. Everyone was so grateful for Barbara for the way she touched their lives and grateful for Martin's. She also had a special deep connection with women who were woven throughout her life. Besides the 30 plus year old women’s group she was a part of (it started out as a play group for their children and is still going strong), she had many close soul sisters that she loved and who loved her. She stayed in touch with them (one with regular phone calls to Germany), and she also worked with them at Martin’s. I also came away from the Martin’s remembering the lesson she taught by example, of doing things through our heart rather than our minds.

A funny thing happened this week in relationship to the Free Farm Stand. Because of the memorial happening at Martin’s, all food donations deliveries were canceled. Thanks to Green Gulch farm I was able to get a number of boxes of extra greens they gave to me. And I got some industrial organic food donated by Veritable Vegetable brought to me by Food Not Bombs. I was also feeling that we were doing pretty good with vegetables that we harvested from our gardens. I reminded myself that I am not running a food program exactly and that I want to emphasize growing our own if we can. I purposely did not try to collect more produce to make up for the shortfall we would have, considering the number of people who are showing up these days. As it turned out at 3pm on Saturday, an hour before I was to leave for the memorial, Food Runners contacted me and had a truckload of produce left over from the Ferry Building Farmer’s market and they were even willing to drop it off at my home.

So needless to say we had a ton of produce both on the super local table and the left over organic table. I had a huge harvest from the Esperanza Garden and the trombone squash were truly spectacular. They grew the best of all the locations we are gardening at, because the heat from the concrete wall reflects into the space. I also am excited by the eggplant growing there; it is such a beautiful plant besides being a tasty vegetable to eat.

The squash from the Permaculture garden is impressive in terms of how productive they are. I also actually brought some produce from my shady backyard, 3lbs of tomatoes. And talk about local, we had 3lbs of chestnuts a bunch of us harvested from the sidewalk kitty corner from the park where we set up the stand. A neighbor brought grapefruit from her backyard Tree on Treat that she said were sour, but I took one home and it made a delicious juice. Two others brought tomatoes they had grown. Lauren brought delicious and beautiful apples she had picked from nearby. L dropped off some of her delicious sprouts that she grew. I am hoping soon that we can offer sprout kits to people so they can grow their own sprouts. Autumn brought by olives and olive spreads from the farmer’s market, samples that they gave out and were left over at the end of the day. I love these gestures of sharing and it is really what makes the stand fun and about community. Also, she played violin with a beautiful brother named Jorge that played his homemade instrument out of recycled materials, like a bow with a gourd amplifier on it and a stick that he hit it with. Did I mention the return of the figs? I guess being a fig grower it is either use it or lose it. I had another 28 boxes of figs and because of the heat they some were starting to rot before we could even give them away. I am amazed thought that we had enough food for everyone that came, considering the line never really disappeared until way late in the day.

The plant/garden table was not happening much this week. I am really behind in growing seedlings and have been getting by on donations of starts from Green Gulch. We not only still need a consistent person at the plant table, but someone to help start growing seedlings for our gardens and to give them away at the table on Sundays. I think we could be offering people seedling starter kits and encourage help starting seedlings in homes in the area. Anyone got space in a small greenhouse or sunny window or porch?

I am excited because we will soon have two new gardens in backyards growing some local produce, some of which will be shared at the Free Farm Stand. It seems almost every week I meet people who are excited about what we are doing and they want to know how they can help. And a lot of people say they want to learn how to garden or just get their hands in some dirt. The sidebar on this page will list the garden work parties coming up and how people can help out and what we need. I just learned that a pile of manure on Bernal Hill is available to people who want some for their garden. I wonder if there is someone who wants to collect some for different gardens I know of that can use some?

Also, read about the fruit picking opportunity coming up next Saturday on the side bar. If anyone has a vehicle or even not, but may want to get out of the city for a trip to Clear Lake (2 ½ hours away), some guy is offering people to come up and pick his 1200 pear trees and give the fruit to the food bank or other groups like the Free Farm Stand.

I heard recently that My Farm went out of business, that they went broke (I do not know how to confirm this information though I got it from a good source). Someone described to me that their operation was run like a ponzi scheme, in that they were operating on the money that they got from installing gardens in people backyards, but they didn’t make enough to maintain the gardens or pay people. Although I have not been a big fan of My Farm, I do think that the more gardens growing food in the city the better. I hope all the gardens are kept going (I heard they had something like 70).

I also agree with my friend who told me about My Farm who says growing food to make a profit is not a good business. From my experience this last year or so, it is a lot of work to be a farmer. I know people trying to do that and live off their work, and I think good luck. Though getting $25 a pound for local grown lettuce sounds like a great way to make money, sort of like growing marijuana without the legal hassle. Time will tell with these operations how successful they can be and not getting burnt out. I know that most of us have to pay rent and that is a good question how to do that and have time too for repairing the world. The answer lies in being creative and committed to that goal, and it gets back to starting things with compassion in the heart.

Pears and a New Paradigm

2009-09-21T10:27:00.001-07:00

Here we are with the Fall Equinox approaching and I feel like I need to catch my breath as this year rushes by. Gandhi had his experiments with Truth and I have been having my experiment with planting and growing a Free Farm Stand. Every week in the park it seems like there is an incredible amount of energy present like a love bomb exploding. First there are now large numbers of people showing up, standing in a line winding out the gate of the park and going down the sidewalk. Then people hang around after shopping, tasting some jam and bread, wandering in the garden, laying on the grass, or kids running around doing what they do. Everyone seems so friendly and cheerful; maybe it is just the sunny weather. Then we have all the hustle and bustle of the great crew of volunteers who show up who work at sorting through boxes of produce and arranging the tables so they look beautiful. And they do and the food itself gives off a vibe that pulsates with life force. I think people really feel it, I know I do.

I love harvesting food that I have helped to plant and grow, I was thinking that last Friday as I picked some of the produce for the stand at 18^th St. and Rhode Island. I also really like meeting so many really sweet people that I am meeting each week, there seems to be an equal abundance of beautiful produce and people.

In the Bay Area seasons are most evident at a farm stand by seeing what is locally grown. Tomatoes and squash rule the day in the approaching fall season and we had our share this week. Dave who lives next door to the Secret Garden brought 10lbs of apples from his backyard tree and I had a 10lb bag of locally picked pears that I don't know where they came from (they were dropped off anonymously at the soup kitchen where I volunteer). We also had another huge amount of figs, about 30 boxes, left over from the farmer's market. Later in the day as we were running low on super local food Clara came by with 9lbs of produce from the Secret Garden.

A couple of other beautiful things happened all on their own at the stand yesterday. Lyn gave me about ten bags she had crocheted to give out to people at the stand to put their food in. Here is the note she wrote that we put in each bag (Pancho translated it into Spanish):

This bag has been handmade as a gift for someone who is a part of the Free Farm Stand community; in other words, you.
I give away a part of me with each bag I give out. I make these bags to help spread the feeling of being nurtured and at the same time to inspire people (you) to bring this when you come for the special produce you get here. I would also be thrilled if you could use this bag as inspiration to find your own way of making your own connections with our community.
In making these bags I have only used materials from thrift stores, friends' leftovers, and other places that don't involve new materials. No two bags are alike.
Enjoy your day, the Farm Stand, the bags, and the new paradigm that we're creating.

I assigned Pancho the difficult task of distributing the bags since there were only 10. At the end as Pancho was giving the last bag to someone and another woman asked if she could have it , and Lyn offered to make her a bag to give that she would give her next week!
Another outstanding gesture of sharing happened when my friend Steve pulled up with his home made bicycle refreshment stand. He set up an umbrella and served aqua fresca with melon juice and ice. An act that was hard to beat considering it was pretty warm out there in the park and the line for that was almost as long as the line for the produce. He ran out pretty fast and he said he needed another large glass jar to store more aqua fresca in.

Things are moving ahead with two new backyard gardens coming to life. I think we have found Garden Anchors for the gardens and garden workdays/parties are being planned (see sidebar under volunteer opportunities and events). Yesterday a man who has lived in the neighborhood forever and actually helped us make this park a reality years ago told me he needs help with his garden too. He has an orange and avocado tree in his yard that he wants help picking too later in winter and he'll share his surplus. And a friend just wrote me that he is moving into a place in the Haight where there are four backyards and no fences and the neighbors are into making a big garden and he is looking forward to doing just that.

Last week was an emotional week for me. The previous Sunday (the morning it rained shortly) a friend of mine name Barbara died totally unexpectedly in her sleep. She was one of the core leaders at Martin de Porres (the Catholic Worker soup kitchen I have been helping at for years). Her loss is going to be tremendous. Two things I was reminded of was how sweet and wonderful having a loving, caring community is that an individual can count on for support. It is probably the most important thing we can have in life and it seems worth it to put the time it takes and patience developing that kind of community. And again I am reminded that our time in this world can be very short so we need to make sure we don't get caught up in distractions like dramas that can ruffle our feathers and make us sad or angry. I need to remind myself of this all the time, to take a deep breath.

At our Friday work day at 18th and Rhode Island Lyn brought some apples from Golden Gate Park and honey from our bee hive for us all to eat to celebrate the New Year (Rosh Hashanah) and so that our New Year will be sweet. Already things are moving in that direction.

The Free Fig Stand

2009-09-14T18:18:00.001-07:00

The Free Farm Stand is generating a lot of excitement these days and I can understand why. The quality of the produce that we are giving away is fresh, beautiful, and healthy. Now we are getting a big line and when the weather is nice like it was yesterday the park fills with people and it becomes a real social scene. A lot of people wind up sitting or laying on the grass, talking to friends, and yesterday there was someone drumming and another person playing a beautiful didgeridoo. From my perspective the scene is not quite sustainable, because I think I need more help in running the show. We seem to have plenty of volunteers the day of the event, but I am still trying to figure out how to get help dealing with all the produce I collect. Maybe it is just a summer phenomena, but the amount of food that we had at the stand was so incredible, it must have been a record amount. I didn't even bring the winter squashes that we had grown or collected because we had so much. This includes a 39lb. pumpkin that we grew at the Permaculture garden that I don't know how to give away and it is too pretty to cut up. So the story is, tons of food I pick up in different places and sometimes different times, put in the van, unload at my house to make room for the bread pick-up, and then I reload the van with the same produce I unloaded earlier. It seems like the way I am doing things is a bit crazy, but it works for now.

Both tables were full: on the super local table we had the summer harvest of zucchini, tomatoes, basil, green beans, Rocoto hot peppers, and mint. Also, my friend Tom from Santa Rosa was in town and brought by 108lbs of apples he gleaned in Santa Rosa and 18lbs of tomatoes he grew and a few cucumbers too. Forest brought zucchini, tomatoes, apples, lemon, and green beans from his father's garden plot in Stanford. Lauren gleaned apples in Golden Gate Park. They were smaller this year than the ones I picked last year. Also, I brought applesauce to share from the apples I picked last week and Christina brought some too, and there was also some hot pepper jam that someone had brought to the stand a while back and I finally put it out to share. Nave brought apples too. Early Saturday morning I picked up from the Farmer's Market 14 boxes of chard, kale, beets, broccoli, and zucchini that were gleaned from the Green Gulch Farm. Later in the day I got over fifty boxes of figs left over from the farmer's market (plus a lot of other produce). By the end of the day everything was given away except two boxes of greens that I took today to the food bank. A number of people took boxes of soft or mushy figs home to make jam. Stay tuned and get ready for great bowel movements.

Antonio brought over his students from the Ecological Gardening course he is teaching and I spoke to them about the stand. I talked about my early inspiration gleaned from the diggers (diggers.org) and fast forwarded to today and the local food growing movement and my involvement in it. I still read a lot of stuff on line and get emails about all these hip events centered around eating fresh, local, wild or organically/sustainable grown foods or even politically correct meat, that one has to pay a pretty penny for. To me (being perhaps a bit judgmental here), that is not what this current revolution is about. I hope I got that point across. Then they all went to the Secret Garden and helped prune trees and plant snap peas. Fantastic!

Last week I went over with two people to check out Lisa's garden on Guerrero and 26^th and talk to her about what she would like to see happen with her garden space. It was very exciting and I think all three of us went away excited about this new gardening opportunity. Then yesterday another woman approached me about her backyard garden space on 18^th and Dolores that she wants help with. I want to start to train people to not only learn how to grow a garden for the Free Farm Stand but be "Volunteer Garden Anchors". I even wrote something up about it that I might add to a volunteer section of this web site someday, though I am not sure if this seems a bit stuffy:

(4 hrs per week) Volunteer Garden Anchor:

Learn how to design a small backyard garden, maintain it, and grow food and flowers to share at the Free Farm Stand
Learn how to work with and keep volunteers happy and busy

The volunteer garden anchor will work with me and a team of other volunteers and the tenant whose backyard garden we will be working in the Mission. My approach will be very hands on and hopefully I can step back and let the garden anchor learn by doing. We will use all appropriate approaches to sustainable organic gardening including permaculture and bio-intensive techniques. The anchor will be responsible for general garden upkeep, planting, harvesting, and bringing the surplus to the Free Farm Stand.

REQUIREMENTS:

Must be responsible (the volunteer garden anchor will have a key to the backyard) and some familiarity with gardening. The ideal person for this job would hopefully be passionate about growing local food and making it accessible to all, especially people on low incomes and tight budgets. 3 month commitment necessary.

Say are there any web designers out here that may want to design a real web site for this blog?

Pictures from Eat-In and Free Farm Stand

2009-09-08T18:27:00.000-07:00

Here are some photos from the Eat-In at our 18th and Rhode Island garden:

Here are pictures from the last Free Farm Stand:

Orchard Love

2009-09-07T18:41:00.001-07:00

I started writing this blog on a notepad (no computer) while sitting on the bench under a tree in the Permaculture Garden at 18^th and Rhode Island. I was there for the "Eat-In" or potluck in support of healthy school lunches (Slow Food. USA came up with the idea of having these national events everywhere today including one at Civic Center and one in Dolores Park). I was feeling pretty slowed down after a hectic weekend of apple picking, soup kitchen cooking, farm standing, and applesauce making. Then as soon as I started writing people I knew started showing up and I got involved in the "Eat-In". More on that later.

Last week a friend whom I trust a lot and reads my blog sent me a note saying that in my last blog I didn't write from my heart (he said it seemed like I was just writing for housewives). Someone then told me what is wrong with writing for housewives? But now I am nervous because I thought I always write from my heart, and I agree I don't want to just write fluff, but want to talk about things that are important to share with everyone. Here are some random thoughts before I give a short update on Free Farm Stand happenings.

One is that on Sunday afternoon I had an experience that felt so good. I had the chance to be reminded that I still love an old friend whom I am pretty upset and disappointed with. It is good to know that love can live in ones heart and surface at unexpected times, making you feel warm and tingly for a short while.

I have been thinking of all the things on my long to do list. At the Permaculture Guild meeting I attended last Wednesday I joined a small group meeting about volunteers. Various people talked about the successes and challenges they have getting volunteer help. There were a number of approaches groups have for working with volunteers and for a while I was thinking I need to move in a more mainstream approach to getting volunteer help. Some of the people at the meeting had me thinking I should write out job descriptions for all the things I need help for, like I should publish internship applications. I actually started writing some job descriptions up. Then I even went so far as to thinking that my non-profit should start hiring people, like a lot of non-profits do. Following that line of thinking and where that would lead, I realized this is not where I am at.

Actually I don't know where I am at; I am running the Free Farm Stand by the skin of my teeth. But I will never have a main stream approach to what I do. I would like to figure out a way to train others to do some of the things I do, like Pancho called it, to be anchors. I come out of living in a commune living situation for years and that is the best way I know of getting things done: by living, working, praying, meditating, serving the poor and disinfranchised with an intentional community or family. How do we grow something like that?

I also started going crazy starting to work on a challenging grant application for a Challenge Grant from the city to get our community garden and our fruit orchard expanded. This week at the Farm Stand I may have met an angel who offered to do the work needed for free, meaning I won't need that grant. I have also been thinking about money more than I should. And I have had many conversations in the last week about economics with various people, about how to get money to support the work all of us are doing. I am still in the minority of people wanting to just do things for free, but I have to admit I have been thinking about the idea of holding a benefit to raise money vs. writing grants.

I really feel the Free Farm Stand is running on auto-pilot these days. At least on Sundays when I go there we (a lot of great volunteers) set up and I zone out. Things are going pretty smoothly. It was interesting this week because we had less food from the farmer's market (and may have less next week too). I heard there were fewer vendors at the markets perhaps because of the Labor Day holiday or the Bay Bridge being closed. So it was a great thing to remind us all that we have got to be learning how to grow more of our own food. We also have to be making it more of a priority in our cities to leave more space open for sky and air, and places to plant beautiful food forests and gardens.

If there was a highlight to the stand this week it was all the apples and peaches we had to give away (though the honey dew melons and 2 eggplants from Esperanza were up there on the excitement level for me). Erin picked apples and peaches on Wednesday and I picked an apple tree on Saturday. By now everyone must know how much I love fruit trees and planting them in the city. Just this one old tree I picked is a great example of how much fruit we can get from one fully mature tree: Betsy and I picked 217 lbs of apples and we didn't get them all. This number also includes apples that I picked off the ground, a lot of which went into apple sauce. On weeks that we get a lot of fruit from gleaning our pounds of local produce skyrockets. This week we added 430lbs of local produce! Again the universe is telling us something…plant more fruit trees!

Of course when I was picking the apples high up on a ladder I could see all the neighbor's yards nearby. Right next door there was an apple tree with branches loaded with red apples laying on the roof of a funky shed that some neighbors were living in. I was pinch hitting in terms of picking apples that day, Erin's car had broken down and Lauren was out of town, so it was just me and my friend Betsy picking the apples, and I had been there almost two hours. I didn't get all the apples on her tree, let alone picking more from a neighbor's tree. It is really a shame to see this good fruit not getting picked. I know there are a lot of people who say they want to help pick fruit. But often it seems that because of the logistics involved in arranging with someone to pick their tree we still need a group of gleaners that can help pick fruit at a late moment's notice.

Talk about food going to waste, I often hear reports of community garden plots with produce not getting picked. Here is another project I am hatching up that I would love to come to fruition: I met a woman from a community garden that will put signs up at all the gardens suggesting that if they have extra produce there are groups like the Free Farm Stand that will put their produce to good use. We need people perhaps to pick up the produce and take it somewhere, like to the Free Farm Stand or the Julian Pantry on Saturday. I even have bike carts that could be used for this project.

This week I am going to look at a potential garden space in the Mission and we might have an opportunity to help someone get into the fun of growing food and sharing the surplus. We may need gardeners in the future for this new garden. And there are other gardens to work in too.

About the Eat-In/potluck. The event was well attended and I enjoyed meeting neighbors and new visitors to the garden, as well as running into some friends I haven't seen in a while; it seemed just the right number of people drifted in and out. And I love all the kids that turned up with their parents. Serving healthy lunches in schools is one political issue that I can really get behind. I heard recently that it was Reagan who got rid of all the school cafeterias. I actually heard that few schools even have them anymore, they were simantles? Actually I am not too in favor of schools as we know it, but if we do have schools we should try to make them less like jails serving jail food.

There were a few a few vegan dishes that people brought which was nice for us vegans in the crowd (I realized too late that the kobacha squash dish I ate had clarified butter in it). One of the best dishes was a raw squash salad that David made with the unknown squash from the garden. These are the massively overgrown squashes that we have been giving out at the stand, cut up into reasonable size pieces. He sliced the squash really thin, added rice wine vinegar, sesame oil, some pumpkin seeds, chocolate mint from the garden, and I think that is it. It was really yummy. Jeremy brought some juice that rocked with apples (of course), celery, beets, and ginger.I also enjoyed the apples and plums that Jim brought from Clear Lake. I wonder what the other Eat-Ins were like.

Eggplant, okra, and melons Oh My!

2009-08-31T16:25:00.001-07:00

I really enjoyed the summer diversity of produce on the home grown table this week and the colors were impressive. There were two small eggplant that were grown at the Esperanza Garden (a first for growing that hot weather loving vegetable). Page brought some beautiful okra from a garden that he tends at Stanford where he works and a big basket of beautiful tomatoes of different shapes and sizes. It really gets me high to grow these hot weather vegetables and fruits or to see them show up at the stand to be shared. Maybe this is all because of global warming, but it sure is fun and makes one feel like a real farmer (no slight intended to cooler weather crops). There were potatoes from the Secret Garden, fingerlings and a pinkish variety called Desiree. The different squashes were attractive, I especially felt proud of the big kobacha squash from 18^th and Rhode Island and the trombone squash from Treat Commons. We also had two spaghetti squash from the Arkansas Community Garden. Lynn has been growing some tasty and handsome sprouts and this week she had sprouted amaranth. It is almost like a birthday party or Christmas and I never know who is going to show up with some gift. I didn't see who brought the four pounds of lemons, Fred brought some produce from Langton St. Community Garden, and towards the very end of the day someone showed up with about 20lbs of the most beautiful and sweet orange cherry tomatoes (like Sungold variety) and 5 lbs. of green onions from a farm in Mendocino called Northstone Organics (a not-for-profit medical cannabis cooperative that grows herbs and food according to the web). I would love to put out a big thank you to the universe.

We had a large crowd again at the beginning, with lines out the gate and down the sidewalk, but at some point it slowed down and mellowed out a bit. We had a good garden table and we gave away a lot of seedlings, mostly collards. I also finally got my cartoon printed out and so gave away honey from our hive. This is the same cartoon I posted a while back and you can view or download it on the sidebar.

One of the main things that is happening at the stand besides a lot of really good organic produce being distributed is that people are sticking around and talking to each other. It is amazing all the connections out there, people who know each other or know someone you know. And I am excited that we got our first neighbor approaching us about putting in a garden in her backyard. Apparently she wants to have a garden in her backyard, but needs help because she is rather busy and doesn't have the time to put in a garden, at least by herself. She contacted My Farm but said she doesn't have a $1,000 to have them do it. My idea is to find people who want to garden, don't have their own space, but they can help people put in gardens that do have space but maybe no time, and then they can share the surplus at the Free Farm Stand.

What is needed in this dreamy plan are people with some free time to garden. I am so glad Clara is now managing the Secret Garden and working with people who want to help grow food to share with low income neighbors. I might have found someone to oversee food production at Esperanza Garden and now we have a garden to build from scratch.

Last week I had an exciting conversation with David and Kevin who teach urban permaculture design courses in the city. There is this idea out there that we can realistically only grow so much food in the city to feed everyone. The next thing we could do is to have farms right outside the city that one could easily get to without being dependent on a car. At one time Kevin was looking into looking for land and forming a community in Castro Valley, an unincorporated part of Alameda County which is a gentle 3 miles bike ride from Hayward Bart (that is 3 miles to the rim of a canyon where there is agricultural land that was once part of a very big ranch. Also, apparently the land was never used for chemical agriculture). He thinks that there is some land there that would be ideal for a permaculture community/farm. The idea is somewhat modeled on the idea of Rotterdam Garden clubs mentioned in the "Permaculture: A Designer's Manual which I haven't read. Another part of the idea would be to have a city and a country branch of the community and people would do something like a time share and spend some of the time in the country and some in the city.

I love these kinds of dreams. I often get exhausted living in the city and overwhelmed with the noise, the crowded feeling, and distractions. I blame a lot of the problems on car culture. Then there is the fucked up system we have where we can be some of the richest people living high off the hog, but still have hungry, homeless, neglected people everywhere that we are supposed to ignore (while we look out for ourselves and Eat Real). But we are lucky to have so much opportunity to create something better and there is so much fun and beautiful work we can do. Starting by growing more of food in cities and nearby and sharing the bounty with those in need, and then building our own healthy communities is a good start.

Prime Time for Fruit and Squash

2009-08-24T16:22:00.001-07:00

Here are more pictures from last weeks stand:

The main thing that sticks out in my mind about the Free Farm Stand was the long line that formed now extending out the gate and down the sidewalk. I think we ran out of food early, certainly before 3pm. The super local table was full and we did extend its size because it we had a lot of produce. Zucchini and squash ruled the day. Page brought a large collection that he had grown and we had a lot of volunteer squash from 18^th and Rhode Island (and zucchini too). I picked a neighbors apple and lemon tree and Produce to the People brought apples. . Nanda brought lemons and zucchini I think surplus from a community garden in San Jose. Someone brought some nice jam from the Secret Garden plums that we served on the bread table (more will be given out next week). Ray brought more ice tea. I continue to pick up a lot of donated food every week, including having a great connection with Green Gulch Farm, run by the Zen Center, where I have been getting flats of starts and some surplus produce. This weeks total super local produce was 174lbs.

The Garden table is going pretty well and every week people are taking home seedlings. We tried something else, which was Page's idea, is that we gave away our first "instant salad garden". A large pot with two lettuces and an arugula plant in it. So all one has to do it take it home, put it somewhere with at least a little sun, and let it grow until harvest time. Also, I am excited that I am finding people to help manage the different gardens growing food for the stand. If anyone wants to garden there is plenty to do. The slide shows have more pictures of the gardens which I hope inspires people who want to get their hands in dirt and grow food to share with neighbors in need.

I continue to hope that the Free Farm Stand can play a significant role in encouraging local food growing and sharing the surplus and wealth of our urban gardens and farms. That we are not just known as a place to get free produce, though I think that is always nice, but a place to share the surplus bounty. I heard the other day that Mayor Newsom contacted three groups to come up with a plan for farming the vacant land at Laguna between Oak and Fell Streets where the freeway was torn down. The groups he contacted were the Permaculture Guild, John Bela with Rebar Group (he/they helped organize the Victory Garden in front of City Hall and is now working on the setting up a Homeless Connect Garden), and My Farm. I am not on the radar of the city hall folks, and I have a lot of ideas about this project, but I think this is the most exciting news I have heard recently. I think a plan has been submitted already and we will see what develops. This is a big piece of land and could grow a lot of food to feed hungry people in the city. I hope it goes in that direction, like the victory Garden at Civic Center last year that grew food for poor people. I put in a vote for a large fruit orchard and food given away to food pantries and free farm stands in different neighborhoods.

I am still trying to move forward with the project of basically expanding our community garden in the park and planting more fruit trees. I am slowing exploring raising funds to put a chain link fence around the area and possibly adding a greenhouse too. As you might know, I am totally excited right now of planting more fruit trees wherever we can in the city.

Return From the Land of Fruit and Nuts

2009-08-17T18:26:00.001-07:00

I came back from the Festival of Fruit in the Santa Rosa area to help open the Free Farm Stand Sunday, and I now have some renewed inspiration and energy that I am so grateful for.

I am so lucky to have spent four days out of the city mainly driving around looking at gardens with other fruit tree enthusiasts, getting away from the daily dose of negative corporate media news, and thinking and talking just about trees and plants most of the time.

The tours started on Wednesday when I went up with a friend to check out the Luther Burbank Farm in Sebastopol (called Gold Ridge Farm). It was a good place to start, since Burbank thought the area up there was the ideal place to grow food with its beautiful weather and rich soil and I have been in love with the area for a long time. Burbank was one of American's true plant nuts whom I feel a great kinship with. Starting my trip thinking about him and seeing some of the work he did was a great way for me to change gears from over busy San Francisco life to daydreaming about fruit growing, the miracle of fruit trees, the miracle of gardens, and meeting the aliens like me who are in love with their gardens and trees and want to share their excitement with anyone who comes along.

I am torn between wanting to try to write about my trip or report on yesterday's Free Farm Stand which was another fabulous event. I easily slip into overwhelmed mode when I think about both things. Not only did I see some amazing and inspiring gardens, but the people I met on the four day trip and the people I met yesterday at the stand both made me feel like the world is great and wonderful.

First about the Free Farm Stand yesterday, though there are connections to my trip: When I came back on Saturday night the van was loaded with produce I had brought back from Santa Rosa. While I was up there for the festival I hooked up with my friend Tom who is a fellow gardener and gleaner. He told me that he also loves to give food away, that it is too much work to try to sell it. Before I came up he had picked a lot of apples, green beans, winter and summer squash from his garden in Forestville to give me to bring back to the stand. He also has started a garden in the backyard of an empty house in Santa Rosa where we both picked zucchini and cucumbers. I got excited about Armenian cucumbers that are beautiful and delicious, though I wonder how they would grow here in San Francisco. There was also a peach tree loaded with peaches that we wanted to pick, but they were just about a week away from being ripe. Then we went somewhere in Santa Rosa that had a few pear trees that needed picking. There were pears all over the ground and the pears were ready to pick. I learned on one of the tours how to pick pears…you lift the pear slightly and if it breaks off the stem it is ready. Ideally with earlier pears like Bartlett you want to either leave them out to ripen more or put them in a refrigerator for a few days first and then leave them out until ready to eat. Late pears like Anjou you pick them and then need to refrigerate them for 2-3 weeks. Tom is a serious gleaner and has an orchard ladder and a bag and we wound up bringing back 160 lbs of pears. We actually picked more and left some for the people whose property the trees were on and some with Tom who likes to dry them. That whole area is totally fruit crazy, every older house seems to have a remnant of an orchard on the property and there are fruit trees everywhere and a lot are not getting picked. On Wednesday I tried to check out a house in Sebastopol that Mohr told me about that has fruit trees needing picking, but I couldn't connect with the owner and where I parked the van on the street there was an apple tree loaded with apples. I started wondering if there was a gleaning group that tried to rescue some of the abundance there. Tom thought not. Anyway, I came back with 323 lbs. of banana squash, cucumbers, apples, pears, kabocha squash, and zucchini. Not bad as a side adventure from the festival of fruit.

The local table also had 20 lbs of squash from the Rhode Island garden and a pound of green beans that was picked on Friday. Lauren and her Produce to the People crew came by with 84 lbs of fruit, including 48 lbs of apples, 10 lbs of plums, and 26 lbs of cherry plums from the Secret Garden (she said she could use help picking this week if there are any fruit pickers out there). Our counter on the sidebar shows we now are over 1 ton of super local produce we have distributed this year!

Lyn brought more of her homegrown delicious sprouts and throughout the day people brought small garden contributions. Someone brought oranges and Pam told me she brought five pounds of produce (like a lot of produce that showed up on the table I either didn't see it nor did I weigh it…only heard about it). I also heard about a cake with strawberries on it that got eaten really fast. Autumn rescued some olives from the farmers market (they throw out their open containers of samples at the end of the day) and they were a big hit, the oil being good too for dipping cut up bread in. Towards the end of the farm stand Shivie and Cemaaj from Team Raw (http://teamraw.com/) came by with the most delicious leftovers from a catering gig, chocolate dipped strawberries and stuffed mushrooms to share with everyone. You can check out a video at http://renegadehealth.com/blog/tag/raw-food-stuffed-mushrooms/ to see how she made them. At the very end of the day I got interviewed by the people who made that video, Kevin and Annmarie of Renegade Health TV. They are traveling around making videos to educate people about health and wellness, to empower people to take actions in improving their own lives and communities. Sounds great to me and it is part of what we are about too. The interview about the stand will be up soon I suppose.

The super local table actual had more food than the Farmer's Market left over table. Also, again people started sitting on the lawn and hanging out together which was beautiful.

I am mainly reporting all this to inspire others that yes we can grow food in the cities and areas within 100 miles of our cities and do a good job of becoming a little more self reliant. And that this kind of fresh local organic produce can be made available to everyone regardless of how much one can really afford.

It starts with us learning to grow some of our own. The garden/plant table was good this week too as we had a lot of help potting up seedlings and giving them away (and seeds too). That is also why I love to go to the Festival of Fruit is because I need to learn as much as I can about how to grow food, especially fruit trees that feed us all so generously and abundantly (with some work of course). The people that open there gardens for us to explore and the ones that talk at the workshops are national treasures. Personally I learn best by observation and visiting others who are doing what I want to do, so I feel like I need to learn as much from them now as I can. Also, the more we connect the more we can share plant material with each other. One of the common facts about these people, besides knowing a lot about gardening and growing thing, many of them have learned how to propagate plants. They have especially learned how to graft onto fruit trees so they can grow many varieties of fruit and have different kinds of fresh fruit on their table every day.

I have nine 8 ½ x 11 pages of notes from the tours I went on. Two a day was all I could do. And I took 281 photos. With all that I find it hard to capture in words or pictures the remarkable diversity I saw nor the excitement I felt at this event.

Some highlights of what I learned (not complete by any means):

A guy in Davis name Joe Real inspired me the most of all the speakers. He spoke and showed slides of his garden in Davis. The title of his talk was "Back Yard Citrus and Persimmon Growing. How to Grow the Most in the Least Space". His garden is in Davis and he has 43 trees on a small 735' part of his yard (around the perimeter of his property). He had a citrus with 101 varieties, a persimmon with fifty or more kinds on it, a 48-n-1 plum, an apple tree with I think fifty kinds of apples, and 450 cultivars of different fruits in total approximately, all cataloged on his computer. He passed out one of the most informative information sheets I have ever read on the topic of maximizing the space you have for growing food. Here is the pdf file:
Backyard Citrus and Persimmon Culture
I learned that if you live in the country or can find 2 ½ acres of land somewhere you can grow enough for a small farm. I visited Gold Nectar Farm in Windsor which is the perfect example of what great growing you can do with that much land.
There were a lot of questions about drip irrigation, how many emitters people used, how long they water for, etc, and I was reminded about how valuable water is and the fact that it is becoming scarcer in some places, so strategies need to be developed how to deal with that issue. The talk I went to by Robert Kourik, author of the new book Roots Demystified esplained how tree roots look and how to best water them.
I learned (again) how we must grow fruit trees small and planted close together to make them easier to pick and to increase the amount and varieties of fruit we can grow. Though Jo grows some of his tree pretty high to get more fruit.
I learned the names of varieties of fruit that some of these people who grow a lot like and that do well for them in their climate. For example, the Seckel Pear seems to be hands down a very popular fruit. Not only did I learn names of good varieties like Orcas pear, Splendor apple, Howard Miracle plum, Splash and Flavor Supreme pluot (that one I tasted and it was great!), Niabell grape, or Isu Persimmon, I also learned the names of fruit that I hadn't really heard of like choke berry (Aronia), Gumi Berry, Leucaena, a nitrogen fixing tree in pea family that make pods with seeds that you can eat, (but I just read that it used for livestock feed.)
I learned that White Winter Permain apple is a favorite of Florence Strange in Petaluma, who has 6 acres of land (after walking around her garden, where she made big cardboard signs identifying a lot of trees she is growing, including some notes about the tree or fruit. I asked her how many trees she thinks she has planted. She said smiling that maybe she has planted 500 trees and has lost 200). So I learned that you just have to not be afraid of trying things and seeing how they work out. I also learned from a number of these gardeners that sometimes plants will die to the ground and then come back and become fruitful again. Florence had a lemon tree that bit the dust due to a winter frost, but grew back and now makes a delicious sour lemon that the skin is sweet and delicious that I tasted.
I learned from Michael Phillips who is an apple grower in New Hampshire that "our chief job is to steward all sorts of healthy happenings". And the importance of a fungal dominated (vs bacteria dominated) soil.

Photos from Sunday August 9

2009-08-11T16:01:00.001-07:00

Thanks to Cristina we have some of the best photos of the most recent stand:

Nosrat brought some volunteer squash that looked liked gourds. They were beautiful. Did anyone try eating them?

Open Source Bounty

2009-08-10T13:06:00.001-07:00

I am feeling pretty crazy right at the moment which means I should probably get out into the garden more. I think the crowds at the stand are overwhelming me a bit! There were people lined up on the sidewalk. Yikes! I started worrying that the stand is becoming too successful and therefore big, and therefore a drag for people having to wait in line. I want to stay small and personal and have time to chat with everyone. To spread good vibes, not institutional rushed hurried vibes. At the same time manna is coming down from heaven. I feel spiritually nourished from all the great helpers we have and the harvests we are bringing in from our neighborhood gardens and fruit trees. I hope more people are growing some of their own food as that is the only sustainable way this will work, growing our neighborhood vegetables and fruit and sharing the surplus. I know we are planting many seeds of all kinds...seeds of change and hope, seeds of inspiration, seeds to grow our own, be it gardens or evolutions.

I am not going into too many details of the stand yesterday. I just realized I didn't take a single photo yesterday at the stand. There was a lot of produce and a lot of people. Before we opened, Lauren organized a picnic for the high school students who having been picking fruit for a summer job with her Produce to the People program. Yesterday was their last day, but there might be a new crew in the fall. She did a lot of cooking and also made a pie with some of the damaged fruit from last week. I love it that she has been rescuing the left over fruit at the end of our day at the stand and processing it into something yummy. She is a true bottom feeder. I have really appreciated all the fruit Produce to the People (and her kids) have been bringing every week (this week 88 pounds of cherry plums, apples, and plums). It is nice to see fruit that would fall to the ground and get wasted, being taken home by people and families struggling to pay rents and put good food on the table. It also seems like the last few weeks someone has brought some homemade jam to share at the bread table. This week there was some jam made with the soft cherry plums from last week

18^th and Rhode Island

I think the exciting news for me this week came out of the permaculture garden on 18^th and Rhode Island Sts. on Potrero Hill. First of all, there are a lot of trailing winter squashes growing all over the place. They are growing well, but no one seemed to know what they were. We picked a few of them before we realized that they were a yellow pumpkin (later Cristina found a label). We also have kabocha squash growing and then by the sidewalk under the apple tree fence there are honeydew melons growing! They looked like melons, but again I didn't plant them and wasn't sure what they were. In all my years gardening here in San Francisco, in the Mission Neighborhood, I have never tried growing melons because I didn't think they would grow or produce sweet fruit. Actually, I think I have tried growing melons and watermelons too and I had no luck. I took the melon home and cut it open to see what was inside and sure enough it was green and though a bit under ripe, was sweet and delicious. That really made my day and I brought half of the melon to the farm stand to share with everyone. There is also what looks like two or three watermelons growing there, but they are very small right now. We harvested a total of 54lbs of produce that Friday. One squash (it may be a volunteer) that was hidden weighed in at 6 lbs.! We have been having the greatest work days on Friday with a lot of nice volunteers showing up.

This garden is turning out to be quite a success and the fact that we are growing most things there with little soil and mostly wood chips is amazing! And it is a perfect example of what good work can be done turning a vacant lot into garden.

Clara has jumped into her role of overseeing the Secret Garden and is putting her beautiful energy into the place. Green Gulch Farm, who gave us another beautiful box of chard this week, also gave us some happy seedlings of kale, chard, broccoli, and bunching onions. They need to go into the ground soon and I hope they can get planted in all the gardens that are growing for the Free Farm Stand. Look for Clara' contact information in the sidebar under My Schedule and Events. The Esperanza garden needs the attention of a gardening angel too.

Festival of Fruit

All this week I will be attending the Festival of Fruit 2009 (http://festivaloffruit.org/) in the Santa Rosa/Petaluma/Sebastopol area. I love this event which is really tours of many gardens by fruit and garden enthusiasts like me. I will be back at the stand on Sunday and I might return with some gleaned produce while in the area.

Peak Produce

2009-08-03T12:10:00.001-07:00

We have heard about the idea of Peak Oil, but what about Peak Produce, have we reached that at the Free Farm Stand yet? Or what about Peak People, the beautiful people of all sorts that I am constantly meeting, the New Diggers, the dreamers and doers, the disguised saints, the sweet crazies (aren't we all)?

Sunday the sun came out in the afternoon to shine on all the hundreds of pounds of organic fresh produce that was collected to share. Check out the sidebar for see the total amounts of food people have grown or collected this year that doesn't come from the farmer's market. The shoppers lined up a little early and I don't think there was ever a break in the sharing dance. For me it started Saturday. Friday night I got a call from my friend Joanne that now lives at Green Gulch Farm and sits zazen and farms. You can't beat that. She found out that there was a field of food that was going to be plowed under the next day and she asked me if I could use some for the stand, that she could pick some and put it on the truck driving to the Ferry Building Farmer's market the next day. I of course said yes, I have always felt that the produce from them is very special, infused with a spiritual vibe that makes one high just to be near it. We got seven boxes of produce from them and I think in the future we may also get some starts from them too. And as I knew it would be the kale, lettuce, and rainbow chard was totally beautiful and fresh and such a beautiful gift and I was excited to be able to share it with our neighborhood.

Actually just before I left I looked across the street at the big supermarket and the area where the trucks drive in and block the open door to the back of the store. This is when one can sneak over there and look in their dumpster or go through the pallet of produce they are getting rid of (I don't know where it goes, it gets put in a truck and driven away). The store employers don't see you (they are not into sharing) and it is easy to score some stuff, mostly worthy of a compost pile, but every once in a while a box of rotting organic bananas for banana bread. These days industrial organic produce winds up in our supermarkets and then some of it goes out the back door probably to be composted somewhere. I like to grab some of it to make more compost for our gardens and I have a friend that is a Hare Krishna devotee who prefers to eat the food that is being wasted and no one else wants. We both hit this dumpster at different times, and I always offer him what I find before it goes in my compost. So that Saturday I hit a jackpot of produce but was too busy to get more than a box, I chose the one that looked like it had the most organic stuff in it. I spent the rest of the day thinking about what an abundant and yet so wasteful society we live in. I feel good that I can help recycle some of the abundant organic food we grow either to feed people directly with left over's from the farmer's markets or to help us grow more gardens.

Then later in the day I picked up food that Food Runners delivers to the soup kitchen where I volunteer and since they are on vacation for two weeks, I could get a lot more. It so happened that Food Runners picked up a lot of extra produce from the Ferry Building Farmers Market, somehow Eatwell farms had a lot of surplus zucchini and eggplant and the van was loaded to the max.

We also harvested a lot of locally grown food and throughout the day people kept showing up with more. People brought 131lbs of produce, including lemons, grapefruits, tomatoes, plums (about three kinds), loquats, apricots, herbs, sprouts, and zucchini. Also, Maggie brought two quarts of homemade tomato salsa and someone brought plum jam. One of the most beautiful "sharings" was that my friend Ray showed up with a big bottle of green tea with ginseng and honey and ice and cups. I have known Ray for about 22 years and he has been somewhat homeless forever, but now he lives in a Tenderloin hotel. I met him through a vegan soup kitchen I was helping to run and he just became a vegetarian so appreciated a place he could get healthy no meat food. He started coming around the Free Farm Stand and picking up bread and some fruit (I don't know how much he cooks). He finally got out of a wheelchair after two years because of a knee injury. And he uses a cane when he gets out. It was so sweet that he felt like he wanted to be part of the scene and bring something he could share with others (I spoke to him the week before and he offered to bring soda but we agreed on tea). Pancho also told me a sweet story he had with an older Spanish speaking woman who was getting some fruit and vegetables, but passed on the bread, because she didn't need it and wanted to save some for others. The real miracle of the day is that 99% of the food was given away. I still wind up having way to many herbs, mostly rosemary, that I have left over. Anyone have any ideas what to do with lots and lots of rosemary every week?

Again I need to say how great a volunteer crew we have. The stand seems to have a life of its own and I have been able to step away a bit and let others run things. One fantastic development is that Kevin who has been picking fruit with Produce to the People has really gotten on board with giving out the bread. He has shown up early to make sure he can do that job and it is great to see him feeling empowered with the work he is doing. The summer program ends next week but there will be funds in the fall to hire youth for these kinds of projects. And word is out that he wants to keep coming to give out bread. He does a wonderful job the way he organizes the bread on the table and serves the bread with jam.

Other projects:

One of my ongoing projects is to plant more fruit trees in Parque Niños Unidos where we have the stand. Unfortunately the park officials want me to put a fence around the area and basically expand the garden into the park so I have to raise maybe $3000 or more to do this. I have also been dreaming of putting a greenhouse there too which would require more funds. I was hoping to apply for a grant from San Francisco Beautiful, but temporarily they have run out of funds. I may be taking a workshop this week to help identify funders.

I get a lot of people saying they want to help in some way. Many people want to help us grow food for the stand. Right now there are four gardens that I am growing food in and they could all use help. I had the idea of training people to help manage each garden to supply food to share at the stand. Already a friend Clara has started working at the Secret Garden and we hope to know more in the future about her schedule and how others can join her.

The permaculture garden at 18^th and Rhode Island with our non profit The No Penny Opera, just got a grant and once we get the check we will know for sure the amount. The money will pay for our water bill, give us money to buy seeds and plants, install a couple of types of a watering systems, etc. I will keep people up to date as we get more information. We have been having real nice workdays and thanks to Cristina we have been documenting each day with her great photos. Lauren brought the kids from her project over and they helped harvest four pounds of potatoes and plant seeds. Cristina has also been taking photos of our lunches which actually look pretty good.

Here are some pretty inspiring photographs of urban gardens around the world that Nanda sent me the link to: http://www.time.com/time/photogallery/0,29307,1913033,00.html. Included in the photo slide show is a shot of the rooftop garden on top of Glide and a couple of shots of City Slicker Farm in Oakland. I have been realizing recently that the Mission is so dense with very little open space that I see. Downtown has more open space in the form of big parking lots and if we reduced the number of cars in the city those park lots the concrete could be torn up and made into farms. But if you want to grow food in the Mission another far away dream would be to tear down fences in backyards and neighbors grow food together. There is also a lot of interest in rooftop gardens (a lot of the photos in the Time magazine link are of rooftop gardens). I have never been to excited by gardening on a roof, it seems like it could be a lonely experience. I will stick with the dream of searching for vacant land in the Mission that I can plant my feet in.

In case you haven't heard Greywater was just made legal in California: http://www.oasisdesign.net/greywater/press/. Hooray!

And I just read that the school district has lots of property going to waste, like a place on Mission and 16th. Can we talk someone into tearing up some asphalt there and planting a garden?

more photos from farm stand July 26

2009-07-27T16:52:00.001-07:00

Tooting Our Horn of Plenty

2009-07-27T13:16:00.001-07:00

Summer is here and we are starting to see more fruit at the Free Farm Stand. The most exciting thing to happen yesterday at the Free Farm Stand was when at the beginning we were just about set up and ready to open when the kids from Produce to the People came walking through the gate with boxes of plums and a big bag of loquats. It was like the reinforcement troops arrived to feed the neighborhood masses with fresh locally picked fruit.

Before they came, the super local table was already loaded with fresh produce and so we had to improvise a table to put all the plums and loquats on. I brought a scale and throughout the day I weighed all the food that kept coming in so we can keep track of the amount of food we are growing and sharing at the Farm Stand. To start the day we had 13lbs. of produce from Rhode Island (11lbs of potatoes, 1lbs of greens, 1lb basil), 4lbs of produce from Eperanza (1.5lbs zucchini, 2lbs kale, 1/2lb of beans), 20lbs of produce gleaned from my friend in Oakland (11.5lbs. of lemons and 9lbs. of concord grapes), and 7.7lbs of produce I just picked from Treat Commons, including over one pound of strawberries and two huge trombone squashes. Throughout the day other people brought 118.6lbs of produce, including 73lbs. of plums, 20lbs of loquats, 5.9lbs of grapefruit, and 7lbs of zucchini. What excites me the most are not the numbers of pounds of produce on the table, but the spirit of sharing that is happening. We are up to 1,423.6 pounds of super local food sharing going on for this year.

Another highlight is that a number of people brought some jam to share that we put on the table with bread, one person brought some yummy tomato sauce, and Lyn brought sprouts that she grew in jars (she really wanted to grow some food to share and she doesn't have a garden). These things made my day. Oh and I didn't mention the great people who came by and helped out. A new friend Bill has been documenting the stand for Mission Local online news and he took these most wonderful photos that accurately capture not only the glorious looking produce, but some of the beautiful faces of our helpers. I am happy that we are getting some of the locals involved, like Raphael who gave out bread and helped set up and Abdullah a young boy who also enthusiastically helped set up and gave out produce.

This does not include the excess produce from the farmers further away from the city (nor the rescued industrial organic produce we are getting now). This week we had a summer bounty including watermelons, peaches and nectarines, cauliflower, zucchini, and red peppers.

18^th and Rhode Island

On Friday a small number of us turned out to continue harvest and weeding and we also planted more kale. We harvested three potato towers that never grew that well but we managed to get 11lbs of spuds, mostly small ones. Here is a slideshow of the harvest:

Kevin turned in a proposal for funding to a local foundation focused on improving the eastern neighborhood of San Francisco and the chances are high that we will get some money. The funds will go towards funding the water at the garden, seeds and plant materials, infrastructure, and a possible startup budget for planting another site nearby. There has been talk about seeing if we can plant fruit trees on some vacant Caltrans land overlooking the freeway at 18^th and San Bruno.

Growing the local garden network

I am trying to find time to spend more of my time in the garden and keeping my hands in the dirt, but also am continuing to promote the local garden/food sharing movement in the Mission. Now that we have non-profit status I am working on trying to find funding for some great projects we have dreamed up. One is that we have a tentative ok to more plant fruit trees in the park where we do the Free Farm Stand. I say tentative because after I get the money needed the project has to go in front of the Park and Recreation Commission to get their approval to change the land use from park to community garden for the area we want to expand into. It sounds like it is pretty likely they will ok the project, so I am going ahead trying to get money to have a chain link fence constructed around the area where the "food forest" will go. It may take as much as $5000 to get the fence built.

I am also working with Lauren of Produce to the People to try to get a greenhouse and free garden center built at Mission High.

If anyone knows of any people out there that have a lot of money or some foundation I should look into please let me know.

Here is a recent article from the Chronicle about Alemany Farm and the mayor's new healthy food policy: http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/c/a/2009/07/19/BASR18Q5UK.DTL. Yes we need more farms in the city!

The Free Farm Share

2009-07-20T11:21:00.001-07:00

It was another Sunday Streets day and I was bicycling down Valencia to go home to set up the Free Farm Stand. It was a blast riding down Valencia and seeing the whole street cut off from car traffic, though it was a bit chaotic and it wasn't a casual ride as I had to constantly avoid pedestrians and other bicycles coming from the other direction. When I got to the park the neighborhood seemed deserted because of the event and I decided to do some gardening until some help arrived. At some point volunteers started showing up and we got the van unloaded and food put on the different tables. Gone are the days (at least right now) of walking over with the wagon (not only because we have more produce, but because the van is used to pick up the bread that we leave in the van overnight). Suddenly out of nowhere people start flocking in like birds and before we know it there is a line of people anxious to get produce.

We filled the very local table with 37 pounds of produce this week. Right as we were setting up a neighbor showed up with a bag of small cherry plums that I think came from her tree. It made me happy that people are starting to understand what we are all about. I like to use the word food sharing as one way to describe what we are doing. We are learning to share (we hear that all the time if we hang out with kids and parents). It does seem like a food giveaway most of the time, but the message is really that we have the power to grow some of our food and to feed ourselves, just as we have the power to change our neighborhoods and get to know our neighbors. Some people think all they are doing is getting some free food and that is one way to look at it, but they might not know they are involved in a grand social experiment/scheme to make the world better by people getting to know each other, sharing food and some community time together. It is funny that now there is a Nolo press book out about sharing (The Sharing Solution) and talk about Sharing Law and the Sharing revolution. There is a blog too at http://www.sharingsolution.com/ . I must admit this really overwhelms me and I don't know what to think about it. I come from the old school where sharing seemed a lot simpler and we didn't need all the laws or contracts or technologies to share something with another person. We just get out in the world and do it. And some of us believe that the "Earth is a Common Treasury for All". Yo, just share the love! But it is all cool sharing any way you have to do it (I may even need some legal contract to get some landowner to share their vacant land with me). I wish I could do more sharing in my own life.

Anyway a number of people brought by produce to give away or share (depending on how you look at it) throughout the day. Margaret brought by some beautiful red potatoes from Holy Innocents from the tater towers that Page and I planted. She also dropped off some huge zucchinis from the Stanford garden, some green beans, and grapefruit. Later in the day Sam came by with some ripe plums and then another friend showed up with grapefruit from down the street on Treat. Nanda whom I have been corresponding with by email, brought by dragon beans that she grew, some lemons, and a number of plants to give away and some seeds. We also had produce from four gardens that we are working in, Treat Commons, Esperanza, 18^th and Rhode Island, and the Secret Garden. Of course the left over farmers market table was loaded with summer vegetables and I also had some "industrial organic" gleaned from Veritable Vegetable. I must admit I was offered a box of non-organic tortillas both flour and corn that I gave away that seemed very popular among our crowd.

At the very end of the Free Farm Stand while cleaning up a bicycle caravan with reggae musicians came riding down the street. I asked them if they wanted some bread that we had left over and they all came in the park and we had an impromptu reggae concert that was great. This is what I have been wanting for a while, some culture mixed with the stand. And I loved that it was sound system was powered by a bicycle.

We also had over two gallons of fresh plum jam that Eli made for the Free Farms Stand that we gave out in baby food jars and we had some on the table for people to taste. He actually thought it needed some improvement and gave me some in sealed mason jars that he added more sugar and ginger to and offered to do the same to the rest he gave me, but I thought it was delicious as is (and everyone else seemed to agree). Now I have some plum jam and apricot jam to give away around the holidays when fresh fruit is harder to come by.

I just heard that the possible new owner of the vacant lot that Esperanza Gardens is now located on has two months or more to grow food, because the he hasn't been able to secure the loans yet to build on it. So that will give us time to plant another crop of greens and other things there. I am getting a lot of volunteers at all the gardens and that is great. We just have to keep planting as much as possible. I would like to see someone help coordinate a seedling program where we give seeds, soil, and trays to people to grow seedlings to give away. That way we would have seedlings to put in the ground when we have "vacancies" and I think then more people could grow food and share the surplus. Here are some pictures of our last workday at 18th and Rhode Island. Like I think I mentioned in a previous posting, more people have time on their hands because they are out of work, so lucky us getting all these great helpers.

Good Food Movement

2009-07-13T12:13:00.001-07:00

Last week I did something I have not done before. I started writing a list of things I wanted to write about this week, because the exciting news related to local food growing kept coming to me fast and furious through my email in-box. It started with a link Christy sent me to a New York Times article about an urban farmer dude in Milwaukee named Will Allen: http://www.nytimes.com/2009/07/05/magazine/05allen-t.html?_r=1&em. I have heard of this guy before and have checked out his inspiring web site with information and pictures about his non-profit: http://www.growingpower.org/. Another friend Nanda sent me the same link to the NY Times article earlier, but I didn’t check it out for some reason. She mentioned he is in this documentary movie called Fresh which I haven’t seen. The New York Times has a way of writing about these saints in such a way as to get a person like me totally worked up and it is like an Urban Farmer’s Wet Dream reading about this project. I almost thought of traveling to the Midwest to learn all I could from him about growing large amounts of produce and making tons of worm compost in the middle of the city. Though a lot of what he does is run a business and they have become quite big (I still believe small is beautiful), they donate food to organizations that serve families that are struggling or homeless. On his web site they say: “We believe that no one should have to choose between rent and food. Neighbors should help neighbors. We are always looking for partners who can utilize our excess bounty to support people in need through meals and prepared produce bags.”

Guisepi from the Free Tea Party sent me a link that he ran across on Craigslist free section: http://opengardenproject.blogspot.com> He said we are doing similar things and he was right: “The Marin Open Garden Project organizes weekly meetings of backyard gardeners to exchange excess fruit, vegetables and other goodies from their gardens in Mill Valley, Larkspur, San Rafael, and San Anselmo. Have a tree full of fruit? The Project will harvest unwanted fruit from your garden and distribute it to other neighbors and community food banks and soup kitchens. Let us harvest your fruit trees with our trained volunteers. Need a plot? Let us introduce you to a gardener with land to share. We are also working to expand the number of community gardens in Marin County and create a seed library tailored to Marin's distinctive microclimates. We are also creating a garden tool library from which residents may borrow tools at no cost.” I got the title of this week’s blog from their blog where they mention the NY Times article as well and say he is part of the “good food movement”. I sort of like that name for a movement to describe all these great projects going on that mixes the ideas of growing healthy, sustainable, local food and neighborhoods and care for those people who are struggling to make ends meet. The local or slow food movement for me leaves out the poor in my opinion.

Last week I also learned that the Free Farm Stand got a mention in Buy Fresh Buy Local newsletter (put out by CAFF or Community Alliance with Family Farmers). Someone sent me the newsletter and there I read about another fabulous project in Concord, the Lemon Lady: http://thelemonlady.blogspot.com/: “Fruit Harvesting For The Hungry & other Non-Profit Gardening Adventures. One-woman Campaign Against Hunger. 8,000+ pounds of local fruit harvested in only a few months! Meeting true angels along the way.”. I feel the same way about always meeting angels in the work I do. I like it that besides harvesting fruit, she is also distributing seedlings and growing them, and giving out seeds to others who want to grow them too: http://thelemonlady.blogspot.com/2009/04/seedling-donation-project-seeking.html . She also has another great project which is to distribute cups with soil in them that she gives out to schools for children to grow.

Then if that wasn’t enough overload for the week, I started getting emails about Mayor’s Newsom’s recent announcement: “All city departments have six months to conduct an audit of unused land - including empty lots, rooftops, windowsills and median strips - that could be turned into community gardens or farms that could benefit residents, either by working at them or purchasing the fresh produce. Food vendors that contract with the city must offer healthy and sustainable food. All vending machines on city property must also offer healthy options, and farmers' markets must begin accepting food stamps, although some already do.” This from the July 9 Chronicle: http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/c/a/2009/07/09/MN5C18L6RG.DTL. The mayor traveled to West Oakland to visit City Slicker Farm, one of my early inspirations for the Free Farm Stand, to make this announcement. Maybe he doesn’t know about all the wonderful local food growing happening here, like at Alemany Farm (I just heard they arenot selling at the Bayview Hunters Point Farmer's Market and are now doing a free/donation CSA to residents in the community and have 18 families so far). Or how about the efforts of our Free Farm Stand? Maybe this is all politics and getting attention in his bid for governor, but hey I like the ideas. I think we need to get someone’s ear and eye at city hall to help us get a mini-farm in the Mission so we can carry on the “good food” movement. Free Local Food for the Hungry grown in our neighborhood! I also heard that Project Homeless Connect is getting a garden on Octavia between Oak and Fell and I don’t know much more yet.

Here are some facts that we can use in our bid for land. I am working on putting a local produce counter on this site. andI have already created a spreadsheet, thanks to Daniel who just moved out here and visited the stand recently, and is helping me with technical issues. I calculated that we have collected and given out 1,231 pounds of locally grown produce since the beginning of this year (I don’t have the records for the first year). That includes all the produce we have grown or people have brought to the stand every week and all the fruit that has been gleaned and brought to the stand. This does not include the thousands of pounds of fresh, locally grown organic produce that comes from the end of the day left over’s from the two farmer’s markets, nor the bread that we give out. Two gardens are on lots that were vacant and were turned into mini-farms. These two vacant lots have grown 240 lbs. of produce so far (the Esperanza garden might be closed soon because the property has been sold and is in escrow). We need to tell the mayor we are doing the work now to make our neighborhoods more sustainable and food secure and we just need help getting some land (I understand that is a big need).

Farm Stand Update

Getting back to the world of the Free Farm Stand, we had another beautiful day out in the sun with lots of fresh local produce, great volunteers, and sweet shoppers. We had about 120lbs of super local food on the table including lots of summer vegetables…green beans, greens, a few tomatoes that went fast, plums (two kinds), loquats, lemons, herbs, and zucchini. Produce to the People provided the loquats and brought their 3 person crew of high school students to help. Two of them that came last week I think are enjoying the work of giving away the produce and one person noted that they seem to be developing a sense of empowerment and authority. At least two people came by with lemons. A fellow that went on the Neighborhood Fruit gleaning trip to Golden Gate Park did manage to bring a bag of cherry plums to the stand. It sounded like they got hassled by park rangers picking the fruit (I guess there were a number of them who showed up attracting attention). Here is the mayor on one side saying we need to grow more food, but the park rangers saying no…not in my backyard literally.

The other produce table was looking good also. Here is a new development. Last week I made a connection with Jack from Food Not Bombs. They have started reconnecting with Veritable Vegetables and getting food from them on Fridays. I guess they can’t use it so they asked me if I wanted it to give out at the stand. When I first started the stand I contacted VV to see about getting a connection with them for their donated produce. At that time they were all filled up with people they give surplus produce to. I just couldn’t pass up this opportunity to get more free produce so I said yes, since they have a sister who delivers it by bike cart. So the produce from them is what I call industrial organic, at least some of it coming from big farms and some of it quite a distance away. I got organic cherry tomatoes from Mexico, organic sprouts from Sacramento, both packaged in plastic, some lettuce, and a few red peppers. I realize it is a slippery slope I am tripping on, but I see it all as gleaning and putting good food that would otherwise go to waste feeding people. I have drawn the line from dumpster diving the food that the supermarket across the street from me throws out and bringing it to the stand (though I put it in my compost). Most of it is non-organic and pretty funky, though I did score some organic bananas there once that I gave away to friends for smoothies. At the end of the Farm Stand day Maria brought by some rice and beans that the volunteers and a shopper ate. A number of us sat on the lawn in the gorgeous sun and Maggie brought out this beautiful steel drum she got in Switzerland.It had the sweetest sound ever and it really made me high listening to both her and Jeremy play it. Next week she might bring it again and Jeremy said he would bring a flute and jam with her.

I again want to say how much I appreciate the great help we have been getting. Most of the photos this week came from Cristina and that takes a load off trying to document the scene and what comes in every week on the table. I also was glad that Maggie has started managing the plant table and I hope that will expand in the future, offering more advice, seeds, seedlings, and information. And Asher did a great job at our bread table.

Potato Towers Update

I forgot to mention that we had a few potatoes that were harvested this week from my back yard and the Secret Garden. From my backyard I harvested 2lbs. of potatoes from two towers (one a trash can and the other a 5 gallon black plastic pot). The other potatoes (4lbs) came from three trash cans and one wire tower. I feel pretty embarrassed to admit that the potato towers that I have grown so far were a total failure with very low yields. I suspect it all has to do with what I put in the towers to grow the potatoes. I basically used stuff that was easily available like fine wood chips form Bay View Greenwaste, straw, some compost, some manure. It seems like with this method you need a lot of something good to grow the potatoes in like maybe good dirt. Whatever you use it seems like it was a lot of trouble gathering the materials either to layer the potatoes as they grew or to make a tower using the lasagna method, covering the layers of potatoes with soil and other stuff in layers to the top of my container. I am waiting to hear results from other gardeners and then I have more tater towers that we will harvest soon. The kids I worked with at the Secret Garden had a lot of fun though looking for potatoes, though we didn’t have very much to find.

Plum Picking and Work Day at 18th and Rhode Island

On Friday we had a great turn out for the garden work day. We pulled weeds (actually pulled up nasty but beautiful bindweed and chopped and dropped other weeds for aesthetic reasons mainly, and watered. After we had a lunch break we harvested the plus from the yard neighboring the garden. I think humans have built in wiring to enjoy harvesting fruit. Everyone gets the most beautiful smile on their face when they pick fruit, sweet or sour. They jump for joy! We picked 90lbs of plums. My friend Eli made jam with about 30lbs of the fruit, but I didn't get it until today so I will bottle it and give it away next week. It is really a shame that so much fruit growing on trees gets wasted. When I looked at our harvest yields, a lot of the harvest weight is do to the large amounts of fruit we have picked. The conclusion is simple. We have to plant more fruit trees everywhere and then learn to maintain them and pick them too. And to not get greedy and to share. Look for the fruit tree planting party in the park where we have the stand...it may take more months to make it happen but it looks promising.

Esperanza Harvest

I must mention that I got excited by the great yield I got from the Esperanza garden this week. I can’t believe I harvested so many greens (9lbs.). We could have planted the area much more densely and gotten hecka more produce, but I was working with people that wanted a place for a stage and for the audience to sit. I also haven’t put a lot of energy into the space because it has never been clear where the food goes that is being grown there. When it seemed that no one was doing anything with the crop that was ready to harvest, I got the ok to bring it to the stand. Now I am waiting to hear if the property is still in escrow and how much more time we have there, which will tell us if we should put in another crop.

My cartoon about bees and honey is now up (Beegan Beekeeping). Scroll down on the sidebar to the cartoon and click on the drawing to check it out. You can right click on the hive sounds and open in a new tab to hear the hive sounds and listen to our bees while reading the comic. Lyn has been helping me bottling honey to give away and I will also be printing up copies to give out with the honey at the stand (I have to finish the Spanish version). I just wanted to try to explain why a vegan is messing around with bees and honey. Also look at the "Dream To Do list " of projects that I would like to see happen someday. I thought I needed a place to keep them until they come true.

Plum Awesome

2009-07-06T13:11:00.001-07:00

A number of months ago I was talking to a couple of people whose opinions I trust and they both told me that in July is when we will really see the effects of the economic downturn. This was when all the bail outs were happening and the idea was that we would see a trickle down effect of the economy collapsing and more and more people losing their jobs. Well here we are in the beginning of July and I can't say I have seen a major meltdown yet, though a lot of people I meet these days either at the Free Farm Stand or coming out to help grow food and garden are out of work. I read volunteers have increased 35% in some places in the U.S. I have been unemployed my whole life and I wonder if I even have marketable skills. So to me this crisis is not something to be afraid of, though I understand that people are going to have big problems paying their rent if they don't have some kind of income.

Right after the earthquake here in 1989, a lot more people were outside and talking to each other. It felt like neighbors were friendlier with each other and it was a brief moment of togetherness coming out of crisis. The Free Farm Stand provides a place not only for people to pick up some extra produce and bread, but is good for networking and making connections. I loved it this week when the sun was out and so many people were sitting on the lawn talking. An instant town square feeling. I would love it if we could see more people coming out Sundays to share something with neighbors and new friends, a Free Farmer's Market.

This week I met a man named Sam who sits at the desk at Yoga Kula and we talked yoga for a while. I think we both agreed that yoga classes should be made available to everyone, regardless of ability to pay. He seemed to know about the free yoga classes available, including the Yoga to the People classes available in Berkeley and now San Francisco http://www.yogatothepeople.com/berkeley/sf-directions.shtml. They ask for a donation but supposedly don't check to see how much you put in their donation box. I had the idea that we should have some stretching and breathing sessions at the stand on Sundays, a good fit with getting healthy produce and it would be available to people in our 'hood.

The Free Farm Stand table was especially beautiful this week. Lauren from Produce to the People brought two high school students to the stand to help out. They had harvested about 100 lbs of plums and loquats, and lemons from local trees and brought it all to give away. I would love to put a produce counter on this site that would track the totals of produce that winds up on the table each Sunday. I am thinking we are probably giving out more than it seems, because every week the pounds of produce adds up.

Both Burton and Kevin were really helpful and I think they both had a good time (and it is cool that they are getting some money from the Mayor's office to help them out this summer). We also had at least one new volunteer named Cristina who helped out and was really wonderful.

Besides the plums and other fruit, I harvested 3 1/2lbs of greens from 18^th and Rhode Island, 4 lbs of carrots from Treat Commons, 2 ½ pounds of zucchini fro 18^th and Rhode Island and the Secret Garden,1 ½ lbs. green beans from the Secret Garden, and about a pound of fava beans from 18^th and Rhode Island. Steve our neighbor on Treat Ave. brought by some of his dad's beautiful produce from the country…a bag of big Meyer lemons, kale, and spearmint. Margaret brought cauliflower from Holy Innocents and some other things too. I like having the very local table filled with things we grew or that people bring separated from the left over produce table. We also are separating the bread table now which is working out great.

Our plant and garden table was pretty weak this week and I am still looking for someone to staff that table while the stand is open, to give out seedlings, answer garden questions (perhaps having some gardening books available), and to take people's names and contact information if they need help with their existing garden.

Other news:

I am working on taking over the No Penny Opera non-profit organization which was just turned over to me. I worked with this group for years and the core group of us who ran it did a lot of fun projects, including CRUMZ soup kitchen and the Comida del Arte Food Pantry. The non-profit has been in hibernation for a while and recently I realized I needed a non-profit sometimes to get funds for some of our projects.

Here is a new development on the fruit trees in the park project.The Challenge Grant that Park and Recreation said would become available in July has been delayed until who knows when. So if we want to plant the fruit trees we will need to come up with a chain link fence around the area. It also sounds like they want to use green plastic coated chain link, instead of something creative, beautiful, and cheap.

The Pride Day Free Farm Stand

2009-06-29T20:00:00.001-07:00

Someone at the Free Farm Stand yesterday asked me why I started this project and I stumbled around for words to answer her. Last night in a bit of a sleepy state I remembered one of my first inspirations for the stand was harvesting a lot of kale in my backyard and washing it and tying it up with an reused organic label wire. I was thinking how exciting it was to grow that large amount of kale; and to be able to give it away in a classy and beautiful manner to people that could use some free healthy produce. Peace Pilgrim spoke about us all having a personal calling in life and that we just need to look inside ourselves and figure out what our calling is and start following it. I know I have always had a calling to deal with food, to give it away in some manner or growing it. So my early inspiration for the Free Farm Stand was to grow a lot of beautiful food (and flowers too someday) and give it away as a gift to those in need.

I was reminded this week that I have been having a hard time fulfilling that original dream of growing a lot of food and giving it away. Last week I visit the Pe'ah Garden in the Home of Peace cemetery in Colma (it is really an acre farm). I have written about this farm in the past that grows food that is donated to the San Francisco Food Bank. Also, Jonathan has been teaching free gardening classes every Sunday out there that I having been putting on my events column for the last month. I knew I would be totally jazzed visiting this farm and I wasn't disappointed. I tell you something is genetically wired in me to get excited when I see large amounts of food being grown to feed the hungry. Thinking about it, I could see some possible improvements that could be made there in terms of the way they were growing things, but all the same there were rows and rows of beautiful organic broccoli, chard, tomatoes, and a big strawberry bowl with sweet strawberries ripe and ready to pick. I was literally overjoyed and feeling a definite pull towards that project. Plus Jonathan has use of a fabulous greenhouse. While I was there we planted two big trays of lettuce for the Free Farm Stand.

I started thinking that with my current situation of working in a number of small gardens, it is challenging to grow a lot of food like that (at least for the numbers of people that are coming these days…see below). I must constantly remind myself it is ok to not grow massive amounts of food. That I am doing the best I can with the space I have. And I have gardens that are small but still need a lot of attention (like my backyard that I have been trying to focus on recently). Anyway I am still meditating on this and am thinking about whether I should take Jonathan up on his offer for me to do some farming there at Pe'ah Garden or to stay more local. The advantage to gardening in the Mission or even Potrero Hill is that I can get volunteers more easily (Colma is a little harder to get to or at least more expensive if you take Bart which is only blocks from the garden/farm).

People lining up for produce seems to be the normal thing at the Free Farm Stand these days. It got really busy fast and I realized how spaced out I got. Fortunately we have some great volunteers that have been helping and I think things ran pretty smoothly, though it gets very hectic at the beginning.
On the local table I had 21 pounds of sweet purple plums that Erin and Asher gleaned in the Mission on Saturday. They also picked some lemons. I picked some lettuce and kale from the Secret Garden and yellow zucchini (also kale and zucchini from Esperanza Gardens and I think someone else brought some). From 18th and Rhode Island I picked about a pound of African Blue basil (which I left in my refrigerator hopefully for next week) and some chard. Page brought by a cauliflower and some spinach and a few artichokes from Holy Innocents. A woman brought some mint from her garden. The farmer's market table was loaded with produce and the bread table which we moved further away from the produce table had more than the usual amount of yeasty delights. The plant table was a little skimpy though we did have some seedlings to give away. I still would like to see us have one person to staff that table and be able to be there full time, offering garden advice and information. I am thinking I could do that if I could just train someone to take charge of the produce table. What happened this week is that we had a lot of helpers at the produce tables, but no one person taking real charge and making sure all the food was being put out. At the end we had a lot of basil left that fortunately Maggie took home with her to distribute somehow.

On Saturday night I happened to be walking near Dolores Park where I ran into the Free Tea Party Bus (http://freeteaparty.org/). I met Guisepi who started the project and a friend Sarah who was helping (she had come in from out of town). They had been serving free tea all day and were packing up (it was a busy day with the Pride Weekend bringing a lot of people out in the hot sun). Whenever I see something like a free project I like to check it out. It turns out that they had just heard about the Free Farm Stand by people who came by to get some free tea. I thought it was a beautiful project and then he offered to come by the Free Farm Stand and serve tea. When I got home I looked up their website and found it also very inspiring and it seemed we were on the same wave length. Here is some of what they say on the tea party web page:
MISSION:
The Free Tea Party cultivates community and encourages dialogue about peace, environment, and health through actions like serving free tea.

GOALS:
To bring people of all classes and colors, shapes and sizes, political beliefs and philosophies together in order to foster a connection between those who normally would never have connected in conversation. In this way valuable ideas can be shared and a human face can be put on people who one may have never related to before
They did show up and serve tea and it was very wonderful. We also had a preview taste of apricot jam from the apricots from last week, served on bread. And the herbal tea was not only cool and refreshing on the hot day it was, it tasted great. I gave them some fresh picked herbs and some honey for further tea parties. Can you imagine meeting a young man who realized that his calling in life is to serve free tea? It only confirms my belief that the "times they are a changing" again. That there are a lot of great things happening all over the world and we all need to continue the revolution/evolution by doing what we can to beautify the world and serve the poor.

Here is a good news flash. The project of planting fruit trees in the park where we have the Free Farm Stand is moving forward. I met with three big shots from Park and Recreation today and they ok'd a plan to fence off the unused and neglected part of the park for the mini-orchard (extending the garden into the park). And they will support me in applying for a grant that is coming up to put in the fence. I do believe that any urban revolution must include planting more fruit trees. I was really happy this Friday to see a small round avocado fruit on the Lamb Haas tree we planted at 18"th and Rhode Island.

Planet of the Apricots

2009-06-22T14:54:00.001-07:00

Early Saturday morning six of us packed into our van with ladders, pole pickers, buckets, a tarp, picking bags, shallow cardboard boxes, and a cooler and a box of food. We were headed to the church of 100 apricot trees in Winters near Davis (about 73 miles from San Francisco). We were invited there to participate in a day of fruit picking and picnicking. I imagined that we were traveling on the Sabbath to the church of apricot trees, because I know what a graceful experience it would be.

When we got there we were all immediately hit with a wave of awe and excitement. There were others there already picking the trees, friends of the sisters whose parents own the property. We had all been invited to pick as much as we can use, including a man who inherited two pigs (under the agreement that he wouldn't eat them) who was getting all the smashed apricots off the ground. He mixes the rotting fruit with grains and some other waste product to make fermented buckets of food for his pigs that love it. They eat the slop and then flop down in drunken bliss.

Picking so many trees for a number of hours was truly a religious experience and it makes one not only feel grateful but it is a direct connection to the power of creation. All that magic and beauty in a simple red orange yellow fruit warmed by a hot sun! The sweet taste of the apricots was also divine. As was the warmth and generosity of the people we met. In our own way we were all high and drunk with the vibe the trees were singing out. Man we've got to be planting more fruit trees everywhere, especially in the city, so we don't have to drive to get that high feeling...plus we got to feed the masses with more than grasses.

At some point we took a break and had a lovely picnic under a large oak. Sharing food together is another holy act and being outside on a somewhat hot day under the shade of a tree with friends was great. Lauren with Produce to the People and her friend Sarah showed up and joined us. Then we all went back to picking, actually shaking and catching (at that point we figured out that shaking the small trees and having four of us holding a tarp worked better than hand picking…it also was a more communal activity like praying together rather than by oneself. I guess they both are good.

When we got back to the city I weighed the fruit and we had collected approximately 428 pounds of apricots, some that went to Martin de Porres and the rest mostly to the stand. Another magical thing that happened is that we saved a lot of the soft fruit that was on the ground for jam. A woman at our church that has made jam for the stand in the past agreed to make jam Sunday and took 30lbs of apricots home with her to do just that.

It turned out that we didn't get a lot of left-overs from the farmer's market. I had some produce I picked from my backyard, Treat Commons, and Rhode Island garden. It was the apricots that made the day exciting. Besides apricots, we had beautiful carrots from Treat Commons (Purple Haze and a fat orange kind...thinning the carrots is the secret to successful carrot growing), oregano, marjoram, mint, chard, kale, flowers from Treat Common and also African Blue Basil. A woman came by with a bag of beautiful lemons, another brought some purple plums, and Erin brought plums that she helped pick on Saturday. A couple of people brought rosemary. Rosemary and oregano are both herbs that we seem to have no problem getting a lot of because they grow so well in our Mediterranean climate. I also should mentioned that I still could really use someone to come and take photos at the Free Farm Stand. This week I totally spaced out in taking pictures of the produce, which was so beautiful on the super local table. The photos here were taken after a lot of the produce was gone and I finally found the camera.

This week was the first time I actually noticed a line of people forming to get produce. I must admit I started getting a little scared that the Free Farm Stand was going to have the feeling of a bread line vs. a community gathering of neighbors sharing their surplus home grown. I did notice around 2 or 2:30pm there was no line and it seemed less busy. We also didn't have a lot of bread at the get go so we limited the number of loaves a person could take to two. That seemed to cause some tension at times, especially when a Russian couple came and took five loaves and wanted more and he didn't understand English. I am thinking next week moving the bread table away from the produce section and also possibly move the plant table too. Maybe this will help mellow the scene. Also I wonder if the crowds are due to all the publicity I have been getting. With the digital age it doesn't even matter if you give an interview, word of mouth is not what it used to be with the internet.

Talk about links on line, there is a link for the Free Farm Stand on my friend Christy's online journal What If? Journal of Radical Possibilities (www.whatifjournal.org). When I first met Christy she told me she once published a journal that had an article about the Diggers in it and she gave me a copy (at that time it was in real ink). I enjoyed reading it and now she is putting What If? online and is looking for "wonderful sources of information on transformative projects going on here locally (and elsewhere!)." In this issue she explores permaculture.

Recently I have been reading a lot of email discussions about the idea of people living together like we did in the sixties and seventies. The idea of intentional communities, service ashrams, gift economy villages. I agree that is what is needed now more than ever. I lived in a communal household for 24 years where we shared income and were pretty communal and it was the greatest experience ever. I wrote previously of an Urban Kibbutz or a urban communal house of hospitality and farm located in the middle of the city. That is the dream I will put out in the universe today. Did everyone enjoy the summer solstice?

Flower Child vs Farmer Dude

2009-06-15T13:41:00.000-07:00

Yesterday’s Free Farm Stand was a real whirlwind of activity. Besides a number of close friends that showed up for the first time, there were at least five other first timers that came by either with produce to share or to help. Plus there were a lot of people with a lot of different questions. I certainly wasn’t free enough to take many pictures let alone talk to everyone that I wanted to talk to more in depth. A lot of people came by to shop and by the end of the day we were pretty much out of everything.

The biggest harvest this week was the 62 pounds of loquats and 18 pounds of cherry plums that we picked on Saturday mostly from one tree next door to the secret garden and the plum located in the Secret Garden (read about that later). We also had some lemons that I picked from our Meyer lemon tree and I think Clare brought some too. We had two pounds of mustard greens from 18^th and Rhode Island (and a handful of fava beans) and two pounds of kale from the Secret Garden. I harvested 25 Baby Gem and Spreckles lettuce from the Esperanza Sustainability Center Garden. Page’s son Forest, who is temporarily taking over Page’s garden and gleaning responsibilities brought by some artichokes, and then he stuck around to help. Margaret brought by some produce from Holy Innocents Church including carrots and rosemary (I am not sure what else). Maggie brought by some beautiful kale from some garden and at some point we had more fresh lettuce (I forgot who brought it). My friend Michael who is in a wheelchair brought mustard greens from his garden. Christy brought some chamomile and a lettuce too from Corona Heights Community Garden. She also came by with a woman named Ania who brought a number of extra broccoli seedlings and some jars of produce she canned too much of, including pickled carrots, green beans, and jam. Ania just sent me an email about a group she is involved with called transition (http://transitioncalifornia.ning.com/group/transitionsanfrancisco). This is another group trying to achieve the same goals as many other groups around including the Free Farm Stand (“Local Self-Reliance for a Post-Petroleum World”). Though I am not sure if I believe we will ever be in a post petroleum world. Does anyone else feel overwhelmed by all the groups out there doing the same kind of work? Is it possible for more groups out there to merge or does it matter?

Molly came by with some nopales growing near her house that she prepared and put in plastic ziplock bags. That was a lot of effort! As we were closing up at the end, a man and his young daughter came by to get some food and he got some of the leftover braising greens mix and some rosemary and loquats. Then a neighbor showed up with a few nice lettuces she just picked and he got some of that too.

I was walking down the street the other day and I saw a poster in a window that said “Hope” with a picture of Obama. I do think there is a lot of hope in the air, but for me it mostly doesn’t come from the top down. These days it comes from the exciting people I am meeting like the woman Binal, a naturopathic doctor that Pancho brought over Sunday. She helps run the free or gift-economy Karma Clinic in Berkeley (http://karmaclinic.org/). Binal has such a warm and beautiful presence and I think we share a lot of similar dreams (like forming a household/community dedicated to healing and service and doing things with no charge). We looked at the garden together and she knew a lot about some of the herbs we were growing there.

On Friday at 18^th and Rhode Island we had a good turnout to work in the garden. We have been planting more food including basil, tomato, and edamame seedlings. I also was excited to plant some sunflower plants for cutting. I think putting in a long row of sunflowers really made my day. I love planting flowers and I would love to plant more in the future if I ever had unlimited amounts of growing space. I do believe we need beautiful gardens to stroll in, places in the urban environment to heal our soul and senses, places to let our spirits roam free, to smell the roses and to tip toe through the tulips, bamboo groves to meditate in, flowers to talk to and wear in our hair. Not just farms to grow huge amounts of produce for the people. We need the flower child as well as the farmer dude.

On Saturday we had just enough people to pick a lot of fruit. David who lives next to the Secret Garden let us in his backyard to pick his 30 or 40 foot loquat tree that was loaded with perfectly ripe fruit. We carried in the 14ft tall orchard ladder and the extendable pole pruner. Dave got up on the ladder and picked by hand all that he could reach and then he clipped the fruit off with the pruner. Below Clare, Renae, and I held a plastic tarp out and caught the falling fruit. This method worked out pretty good. Later others joined the fun and we had Erin, Julia, Nave, and Pancho picking cherry plums, loquats and harvesting lettuce and kale, and planting more lettuce. We wound up picking 62 pounds of loquats from two trees though most came from Dave’s tree (and there are probably another 50 pounds on the tree and hundreds of pounds of cherry plums that are not ripe yet).
On Saturday there was also an event that I wrote about last week which was a queer bike tour of gardens in the Mission ending at an art gallery in SOMA where there was a Free Farm Stand set up. I actually gave them a little extra produce and some basil plants. I heard is that on their tour of the different gardens, gardeners would give them some surplus vegetables for their stand. I wonder if there are any pictures out there of the event, especially of their Free Farm Stand? My friends told me it was really great. I love the idea of having a regular bike rider or two visiting community gardens on Saturdays and connecting with gardeners to see if there is any surplus that could be picked up to be given away. I have a bicycle cart that could be used for this purpose.

Local Farmer Dude

2009-06-08T14:34:00.001-07:00

Yesterday's Free Farm Stand was one of the best ever. It was the first time where the amount of locally grown neighborhood produce really out shined the left over produce from the Farmer's Markets. I realized on Saturday evening that I didn't have a lot of produce from the Farmer's Market and I was feeling OK about that, that whatever I have to give away is a beautiful thing no matter the amount. So it turned out that the very local table had so much produce it had to expand onto the plant table and all the stuff looked really great. I felt like a real local farmer dude showing off the stuff I grew and the stuff neighbors and friends grew or picked from trees. Not just like a schleper with a tired back.

It wasn't like the left over table wasn't pretty full, but just compared to some weeks we didn't have crazy amounts of things. We had a lot of nice young onions, some whole wheat flour from Eat Well Farms, and more odd greens. On the local table I had a bowl full of just picked Baby Gem lettuces from my backyard, sunflower greens that I grew, two pounds of mustard and chard greens and 2lbs of fava beans from 18^th and Rhode Island, some mint and oregano and rosemary from there too, and a lot of citrus fruit from 20^th and South Van Ness. On Saturday SF Glean had its first fruit tree gleaning orientation and then they went and picked some fruit trees. I heard about one tree through Neighborhood Vegetables, another fabulous local project trying to take off in San Francisco (it has already in Berkeley). I was out of town, but when I came back there was 12lbs of plums, 27 1/2lbs of navel oranges, 23lbs of mandarin oranges. Here is a slideshow of the picking crew in action:
I also picked chamomile from Treat Commons, some beautiful carrots, including some called Purple Haze, sweet pea flowers, and mustard greens and herbs The rest of the day people came by bringing things they grew or picked. It started with my friend Page who brought a number of cauliflowers that he had grown at Holy Innocents Church in Noe Valley. He also had a few lemons from a tree in Stanford. Steve our neighbor on Treat Ave. came by with a cooler filled with fresh lettuce and kale and big lemons from his Dad's home in Sebastapol (he said he has just picked it that morning and everyone was oohing and awing at how gorgeous the produce looked). Pam came by later with some collards flowers for me to try cooking (more on that later) and I think she dropped off some extra lettuce. Another friend brought a box of lemons they picked from a neighbors tree down the block. I am not sure if I saw all the food that people brought by because I was kept busy talking to people, but the table had stuff on it for a while.

The other thing that was so exciting is that the plant stand was a big hit. Two people brought a lot of beautiful seedlings and we had a lot of plants to give away.

The local gardening scene keeps growing and it seems every week there is something up with that, some movie about gardens and local food, or radio show, some local food project or event happening. Mentioning interviews, a few people told me the other day they heard me on KALW radio talking about the Free Farm Stand (see sidebar for interview). I knew KALW came by and that I talked to someone who was a freelance reporter, but I didn't know it was going on the air. I was rather disappointed that the interviewer didn't quite get what I was doing, seeming to emphasize and be mostly excited about the free food being given away, especially the bread. I don't think he understood the most important thing that I am trying to do which is to promote local food growing as a way of dealing with hunger and food insecurity in my neighborhood. Though I am giving away a lot of food, including bread, I really hope that people are coming because it helps with their tight budget, not because it is the hippest place to go to score some free food, which the interviewer seemed to imply.

My friend Ami who made the 4 minute movie on the Free Farm Stand for a city college project is organizing an event this Saturday which includes a Free Farm Stand. There is a queer gardens bike tour that is free at 4:30pm that meets at the Bike Kitchen (19th and Alabama) and ends at the event at SOMArts where there will be at 7pm "Hortisexual Installations and a free farm stand (bring your garden's excess to share!)" with: Queer Food for Love, Apothequeery by Dori Midnight, the genderqueer goat gods, music by Jesse Quattro and Devin Hoff". At 8pm the other part (movies and performances) will cost $15-$20.

Another friend Lauren has started a cool project called Produce to People (http://www.producetothepeople.blogspot.com/). From the website which seems like it is in its infant stage: "Produce to the People (PttP) is a backyard harvest project that collects excess produce from residential fruit trees and gardens in San Francisco. The produce is given to local organizations that redistribute free food to low-income families and individuals, including the Free Farm Stand and the Food Pantry. Perhaps SF Glean which I have been helping with might join forces with Lauren's project.

Near the Stanford campus in Palo Alto, Page who teaches a sustainability class at the university and is helping start gardens in churches here in the city, reported to me that the students have started a gleaning project there and that they picked 2 trees of the 140 they have located. Two of the organizers brought two large laundry baskets of oranges and lemons to the Julian Pantry on Saturday. To me this is the ultimate beautiful thing to do.

Last week Shandra, Marcus, and I planted two fruit trees in the Bay View in front of a house with some land in front of it. I keep pushing for planting more fruit trees in the city, because the more we plant now the better chances of having more fruit to pick in the future.

I was listening on the radio the other day while driving and I heard this guy talking about what a unique time we are in now, much better than the sixties. That not only do we have technology and the ability for lots of communication to happen, there are a lot of great ideas out there, and the system is collapsing for the moment. So this guy thinks we have the chance to experiment with alternative economies. And start helping each other out. I agree.

On the topic of "plant you now dig you later", the potato towers are growing in various locations about town. Some are doing better than others it seems, like the ones at 18^th and Rhode Island don't seem as green as the ones in my backyard or the ones at Treat Commons. I planted a few more towers at 18^th and Rhode Island, the kind that you layer with mulch as the potatoes grow. I used one upside down trash can with its bottom cut out and two with chicken wire with a black plastic insert that I found at Building Resources. I had to use stakes to keep the chicken wire ones from toppling over. I think I still have more spuds to plant, just need a spot.

So Pam Pierce yesterday turned me onto growing collard greens and harvesting the flowers as an less intense alternative to broccoli raab. You grow the collards and then in the second year they will start to flower (they are biennials) and that is when you begin harvesting them. You will have a harvest over a long period of time. Here is her recipe which I tried last night: Chop up some onions and garlic and sauté them in some olive oil. Then throw in the collard flowers and cook until not too crunchy. Then dry roast a small amount of pine nuts in a skillet and toss on top. They were quite delicious and better than raab.

“Dryad-maids together; your gifts I sing”

2009-06-01T11:49:00.001-07:00

If I could sum up my feelings right at the moment into one word it would be gratefulness. If a person doesn't get a chance to feel grateful I would guess that would be a sad situation, because it is a great way of feeling high. A sense of being connected to that love energy out there. Maybe this weekly writing should just be a prayer blog, counting my blessings out loud.

This week again I got to work with some new people in my life and that was fun. And the Free Farm Stand this week was particularly energetic. I just reported last week that some of my dearest helpers were gone because of summer (or school graduation) and yesterday a new batch of volunteers came by to help. It was really fabulous and I was especially pleased that we got the plant table up to give away the seedlings that were in need of a home. Also, Page and Jay showed up for their first time and were helpful to the max; I especially appreciated not having to take photos to document the scene. I think Page took over 100 pictures!

For the first time I truly harvested only the surplus lettuce in my backyard garden, leaving some for Angie and I to eat later in the week. I knew I had gotten a lot of lettuce from the farmer's market so I decided not to pick all of ours. It turned out at the end of the day I still had a little lettuce left that I didn't give away that I will take to the soup kitchen if it holds up. On the very local table besides the lettuce, we had some mint that I had picked (I really like this variety of wintergreen mint that I am growing in two gardens), more fava beans from Rhode Island garden (25lbs), some misc. greens from there too, chamomile and flowers from Treat Commons, and loquats from my tree. Loquats are a great fruit to grow though getting a known variety that makes the sweetest fruit would be ideal (I now have a lot of seedlings that I want to try grafting sometime when I can find another tree that makes tasty fruit) The loquat trees I know of around here are crazy tall, needing a crane to harvest them. Or a good tree climber with a safety harness. I have a 14 foot tall orchard ladder and can only get to some of my loquats. I must admit I have a bit of fear of heights, but I do manage to get up on tall ladders to pick fruit. It is wonderful and sad to be on top of a tall ladder next to a tall tree loaded with fruit. I can pick a lot in a short time, but then when I look further up I can see fruit I can't reach. Jo gave me a great professional fruit picking bag that makes it easier to pick fruit, but my pole picker didn't work with the loquats. Right now it is the beginning of the fun fruit season here, apricots are in the market and there are trees in our neighborhood that are loaded with green fruit. Again I would sing a praise to fruit trees and recommend everyone plant one where they have space. I am still working with park and recreation to plant more fruit trees in the park here.

Getting back to the very local table, throughout the day people came by with garden gifts to share with everyone. Carla's surplus kale got the prize for being the most beautiful delicious looking kale I have seen in a while. Because I wasn't at the table I didn't see all the things that people brought, but I noticed some beautiful chard at one point. Also, Pam Pierce's husband brought a number of bags of produce, including some lettuce, herbs, and cilantro (I am not sure I saw it all). Nancy came by with some oregano and thyme from her container garden. Two people brought lemons. The plant/garden table was loaded with seedlings. This week I potted up plants with the Jamestown kids (our last workday for now). I also got a donation of seedlings from a gardener who visited the stand for the first time last week and on Tuesday his daughter dropped off a couple of flats of tomatoes, eggplant, and hot pepper starts. Tori and Davin with eco-sf showed up with several trays of seedlings too which was really great.

Again we had a lot of left-overs from the local farmers including zucchini which is starting to come in now. I actually picked up the bread this week because our regular driver was out of town. The man at Acme bakery was so nice and generous and gave me enough bread to fill a small station wagon. If I had really tried I probably could have stuffed more in and he had more to give away. At some point towards the very end I think we ran out of bread.

I have been giving out reusable cloth bags that Christy got somewhere and also I have a big stash of clear plastic produce bags I got from a closed bakery (and people have been bringing their used bags too). I have been thinking about the problem of plastic grocery bags and how to teach people to get less dependent on them. I know the Ferry Building Farmers market now no longer carries plastic bags. They sell for a quarter bio-bags that are made with cornstarch or something and they completely break down in the compost.

Another fun thing that happened at the stand on Sunday was that Bay Area Source had their zine release party on the grass and brought their ice cream making equipment with them (check out the slide show...the can is is the ice cream maker). The ice cream (both vegan and non-vegan) was very popular with everyone, especially the kids. I love the concept of having other free almost vegan educational or cultural events going on in the park next to the Free Farm Stand and it goes back to my idea of having a free farmers market in the park instead of just a lonely farm stand.

On Friday Ian came out to our regular workday at Rhode Island and we picked more fava beans. We also planted more potato towers and did some watering. I didn't realize how much work there is to do there so if anyone wants to garden, right now that is a great place to go if you have time available on Friday mornings. There is more planting to do and watering and harvesting.

On Saturday a bunch of people came over and helped extract honey from our bee hive. We got over ninety pounds of honey or eight plus gallons. If I can get some in jars by next week we will give some out at the stand. My new friend Andrew who is a member of the SF Bee Association like me and has a hive on a roof south of Market came and helped the whole day. I got excited because he reads Latin and Greek (something I wish they taught in schools). He was telling me about the Greeks who wrote about bees and he is now reading the Georgics published in 29BCE by the Roman poet Virgil, a book about rural life and farming. In the Georgics IV Vigil writes: "Of air-born honey, gift of heaven, I now take up the tale. Upon this theme no less". This kind of history thrills me, knowing that there is nothing new under the sun.

The title for this blog is also from Virgil. Dryads I just learned are tree nymphs.

Someone suggested I use Twitter so people could follow me and learn where I am gardening at the moment and other up to the minute updates. I guess I am going to try it. It is on the sidebar...

The Hyper Local Flavor Zone

2009-05-25T10:46:00.001-07:00

O yee of little faith. That is me at times. A worrywart. When I went over to the park with a van full of food at noon nobody was around. The Carnival parade was going down 24th Street and the park was pretty much empty. I started thinking of contingency plans in case I was stuck with a lot of vegetables and bread. All my regular volunteers were away , some having graduated from school and have taken off for the summer. I set up the stand by myself, the first time in a year I would guess. I even put our sign on the sidewalk thinking I needed to catch the attention of people walking by the park. My friend Greg showed up with a nine month old baby strapped around his waist and was unable to do much except provide a cheering section for me which I appreciated. Greg was probably the first person to help me when I first started the farm stand and I hadn't seen him for a while. He soon had to take off to put the baby who was getting cranky to bed (an aside note, have you noticed the baby boom happening right now?). Finally, one of our regular shoppers came by and realizing that things wouldn't get set up soon without me getting some help, so she started helping. Soon some other shoppers pitched in and I sort of had a crew. I wasn't really free to set up the plant stand nor snap a lot of photos, but everything worked out fine. And by the time we were set up we had the usual crowd of early birds who were nervous about getting some produce and it was a bit hectic from the start. Getting near 2pm, after the parade had finished, more people showed up and really people kept trickling in up until I actually pulled the cart out the gate. Two kids in the park asked me for some food as I was about to pull away and I had a few bunches of greens left…they seemed happy to get a bunch of red mustard. I can' believe that I gave everything away except a few onions and some greens. Towards the very end, a Chinese woman who lived in Vietnam was excited to get the last bunch of Malabar spinach. I have never known what to do with that vegetable (I keep forgetting to look it up). She explained how it is good in soup and she gave me her complicated recipe for soup involving using egg. I just looked it up and somewhere it said "The mucilaginous texture is especially useful as a thickener in soups and stews."

I had a pretty good harvest for the hyper local table i.e. the home grown stuff from the flavor zone. Besides another forty pounds of fava beans from 18^th and Rhode Island, I harvested a few pounds of mustard greens and chard too, plus I got the last of the lettuce lawn at the Secret Garden. I also harvested some oregano and African Blue basil (mostly flowers), and a basket of strawberries from Treat Commons. Ruben told me to harvest his lettuce lawn too and also I picked some arugula and mustard from his bed. Also I picked a lot of sweet pea flowers and daisies. The less local left over table was really packed too, including some strawberries that I tried to save for the kids. Page came by with a boxes of oranges and loquats he picked near Stanford where he teaches (that is my guess... he was parked illegally and had to run in and out). My loquats are about ready, but I didn't get around to picking them. Needless to say fresh fruit is one of the more popular things we give away and I wish we could find more to pick and distribute. Zoe came by with a beautiful lettuce mix from her garden in the Sunset. Another friend came by with a handful of salad burnett. The leaves taste like cucumber and is pretty good tasting. Later in the day Pancho showed up and was able to talk to all the Spanish speaking people who came by. He is such a warm person and it makes me really happy to have someone like him that can carry on a conversation with people who speak little English. At one point there was an older woman that came with a cane and he helped her fill her bag and they were both chatting and laughing, it was a really beautiful scene. He learned that she came from Mexico like him and had the same name as his mother, Mary. And she new all about the vegetables and how to cook them.

the hyper local table with the home grown stuff

the less local produce from the farmer's markets

a happy shopper with an orange from our friendly gleaner Page

and loquats

beautiful salad from the sunset with flowers on top

The work day at 18^th and Rhode Island was also sparsely attended, but Alvin did manage to pick those forty pounds of beans by himself. I hopped the small fence of the original squatted garden on the site and planted hot weather things in real dirt which was so exciting (as opposed to planting things in the mostly wood chip berms permaculture style). This is the spot where I harvested orange cherry tomatoes late into January of this year. I planted more tomatoes, including the cherry tomato from there that I saved seed for, eggplant, and hot peppers. This will be a good test to see if we can grow eggplant in San Francisco. Of course now I am waiting for our global warming to return to replace this cool fog. Kelvin is busy planning more lovely things for this garden including a special lentil that supposedly will grow here. Jay and David have been working on planting the "cool weather" bananas, pepino dulce (melon pear or melon shrub), and the babaco (mountain papaya) plants we have been growing for the garden.

Every week I seem to connect with some new beautiful person or hear of a project that is totally inspiring. I went to Mission High School last week to talk to some kids that were involved with an environmental service learning project there. One surprising thing is that I learned that the principle of the school, Eric, who visited the farm stand there once, is the father of Asher, the energetic and enthusiastic 13 year boy who has been helping me every week at the stand. His father seems like a revolutionary guy who gave the ok to turn a parking lot at the school into a garden. After the talk I visited the garden and saw Lauren who has been volunteering there and also helped at the stand. I also learned that the fabulous Mission Science workshop is now located in the space there that used to be the auto mechanics department at the school. Dan, who is the amazingly inspiring man who started the project, was showing off these planter boxes he is going to build with his students (he is going to build sixty!). I also met the biology teacher named Susan who is teaching biology through the medium of compost. She was looking at the worm bin Lauren helped build and the idea is to incorporate worm study into the biology curriculum.

I have been a bit restless lately and feeling the tug to explore other possible things to do. Not giving up the Free Farm Stand, but perhaps putting out the desire to find more consistent help to run it…I do not want it to be a one person show. I am still day dreaming of starting a communal household in the Mission based around service (remember the Urban Kibbutz idea?). I really believe that projects like the Free Farm Stand would ideally be run by a commune. Communal living is so much more an efficient and a sustainable way of living. We should be sharing our lives more, including income sharing and living like family. The challenge is to find a building and find people with like minded ideas to come up with the money needed to get a place.

There are companion projects to the Free Farm Stand too that may be fun to start, like a Free Neighborhood Garden Center. And there are more gardens/urban mini-urban farms to start. I have also been inspired recently by my friend who has started a free advertising zine called Baitline. I so much appreciate beautiful artwork and sweet words and ideas printed on paper. So I have been thinking about a Free Farm Stand newsletter. I need a lead balloon to tie around my feet before I float away.

By the way check out the Current News and Event s column. At the next Farm Stand two friends at Bay Area Source are going to have an ice cream party in the park neighboring the stand. They will be giving away their newest zine and have equipment available for people to make their own ice cream (both vegan and non-vegan). I am still in favor of the vegan diet, but I wanted to support these wonderful women who have being doing great things for a while. Maybe they will at least have dairy from non-factory farmed animals.

It has always been my hope that the Free Farm Stand will attract others to come to the park on Sunday and share for free something they are interested in…especially along the lines of art and music and education.

The Little Table that Could

2009-05-18T10:00:00.001-07:00

I love opening the Free Farm Stand on a hot sunny day, though keeping the produce from wilting is a challenge. We tried the new method of having two tables set up one loaded with left over produce from the farmer's market and the other with produce grown more locally.

The idea being that the home grown garden produce that neighbors and the community have brought to share doesn't get lost among the commercially grown produce. I actually don't know if people really noticed the separation. Maybe with the price of organic vegetables being pretty high people just concentrate on getting the fresh produce and the fact that their neighbor might have grown it gets lost with some people. Or maybe you have to be a gardener to really appreciate and understand the effort that goes into bringing food to our tables. And it is more than that, it is almost a religious experience to be involved in growing some of your own food, it connects us to that life force and to the divine and Holy Spirit. It reminds us of the everyday miracles that occur in our gardens. I know that a lot of people coming to the Free Farm Stand understand this already, because people immediately feel some joy just being around the food that radiates good vibes. Maybe I am getting too far off the deep end here and I should go back to the practical.

Here is what was on the home grown table: fava beans (we harvested another 35 lbs. from 18^th and Rhode Island), a small basket of berries picked from Treat Commons (three or four blueberries, raspberries, and strawberries), a small amount of wintergreen mint from Treat Commons, and some delicious baby lettuce from the salad lawn at the Secret garden. Later two people came by with more fava bean and one woman brought a small amount of chervil which is a delightful herb that we all should be growing more of, and a friend came by with surplus parsley that she had grown.
I was telling someone that the home grown table is the hope section because we hope we will have more produce on the table some day. It is like the story "The little Engine that Could". We think we can, we think we can (grow more food for all). I also printed up flyers in Spanish and English that explained in detail the goals of the Free Farm Stand. I saw very few people taking them, though I did hand out some. Later in the day I got around to adding seedlings to the table. There was a lot of interest in seedlings and I managed to give quite a few away.

The crowd of people was not as large as last week, maybe because of the heat or the Bay to Breakers. I was quite busy though because we were a little short on people to be at the table.

So this is where things are at right now with the Free Farm Stand. As we move into summer some of our regular volunteers that were students are going to be away, some temporarily. One of my favorite helpers Thy has graduated and is moving to the L.A. area. So the stand is going to need more help. And I am still trying to get the garden booth up and running, where we not only give out plants and seedlings, but we are available to answer garden related questions. We are also short on Spanish speaking volunteers at the stand which is really important. Here is something I am putting out to the universe: I would love to find someone I can train that could learn the process of running the stand from start to finish, so that if I couldn't be around some week the stand could remain open.

Ending on an up note, the gardens are looking pretty good. The tater towers are green and the upside down tomatoes are looking good too. This Tuesday I want to put in more work at the secret garden which needs lots of weeding and more planting. I also get want to get my backyard garden in better shape (it is getting there after a lot of effort last week) and I plan to get a lot of seed planted for starts too. There is a lot of gardening to do and I am anxious to get away from this computer and get back into the garden. Oh and our bees have three supers of honey ready to extract and if we can get the extractor we will be extracting honey next Saturday!

Beautiful Bounty

2009-05-11T20:29:00.001-07:00

I want to start off saying that I have become overwhelmed this last week with all the amazing sweet and energetic people I have been in touch with. Besides being overwhelmed with such spring bounty of produce, the bay area seems bountiful now with local garden projects galore and people wanting to plug in somehow.

Talking about being overwhelmed Christy sent me an email about how she is overwhelmed with the produce from the Farmer's Market. Here is her words with a great suggestion that I think we can follow up on next week.:

"Hey Tree,

I had an idea after being at the farm stand yesterday. Do you think it would work to reserve a section of one of the tables for the food that the community and home gardeners like you and some of us donate to the stand? Maybe with a little sign indicating that? I think it might spur more people to bring stuff. For me it's a little overwhelming to see all the produce that the commercial growers just throw away piled up there, and it's just not as special as knowing one of your neighbors worked to produce food to share with you. It would also be a gentle lesson for folks who visit the stand on the number and variety, even if small quantity, of things that are being grown by their neighbors, and might inspire them more to grow stuff themselves."

The Free Farm Stand this week was well attended this week, and we had a good number of great helpers running it. Christy in her email also noted that the popularity is growing with the "younger, hip, diet-conscious folks" and that she saw "fewer Latino and other immigrant families". I do see the stand becoming more popular. One of my goals has been to see the stand bringing neighbors together every week and that is happening. And I continue to strive to make this local food movement accessible to all especially those on tight budgets and low incomes. I am thinking that is more and more of us these days.

The amount of produce this week from three of the gardens I work in was phenomenal: 48lbs of fava beans from 18^th and Rhode Island, 6lbs from my backyard, and 7 ½ lbs from the Secret Garden. I also harvested 6 ½ lbs of greens from 18^th and Rhode Island and 5 lbs of baby lettuce from the secret garden. I also picked lemons from my neighbor's tree. Other people brought more mustard greens, and peppermint and peppermint starter plants, and chamomile. One woman brought produce from a CSA box that didn't get picked up. We also gave out left over flowers that originally came from Whole Foods and sweet pea flowers from Treat Commons (it was Mother's Day and everyone loved the flowers).

We also gave out a lot of seedlings, mostly tomatoes and artichokes. It was really nice having a new person around named Pancho who spoke Spanish with people. I also brought a small camp stove and boiled up some shelled fava beans to show people how to cook them and what they taste like. People loved them and luckily we had a lot to give away (I also got a box of them from the farmer's market delivery).

Report on last week as it relates to the Free Farm Stand

Last Tuesday we had a great work day in Treat Commons ( a number of new people showed up to volunteer) and we planted some trombone squash and cucumbers, plus thinned carrots and did some weeding. Then at the Secret Garden the kids harvested 6 ½ lbs of fava beans that grew in a very shady part of the garden. We also mulched the potatoes growing in the tater towers. All but one of the towers is doing well.

Last Wednesday which was the first Wednesday of the month and I went to the SF Permaculture Guild meeting. I mainly went to hear Laurence Schechtman ,"Laurence Of Berkeley" talk about the project I have heard about and mentioned in my blog last year called Neighborhood Vegetables http://neighborhoodveggies.ning.com/. It is a group that encourages and organizes neighbors to help each other grow food. What I learned from Laurence is a good tip on having a successful meeting: "A meeting is never complete without everyone having a job to do and someone to do it with." The meeting he organizes ends with a "responsibility circle" where people tell the group what responsibility they are going to take on. I just signed up for Neighborhood Vegetables and joined the San Francisco group. I really don't know where this will lead. I like the idea of neighbors helping each other grow food by planting gardens together and that is why I joined. Though right now I am pretty busy trying to be an urban farmer and growing food to give away to those who don't have the land to grow food or the time to garden (though I think everyone can probably make some time to grow some food somewhere). I had forgotten that whenever I go to the guild meeting now I see not only so many people I know, but meet others who are usually interesting in different ways.

Thursday I had one new friend Brian help me harvest fava beans from my backyard (6lbs from another shady garden and I realized later that I missed some). I moved a lot of the seedlings out of the garden and am ready to start planting more seeds.

The On Friday we had a great workday at 18^th and Rhode Island. About six people showed up to help. We spent the morning harvesting some of the fava beans on the hill. I was really surprised that when we finished harvesting we had a big trash can bag full of fava beans. When I took them home to weigh them there were 48lbs of beans. We also harvested 6 ½ lbs of various greens, mostly Swiss chard and some lettuce. We also planted two avocado trees, a number of pineapple guava, sunchokes, stinging nettle, and some rocoto hot peppers.

On Saturday was the grand opening of the Esperanza Garden Sustainability Center. There was a great turnout and good music and food. The sound system was bike peddled generated and there was also a bike pedaled blender that made smoothies.

I had a mini-farm stand set up and next to me was a free lemonade stand made with big lemons from the tree of the dad and his young daughter who made it. The stand was sort of a bust I thought, not too many people seemed interested in the food nor seedlings I was giving away. Maybe the wrong kind of crowd I don't know. I did give a short hands on demonstration of how to build a tater tower and also growing tomatoes upside down. I met a woman there who has already tried this and she says it does work.

One last thing is that I have been corresponding with some people for a while online who are also doing similar "gift economy" work in different places. We have both been inspiring each other. On Saturday I got to meet Jeff for the first time at the Esperanza opening and then on Sunday he and two others, Pancho and Elizabeth came out to help at the stand. One of the things they are involved with is the Karma Kitchen. Read his blog about the Farmers Market comes to Karma Kitchen: http://www.charityfocus.org/blog/view.php?id=1954. I hope we can collaborate on wonderful projects in the future.

I thought there has been a lot of focus on the Free Farm Stand and less on the gardens that supply some of the food. So here is a slide show from the Secret Garden last week and the exciting delicious lettuce lawn.

The Season of Garden Greens and Lemons

2009-05-04T21:13:00.000-07:00

I am back from my three day trip out of town. It was a totally surreal trip for me to spend time in the suburbs outside Denver. I am familiar with suburbs since I grew up in one, but I still felt like I was on another planet. I started a poem when I was there:

I missed the boat a long time ago to be normal

at an early age I got off the path

As soon as I got home I was anxious to get out into the gardens. First I went over to the Esperanza Garden where there was going to be a work day preparing the garden for the grand opening next Saturday May 9th. Like I said last week this garden might not be around in two months, but people are planting things in pots and annuals in the ground. I planted some lettuce and a yellow zucchini and will come back hopefully in the middle of the week to plant some pole beans. I think if we can get one crop of something edible out of the garden before it gets developed that will be great. At the opening I think I am going to be there doing a workshop on growing potatoes in towers and tomatoes upside down in pots. I then went over to Treat Commons and harvested a big trash bag full of chard and kale for the free farm stand.

Our greens

I guess it has been raining a bit which is great news. It was raining a little when we set up the stand, but for the most part the day was clear and we had another large crowd with a large amount of food that I brought over in a van from the soup kitchen where I work the first Sunday of the month. We are still in the season of garden greens which filled our table.
We again had large amounts of basil which should be out of season now and were probably grown in a green house since it is supposedly locally grown. Nosrat, our neighbor who lives around the corner and is an excellent cook, took a sample of the different things we had on the table, including basil, walnuts, young garlic, and some cilantro and went home and blended up some tasty vegan pesto. He brought it back and shared it with everyone served on some bread. Ashly came later and brought some fava bean spread made with curry that we put out for people to taste (the fava beans came from 18th and Rhode Island…I plan to go there Friday for the workday and will probably harvest more for the stand). Later a gardener in Treat Commons came by with her young daughter to bring some cookies to share. It was her daughter's idea who just got some cookies from a new cookie shop on Valencia to bring some over to share at the stand. I didn't say anything about them not being vegan and just gave them away any way becausethe gesture was so sweet (the cookies I am sure were too).

A couple of people came by with lemons from their trees or neighbors trees. One woman brought both Meyer lemons and Ponderosa lemons that are big and round and have a thick rind.

Can you tell which one is the Ponderosa Lemon?

Page and Margret came by with some offerings from their garden (actually I am not sure which garden things came from since they grow things all over, including a garden at Holy Innocents Church in Noe Valley, a rooftop garden where they live also in Noe Valley, and a garden in Stanford where they work). They brought one bunch of celery, a few carrot thinnings, some lettuce and arugula, and a bag of gigantic ponderosa lemons from a neighbor.
Page told me that the gleaning project he is organizing at Stanford is going ahead. Page teaches a course in sustainability there and has gotten interested in getting the fruit trees growing there (in the area where the faculty lives) picked by his students. Apparently they have identified 140 fruit trees and have them located with a GPS unit and have put them on a Google map. They are going to eventually harvest the trees and Page will bring the fruit in his truck to the stand.

I wanted to report that another reporter came by the stand who is doing a piece for KALW radio about farmer’s markets. He interviewed me for maybe five minutes and other people too. The popularity of local food growing continues. I just got a link to a four minute video made by students at City College about the farm stand and I have included it on the sidebar of this blog. My hope that what grows out of all this talk (especially on my part) is that we can find the energy and people with the time to grow more food so we don’t have to rely so much on the left-over’s from the farmers market (though it is itself a great way of gleaning organic relatively local food).

Every week I learn about some new cool local gardening event or project taking off. Here are two:

From an email:

“I just learned that the City of Lafayette formed a Sustainability Committee and that East Bay Municipal Utility District is allowing the City to utilize about 2 acres by the Lafayette Reservoir for their community garden sustainability project, which may interest you. The citizens there are very interested in this and you may find partnerships there with the many wealthier organizations in town. They are also building a gazillion dollar state of the art Library which will be completed I believe this year or early next year.”

From the permaculture list serve:

food forest for food first

Posted by: "wildseed christopher" wildheartgardens@yahoo.com wildheartgardens

Sun May 3, 2009 9:40 pm (PDT)

Who wants to help create a mini food forest at Food First?!
Our goal is to create a high profile permaculture garden that will be seen by hundreds of visitors who come to Food First from all parts of the world. The food produced on site will supplement the lunches that FF provides for its staff and interns. The installation will be only us volunteers so please come out and help if you have a few hours to spare over the weekend – It will be a lot of fun!
The plan:
We will remove much of the existing ornamental and invasive bushes and shrubs, create rainwater catchments, earthworks with swales and infiltration basins, spread a heavy layer of mulch, and plant a bunch of food producing plants, natives and insectaries.
Where:
398 60th St. at Colby (near the Oakland/Berkeley border)
For those of you unfamiliar with the organization, Food First is an amazing Non-Profit organization working to change the global food system. "The Institute for Food and Development Policy/Food First shapes how people think by analyzing the root causes of global hunger, poverty, and ecological degradation and developing solutions in partnership with movements working for social change." Check it out at http://www.foodfirst.org/
When:
May 8-10 (Fri, Sat, Sun) 10am -5pm
Come whatever day(s) you can for as long as you want!
Please let me know if you are interested in bringing this project to fruition so I can organize enough tools and materials.
Vegetarian lunch will be provided :)
Thanks,
Alex
510 717 1299

I find things like this are very exciting. Wish I could get involved in everything!

Farming Dharma

2009-04-27T06:18:00.001-07:00

I was feeling a bit of excitement when I came to the Free Farm Stand a little late today. I just arrived from Martin de Porres soup kitchen where I volunteer and had gotten the lucky chance to hear the Dalai Lama speak. Here is an article in the Chronicle about it: http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/n/a/2009/04/26/national/a200532D22.DTL&tsp=1. The thing that stood out in my mind is that he seemed to have a simple and clear message of compassion and respect for others (especially the poor) and other religions and faiths. And I was surprised how accessible he seemed, though I guess it took two years for this event to happen, it seemed amazing that such a celebrity would even visit a place like Martin's, and once he was there he was also surprisingly real and human. I do feel that he gave off a human glow and energy that truly spread joy and peace around him. I guess that comes from his commitment to "the promotion of human values such as compassion, forgiveness, tolerance, contentment and self-discipline".

I didn't take many pictures of the stand today, partly because I was not all there. I could use someone who can take good pictures to document the scene. Though one could argue that I have taken enough pictures already to get the idea of what is happening. Beautiful people and beautiful vegetables and fruit.

I just love the people who have been coming out and helping run the stand, which has left me free to talk to people and to work a little with people that want to garden while the stand is open. I got busy for a while working with my young friend Zeus who loves to garden, so we planted some scarlet runner beans. I unfortunately didn't get a chance to talk to everyone and I know some people came that I wanted to say hi to. Also, I keep meeting people that want to help. There is so much gardening to do and seedlings to propagate. I am hoping that I can help enlist some of the gardening energy that is out there so we can grow more of our own produce.

And that ties into this other thought. I would still like to get a good garden information booth set up that can help people with their garden questions and can encourage people to grow their own (in English and Spanish). We have been giving away a lot of plants, but it could be better if we gave out information on how to care for them and if we could set up a garden support network.

Well those are some random thoughts. We seem to be getting a lot of greens the last few weeks. Because I was so busy this weekend I didn't get a chance to harvest all the greens (mostly chard and kale) in the different gardens that are ready to pick. But we got so much from the farmers market there was no shortage of chard or arugula or lettuce. And we hit the jackpot with fava beans. At 18^th and Rhode Island we harvested 15 pounds of beans and then I got a box more of them from the farmers market. I wrote an update on the Potrero garden on the18^th and Rhode Island website. The ones we picked were larger pods with bigger beans. The ones from the farmers market were young and much smaller. A woman came by the stand and told me that the young favas could be covered with a light sprinkling of olive oil and a shake of salt and roasted in the oven in a pan (she might have also suggested garlic) and then eaten pod and all. I got excited with that idea because I have been having pretty good luck roasting other vegetables that way like cauliflower and asparagus. So I went home and tried it, but was a little disappointed. They were edible, but I didn't like the flavor all that much. I think others who have some immature fava beans should try this out and maybe add garlic.

People are still coming by the stand and making contributions. Two people brought lemons from their tree and another woman brought the most beautiful peppermint from her garden that I had to take a photo of it. A woman brought a nice bunch of chervil that she grew. It is an herb that is not as commonly grown that has a sweet licorice taste. Dave brought me some sad looking vegetable starts that came from Rainbow that they couldn't sell, but were still alive and I am sure will grow.

Perfect Peppermint in the top of the basket

Chervil

I am leaving town for three days starting Wednesday and won't be around gardening that much. When I get back I want to explore starting a garden in Bayview on the land I wrote about last week. The Esperanza Garden on Florida St. next to sell space had a potential setback. The land that was up for sale is now in escrow and the possible new owner has 45 days to come up with construction loans to build on the property and then we have 30 days to vacate. People are going ahead with planting and we think we can get in one crop before the time we have to leave (the potatoes may be ready to harvest by then). On May 9^th there is going to be an event in the garden with live music and some various workshops. Look on the sidebar for information about it when I get it.

1st Anniversary Report

2009-04-20T16:04:00.000-07:00

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.

Holy Week Farm Stand

2009-04-13T10:07:00.001-07:00

Every day is holy like every day is an unbirthday and we can celebrate and break bread together. On Sunday I was sitting in a synagogue listening to an Easter sermon next to a two week old baby and thinking about how perfect a thing she was.

When you think about it we are really blessed to have such a perfect world that at the same time is so imperfect.

And gardening is the perfect thing to be doing in these times. It makes you see the perfectness and patterns and helps you appreciate the miracle of it all.

The Free Farm Stand was pretty good this week though I felt like I was too busy and I didn't talk to all the wonderful people and friends that came by. It was a little like a hugfest and it included a kiss on the cheek from a curvy woman named 13 with an interesting piercing on her lip wearing a tight bunny suit . Ok that helped make my day as well as seeing my friend Harrison who she came with.

Piles of farm fresh organic produce and several pounds of lettuce from our gardens. What else is there to say? I was surprised that we got a lot of basil (two kinds) from the farmer's market; I wonder where that is grown so early in the year, probably greenhouse grown. Yeah greenhouses!

Several people came by with produce from their gardens which is the really exciting part to me! Pam Pierce who is one of the wisest gardeners around (and we are lucky to have her in San Francisco), brought by some surplus vegetables from her garden (really beautiful chard, red mustard greens, and leeks), other people brought lemons, and another woman brought some spearmint. I got to ask Pam some garden questions and she got me worried about late blight in tomatoes, which I haven't seen yet in any of the gardens I have worked in (as far as I know). I read her blog on a regular basis and there is always something I learn from it (http://goldengategarden.typepad.com/). Molly a gardener in Treat Commons came by with some delicious homemade organic strawberry jam that she made and I served it on matzoh. Sara brought the two biggest artichokes from San Francisco State (the garden that students planted there) and some greens too.

Tater Towers update

I just came up with the name tater towers and I am happy to report that most are doing their thing…green potato shoots breaking through the mulch and growing well so far (a few of the newer ones haven't sprouted, but the ones planted March 20^th are well on their way.

Tater Towers at !8th and Rhode Island planted March 13 a month ago

I have been adding mulch to the ones that you cover as they grow. I have just scored a lot more sprouting potatoes and want to plant more towers. I could use more wire mesh as I want to try some more lasagna style tater towers. I have talked to a number of people that are trying this out and I think this method is suddenly becoming very popular. Jim Bishop sent me a link to his blog Yards for Farms where he wrote about potato towers too http://yards4farms.blogspot.com/2009/03/potato-tower-part-2.html. I am still looking for someone to let me put a tower on their sidewalk garden. But if anyone has some odd sunny space even with concrete that wants to try this out and bring surplus potatoes to the stand let me know and I can help set you up. Maybe this Saturday we will plant some tater towers at Esperanza. By the way I am trying to grow these in various containers, including the terrible compost bins that SLUG used to distribute. They come in half and I have planted potatoes in the top half.

Just planted

Last week Allegra sent me an article about growing tomatoes planted upside down in some kind of commercial product called the topsy turvy. That caught my interest and I googled growing tomatoes upside down and found that there is a lot written on the subject. One of the advantages of growing tomatoes this way is that you can grow them where you don't have space otherwise just like we do with the tater towers. Check out this photo from http://www.minifarmhomestead.com/gardening/tomatopictures.htm (they have other pictures too).

Here are some photos of a vegetable tower from Kevin who with Starhawk built it with a class they were teaching.

I met a woman yesterday at the stand that grows tomatoes in hanging pots which is almost the same thing. Anyway tomorrow I want to try it out with the Jamestown kids and I will report back on the how we did it. With all these space saving methods garden soil and mulch is needed and it would be nice if we could have free neighborhood resource centers where people could pick up these things. The centers could be stocked with all the free stuff around for gardens off of places like freecycle or craigslist or stables. I am not a big advocate of going out and buying soil and manure unless one has no other easy option.

Esperanza Sustainability Center update

On Saturday I helped dig some beds in the peace mandala at the new garden next to CELL space on Florida at 19^th Street. Earlier in the week I attended a meeting about the garden and what people's visions are. Jonathan actually got a written agreement from the owner to use the land for free until it is sold.

I am not sure how much time I have to contribute to this project though it is very enticing for me to get sucked in. They have a nice space that can be transformed into a beautiful garden and education center (and they are also building a greenhouse). I am trying to be open to other ways of doing things and when the idea of having a business component to the project came up I tried to just listen rather than give my standard do it free rap. I guess they plan on buying insurance because of the arrangement with the owner and they will have other costs like water and some materials. There idea is to have workshops and other things which will cost money, but that no one will be turned away for lack of funds and they are going to go light on bugging people to pay…like maybe a contribution box in the corner. If they did that I could hardly object to capitalism light. There is a new movement now to bring back barter and make it fashionable again (the Time Bank is an example) and I am still uncomfortable with that compared to just trusting the universe to keep you going. If I wind up teaching workshops there I am going to give this more thought and whether I would be stretching my ideals too much by have a fee (though no one would be turned away or made to feel guilty). It sounds like Saturdays there will be ongoing work happening there.

Common Vision Tree Planting Report

On Friday afternoon at 18th and Rhode Island Common Vision people showed up to plant a apple/pear tree fence. They brought 21 donated trees and they dug holes and planted them at a 45 degre angle. The idea is that they will grow together and make a fence or hedge of fruiting trees. The event reminded me of going to a Rainbow gathering. A few of the people I talked to were semi-nomadic and had no one place they lived. There all seemed like rainbow people and I liked there energy and idealism. And they plant fruit trees like a band of Johnny aAppleseeds. From February through May they travel in their buses planting trees in schools and other places. They brought their drums and made some nice sounds and there was also portable mural painting and popcorn. It was a fun and inspiring day.

The Free Farm Stand got in the news last week after Africa Jones came around and interviewed us for Free Speech Radio News for a radio show on growing food in the city. Again I am trying something new here and have been reluctantly accepting interviews (I mostly like to remain anonymous since the project speaks for itself). You can listen to the interview by scrolling way down the right sidebar and clicking on the play button. I could really use some technical web help here because the way I got this on the page took some effort and I would rather have an audio player that was smaller and less of an advertisement.

Dreaming of an Urban Kibbutz

2009-04-06T10:12:00.001-07:00

This week I have enjoyed the time I have been able to stay at home and get my backyard garden in shape. It is actually going rather slowly and I could use more help. I have been daydreaming of an Urban Kibbutz Farm or a House of Hospitality with an attached farm where a people live together and have a service project of growing food to give away and taking in seekers. I have been feeling overwhelmed trying to be a mobile gardener and growing food in different gardens, even though they are within blocks of each other. I have been wondering if I might be stretching myself too thin by getting involved in the Esperanza Sustainability Center (see last blog and sidebar for link) and managing the new greenhouse they are building. The funny thing is it seems once I start thinking about something these days things start to happen. I was thinking of how we need shelves for the greenhouse and on Saturday I accidentally ran into an estate sale where an 85 year old man used to live who was an avid gardener. The man running the sale said I could have whatever I wanted in the backyard for free, so not only did I get a lot of outdoor plant shelves from the deck, but a lot of large pots and other garden related things, including some greenhouse plastic (a step backward in some ways for getting my backyard in shape).

Anyway, I am still pondering all these wondrous things happening in the universe around me and trying to figure out how to simplify my life a bit so I don't get burnt out.

I was told not to expect much produce from the farmer's markets this week, but that turned out wrong (the table was filled with greens, artichokes, a few beets, and big purple cabbages that we needed to cut up). I harvested a lot of vegetables from our gardens thinking that would be all I had. The Secret Garden gave us over two pounds of baby lettuce mix and a bag of greens (mostly chard). I also harvested a lot of snap peas that the kids had planted.

While there on Saturday I noticed that the zucchini we planted on Tuesday had got totally eaten and were gone! But the potato towers have potatoes that are growing well and the newer ones haven't sprouted yet. Treat Commons had snow peas and some greens, chard and tree collards and some kale. My backyard garden is more of a nursery these days and that is where a lot of my time has been going, trying to raise a lot of starts. I am just starting to get some things in the ground (I installed three potato towers) and planted some seedlings from Jonathan.

The SF Glean team scored again this week with Jonathan and Ashly picking 36lbs of meyer lemons from one tree in Noe Valley. Two other neighbors came by with lemons they picked from their trees. Someone else brought some nice oregano from their garden and Steve and Shelly brought some rosemary. Fresh herbs are so easy to grow and they often produce more than we can use, so it is a great thing to share. We really can get free from having to buy some store bought herbs like rosemary, oregano, thyme, etc.

I must admit that the Farm Stand gets a bit crazy busy at times with all the people showing up especially at the beginning. I am trying hard to make it a fun and mellow scene, which for the most part it is. We have a great crew of volunteers which helps, though we are still in need of some people to help run the garden advice and plant give away table. A lot of people are showing up not just for the produce, but to check out the garden and I love talking to people and answering their garden questions.

Alvin came by with a big bag of sprouting potatoes that he got cooking with Food Not Bombs. I am still excited about growing potatoes and am looking for a sidewalk garden to try growing potatoes on. When I was putting things away at the end of the day, I noticed someone had brought by some pretty baskets that we can use for the stand. I feel blessed that there is such good energy around and it feels like we can transform things if we try.

Here are some events coming up that are pretty inspiring. Next Friday April 10^th at 4pm Common Vision (http://www.commonvision.org/ is going to be planting an apple/pear fence at 18^th and Rhode Island Sts. There will be drumming and tree planting and tree planting education. Another event later in the month is the Bay Friendly Garden Tour happening Sunday April 26 in the east bay. I love visiting other gardens as a way to get ideas and get inspired and this self-guided tour is free (and there are some gardens selling interesting seedlings), but you have to register online by April 16. Go here to check it out and register http://stopwaste.org/home/index.asp?page=617 .

Hecka Sweet Oranges and People

2009-03-30T09:19:00.001-07:00

Towards the end of April of this month we will have the 1^st year anniversary of the opening of the Free Farm Stand and I am starting to look back and evaluate how things have gone so far. I want to see what I have learned and if there are any changes I should be making in what I am doing.

This Saturday I had a mini-realization that I can't always count of getting free left over produce from the farmers market (this week there was very little for some reason and there will be little next week too). I was wondering as the economy gets worse, will there be less free food to hand out? I was starting to get a little anxious like I did when I first started the stand that I wouldn't have much to give out to all the people showing up these days. Then I thought in reality I can only grow so much food (unless I somehow manifest a small farm in the city...see the end of this article) and other people will only have small amounts of extra produce from their gardens that they can contribute. I reminded myself that I am not trying to run a food program exactly, but to be part of the movement of people encouraging local food growing and sharing (though I must admit I have that tendency to want to do serve large numbers of hungry people). One thing I am able to produce a lot of (though it takes some work) are vegetable starts or seedlings. Thinking this I went into greenhouse day dreaming mode. More on where that led me later on.

The Free Farm Stand was pretty good this week despite the lack of huge amounts of farmer's market booty. There was definitely a lot of people and a great feeling of community. It was such a sunny day everyone was out in the park and the garden got a lot of visitors and helpers. Especially the kids were really into watering the plants. There was lots of chit chat everywhere. One woman who spoke only Spanish requested some chayote leaves to cook with. Rebekah was around and spoke to her in Spanish and got the recipe how to use the leaves for a kind of mush she makes with them. Here is the recipe:

Chile Atol....( a thick kind of porridge spiced with chiles)

Boil whole ears of corn until tender

In a separate bowl mix corn flour with water gently stir it into simmering corn stirring constantly so it doesn't stick.

Meanwhile in a blender mix together

4 or 5 tender chayote or flor de calabaza leaves

5 or 6 epazote leaves(she says to not use too many because they can have an overpowering flavor)

1-3 green serrano chiles(depending on how much spice you like)

salt

pour this into the porridge mixture and simmer awhile constantly stirring.

I have a new friend and garden apprentice I mentioned before, a ten year old boy name Zeus who came and helped potting up seedlings to give away. He is filled with millions of questions and I had a hard time answering them all. He is so enthusiastic about gardening and it is very wonderful to see. His family gave us two bird houses they had built and some carrot seed.

The table had some beautiful chard and greens from mostly the secret garden and a handful of herbs, some red celery stalks, and a handful of snap peas. Nosrat brought by a huge amount of herbs from his garden including fresh sage. It is nice to use fresh herbs in our cooking and for a lot of us it is simple laziness that we open jars to get our flavor instead of picking it from a kitchen garden, either from a backyard, community garden, or windowsill.

There was a lot of baby romaine and radicchio from the farmer's market. I must admit I have a prejudice against radicchio and if anyone out there that can turn me around on this with some fabulous way of using it I would love it (I am not much into bitters I guess). We also had a lot of bread that people like.

I was most excited by the fruit on the table. We had 33lbs of navel oranges picked from a local tree that was hecka sweet and juicy. It was the first big harvest of the year by SF Glean (see web site link on the sidebar, though the site doesn't have a lot of information on it now). Jonathan took the list of fruit trees that needed researching and lucked out in meeting the owner of the trees. He got permission to harvest the trees and we might get more in a the following weeks.

Margaret (also on the gleaning team) came by with some beautiful lemons she picked from Holy Innocents Church and a little sign that explained where they came from which was a nice touch. Steve brought not only lots of chard seeds from his dad's garden in Sonoma County, but also a bag of big Meyer lemons.

I tried this week to put more attention into the plant giveaway table. We had a lot of tomato seedlings to give away plus cilantro and chives, plus a few miscellaneous plants like rhubarb and hummingbird sage. A friend brought over a collection of the healthiest looking tomato starts she had grown to share and the varieties were ones that I didn't have. Our helpers talked to everyone that took plants to make sure they know how to grow it and to told them about the different we had varieties and other related information. We also put in a word about donating any surplus they grow to the stand. If we can get it together for next week we would like to have a flier in English and Spanish how to take care of the plant and grow it. We will start with tomatoes.

There was so much happening this weekend with many gardening events everywhere across town. On Friday we had a good workday at 18^th and Rhode Island. Our small crew built two trellises for tomatoes and planted 12 kinds of cherry tomatoes, mostly heirlooms. We also built one more potato tower. After that, Page and I went to the Secret Garden and planted three more towers. The potatoes are starting to grow in many of the towers we have planted (I think we have about 14 towers now planted in different places). On Saturday I heard the PDC class planted more stuff on the hill.

On Friday evening I got an email from my friend Jonathan who was one of the people who started CELL space who has started cleaning up the vacant lot next to CELL on Florida and is resurrecting the garden that was there a few years ago. His project is called the Esperanza Sustainability Center and he seems to want to do everything you have ever heard of there in terms of sustainability, including a community garden (not divided into plots but to give to the food to those who garden and maybe to sell some to local restaurants), a nursery for "Propagation of edible fruit trees, native trees, medicinals and other plant starts for Urban Dissemination" (including constructing a quick dome greenhouse), workshops, and a performance stage. I went there on Saturday and there was a big 20yd pile of Bay View Greenwaste Management fine woodchip compost piled on the sidewalk. Sound familiar? It was sheet mulching day and I went off to help get a bale of cardboard from Whole Foods (while there the FARM project people that I wrote about last week was there doing the same thing (stuffing cardboard into their van for sheet mulching). When we got back, there were a whole lot of new people that I have never met ready to move cardboard and mulch. Two volunteers went off with me to pick up a load of horse manure and when I got back the place was hopping with energy and sweat. I stuck around for a while shoveling wood chips and then I took off to check out the sight at Hooper Street where the CCA students were sheet mulching the long strip of land next to their college building.

I found the scene pretty inspiring and like I wrote to Robyn one of the organizers, to see a wasted piece of land being transformed like that is so inspiring to me. They actually got permission from DPW to do what they were doing.

I just got word of a man in San Jose that has access to an acre of land in the middle of downtown that is flood plain and can't be built on. He wants to grow food to give away, convinced we will have 18-22% unemployment soon. His project is a week old and says he needs all the help he can get. I wish san Jose was a little closer to the city.

It’s All Good to the Core

2009-03-23T07:54:00.001-07:00

What a beautiful day it turned out to be at the Free Farm Stand, and I was thinking it was going to rain. It was another day that we were loaded up with beautiful vegetables and bread. I must admit I was feeling pretty good about myself that I had grown so much lettuce mix in both gardens (Treat Commons and the Secret Garden). I didn't weigh the mix, but it was probably over 2lbs. I also felt good that I harvested a lot of lettuces that were growing in between the fava beans planted at 18^th and Rhode island. I just discovered them by accident before I left on Friday. What happened is that I noticed one of the red chard plants started to grow bigger and it was being shaded by the fava beans so I decided to cut the fava beans growing around the chard. That is when I saw all these lettuces and other chard plants growing hidden among the fava bean plants.

I won't write a lot about the Free Farm Stand this week. The table was filled with mostly wonderful vegetables left over from the farmers markets on Saturday. There were a few boxes of the most beautiful artichokes. I keep thinking when will people start growing artichokes in their newly created sidewalk gardens (and or potato towers). Caleb brought a beautiful basket of arugula and bouquets of herbs that his friend grew and they assembled. This to me is what the stand is all about, small class act gestures of sharing by friends and neighbors. And Caleb was there to give his gift away in person and could talk to everyone about it. These actions turn the world around and make my heart soar! Talk about class acts. A friend from church gave me a box of lemon and orange marmalade from her trees in the east bay that she made too much of (it is easy since our trees are so productive). It also was wonderful, from the wrapping of the jam box with a bright red Japanese cloth, the labeling of the jars, to the delicious taste of the marmalade. I gave people a taste on bread and people loved it (I also gave jars of it away). This is a great example of what to do with oranges that may be too sour to eat, like the tree down the street that I heard about that needs gleaning, but the owner says they don't taste good. We should give him a taste of her marmalade. I also brought a jar of carob powder and pods from a local tree that I helped plant years ago, and gave people a taste of that. More on the carob pods below. I picked a few lemons from my neighbor's tree and kept thinking there must be more lemons ready to pick now somewhere. Sam came later in the day just when we were running low on produce and brought some miscellaneous vegetables that a friend grew. I was busy giving out food because we were a bit short on volunteers and I wasn't able to set up the "garden advice and plant give away table", but later when it slowed down I was able to bring out some seedlings.

I actually started writing this blog entry early Sunday morning before the Free Farm Stand opened just to catch up on all that has happened this past week. I remember friends of mine saying something like that when the hot issue of the day gets written up in Time magazine it time to move on to new things. At that time it was communal living we were talking about. Now it is local food and going beyond eating organic which is now a weakened concept, and the focus is on sustainable local agriculture.

This week all the big papers have spread the news about the Obama family digging up some lawn at the White House and planting a vegetable garden. This is a victory for us local food activists and gardeners who have been involved in signing petitions to the Washington elites to get them to do this,, and to push Washington to adopt a more sane agriculture policy. This morning I learned from a fabulous article in the New York Times (called Is a Food Revolution in Season?
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/03/22/business/22food.html?partner=rss&emc=rss) that "In mid-February, Tom Vilsack, the new secretary of agriculture, took a jackhammer to a patch of pavement outside his headquarters to create his own organic "people's garden."

All this is good and exciting as local organic sustainable food because moves slowly from being the hip thing on the block to more mainstream, just like tofu can be found in supermarkets across the country. But our job as pioneers is to move on to the next revolution and to remain real. We have to get beyond the talk and move into quiet bold action. We have to continue to work for the poor and disenfranchised and make sure our heads don't get swollen with all this attention on what we are doing. We don't need super stars of the local food movement (I write this largely for myself: thinking about yesterday when a friend of mine was filming a documentary for a class he is taking at City College. I gave him the go ahead, hoping that he learns how to capture the real news that was happening at the stand, which wasn't all about me). We need make to meaningful changes in the communities we live in on a fruit tree roots level. We need to create art and write poems that shake the walls of the current ways we do things, and what a better time to do it than when the system seems to be sinking.

Yesterday I swung by the 18^th and Rhode Island site where the new PDC course was taking place (Permaculture Design Course). It was real encouraging to see so many people who joined this class and have an interest in learning how to build sustainable cities. There seemed to be about 25 people there in the slight drizzle learning about sheet mulching. And it was funny to see that I knew a lot of these people and have worked with them in connection to the Free Farm Stand. People are paying $500-$600 to commit to 100 hours of time learning permaculture with an urban focus, which the teachers who started the class say is really fair and half the price of other similar classes (which it is). The teachers say are not trying to make money, but to get more permaculture designers working in San Francisco to make a better city.

My dream and I know Kevin (one of the teachers of the course) shares this vision that eventually these classes will be free. I would say why not now? I would like to see the classes being more like the sharing of skills like the Free Skool movement in Santa Cruz. I know there are costs and such that need to be met, but if we are designers of a new society can't we come up with a different design than the current capitalist model? John Lennon said "I may be a dreamer, but I am not the only one." I also share David and Kevin's goal of getting more trained people with the skills to transform our neighborhoods into more sustainable places to live, which includes growing more gardens and fruit trees that feed us. The question or challenge is how to get these people that are enthusiastic that are taking these courses to continue the work after the classes are over. I am still working on trying to get fruit trees planted in my park which was a PDC project from last year.

The other day I was writing to my friend Nicole and I think I was being a bit too critical of some people I was working with. She pointed out to me a slightly different perspective to things, that people were just trying to do the best they could and saw things differently than me. I appreciated her saying that to me as I need to be reminded not to be so judgmental all the time. "It is all good" is my current mantra right now.

On Friday we had a small turnout, but everyone who came by was really helpful and we got a lot done. We planted more strawberries first. Then we finished the potato tower we started last week and worked on two more. We finished building one more tower using the lasagna layering method and started one where we will cover the potato plant as it grows. I brought some old wet straw that we used and mixed it in with a little bit of soil and a lot of composted woodchips and clippings and a smaller amount of older manure (also we added some cut up green fava bean stalks and leaves.). On Saturday apparently one of the potato towers started leaning over and Ryan pushed it back up an stabilized it. Maybe we didn't level the ground enough or perhaps it is unstable because it is sitting on a hill of sheet mulch which is somewhat springy.

Two types of potato towers

On Friday night I attended a local Forage Feast that was free (kind of like a forage pot luck). It was a sweet event and I enjoyed seeing friends and meeting some new people. I brought a camera, but I think I got a bit too tipsy on the nettle beer or was it the honey wine, and didn't get into being the role of an investigative journalist. There were some great vegan dishes that people made, including some great bread stuffing made with local herbs, some kind of ollalaberry crisp made with some local (foraged?) ingredients, a great creamy nettle dip, and an artistic and surprisingly flavorful miner's lettuce salad…just the handsome round miner's lettuce leaves in a light vinaigrette. Just seeing the salad made me want to eat it and this was before I got high. The nettle beer was subtle and delicious, made with nettle teas, sugar, and bread yeast (I was told you can also use champagne yeast). There were also some nice teas and lemon aid made with local ingredients. One exception, the rosemary tea with mint that I had high hopes for because of all the rosemary around, was a bit too intense for me.

I brought carob pods from down the street and some homemade carob powder. I also made some little sweet balls out of dried chestnuts from also down the street (boiled and ground up), walnuts from my back yard, and carob powder. I told people at the Free Farm Stand that I would explain to people how I made the powder from the pods here. I got my information on how to do this from the internet with my own modifications.

First I made sure all the pods were clean and free from dirt or not rotted, I pulled some out that I had collected that looked a bit funky. The pods are pretty tough and leathery and have seeds in them that you need to remove (I read that the seeds could be ground up and used to make a vegetable gum). To make it easy to remove the seeds I used a pressure cooker and steam cooked the pods for about six minutes. Then it was not too hard to take a sharp pointed knife and cut the pods lengthwise to open them and remove the tiny black seeds. Then I partially chopped up the pods with a coffee grinder (a food processor would also work). I turned on the oven to the lowest temperature (around 200- 250 degrees) and slightly roasted the pods for about ten to fifteen minutes. I ground up the roasted pods in the coffee grinder and sifted the ground up pods with a very fine mesh strainer. It doesn't come out quite like powder, but is pretty fine.

The pods can be eaten raw but that is sort of a chore because they are so chewy. Besides the local sustainable agriculture movement going on, foraging has become a popular thing too. I am not sure if picking a tree that I planted counts as true foraging, but it is nice to eat the things growing around us if they taste ok and especially f they are nutritional. It is a bit of work though with carob pods.

No Farmers No Food

2009-03-16T10:18:00.001-07:00

This week's blog title comes from a bumper sticker someone gave us this Sunday. It comes from a group in the Midwest that is "Fighting to keep family farms on their land". I was thinking that all the foreclosures happening everywhere are like the family farms disappearing. My friend Christian came by and told me he is working with Homes not Jails again and that they plan on squatting some of these foreclosed properties. Apparently it is easier than ever now finding the properties, there are lists online and you can even see the inside of the house. Maybe they describe the outside land around the house too and whether it has fruit trees or any landscaping. Some of these squatters should consider "Digger style" digging up the vacant lawns and yards around these foreclosed houses, and planting gardens and fruit trees. Bring back the family farms to our cities and suburbs.

Of all the gardening activities I have been involved with this past week, I think I have enjoyed working most in my backyard garden, propagating plants and slowly getting the garden in shape, ready for a spring planting. It feels meditative just being an urban farmer in my back forty and slowing down a bit…not that I have quite done that yet. Do other people feel like I do that there is so much going on these days around local food growing and other "green" activities? I get so sucked into it and have a hard time not wanting to get involved in it all. Then I get overwhelmed and have a hard time staying grounded.

Thy took so many beautiful photos of the great spread of vegetables on the table this week. I would prefer it if it was all food that we grew ourselves as neighbors, but it is free, fresh, pretty much local within a 100 miles, and organically, sustainably grown. It is a bit harder to capture photos of the colorful people that come every week, we don't want to make people feel uncomfortable or feel like they are going to a camera shoot. I think the group of people that show up every week is truly what makes the event wonderful...a place where neighbors can gather and hang out with their community.

We really did have lovely produce this week…artichokes, leeks, shelling peas, so many greens, especially chard (3 cases), carrots, turnips, herbs, young garlic. From our gardens I harvested 2 1/2lbs of baby lettuce and 2 1/2lbs of greens including a big bunch of Oriental spinach. It's wild that I can now guess what the farmer's market will have when I harvest what we have been growing…it is the same kind of vegetables. Like right now the chard growing in our gardens is so handsome and perfect, free of all signs of leaf miner damage. I also found one Jalapeño pepper on a plant that has become perennial. Three people came by with Meyer lemons they harvested. That was a special treat. It was a busy cloudy day and as usual when we were ready to go home there was very little left but a sack of turnips and some rosemary.

During part of the Free Farm Stand I took off to go to a meeting in the park with people who are interested in SF Glean, the new fruit harvesting project we have started. Some new people came who were not at the first meeting and we talked about the project and came up with some next steps we can take to move the project forward. And on the plant table we had flyers on the table to alert us of any fruit trees in the neighborhood that may need picking. We also gave away strawberries and cilantro and edible chrysanthemum starts.

Like I said there are so may many garden related activities happening now and I keep meeting new people that inspire me in different ways. Zeus is a young boy about 10 I am guessing who started coming to the farm stand last week who loves to garden. I have met a number of kids recently who love gardening too, but Zeus is super enthusiastic and now I have met his whole family, his dad, sister, and mom. He has been really helpful, last week planting strawberries and this week potting up seedlings and putting them on the plant give-away table. I love sharing with him little things about plants and he just soaks it all up.

On Tuesday the kids from the Jamestown Center came by Treat Commons and they learned about transplanting seedlings. We made paper pots and transplanted tomato seedlings into them. We now have over 200 tomato seedlings that need to grow a few weeks before we can give them away. And we still have a lot more seedlings that need potting up. We need more six packs, small 2" or cup size pots, or trays to put seedlings in.

The Friday workday at 18^th and Rhode Island was very productive. We put in more strawberries, some comfrey was planted and other seedlings, and we got a real good lesson in building potato towers from Kevin. We built the tower using the all at once or lasagna layering method. Kevin taught us some things about growing potatoes in towers that resonated with what I already knew about growing potatoes in the ground or from my observation of them volunteering in my garden. In particular they like to grow in soil that has a lot of not completely finished compost in it, made of partially composted leaves or straw. He thinks that for towers you need a fluffier material with more air spaces to make the layers less dense and to prevent compacting do to the weight of the piles. I have been using just composted wood chips which are black and rich, but perhaps too dense. On Friday we didn't have all the ideal materials to fill the tower we started, so this week I am going to bring some rotted straw and mix it in with the composted chips and plant material. We used all the fava bean plants that we cut down when we planted the strawberries and some rotted manure because that is what we had. Here is how we made the layers: Sprinkle a couple of inches of fine potting soil on the ground (lay down cardboard if doing it on concrete). Put nine potatoes on top of the soil (we cut the big sprouting ones and usually we would let them heal first before planting them).The small whole sprouting ones we just laid down on the soil. On top of that we put some chopped up fava bean leaves and plants (ideally they would be partially composted). A minimum of 5"-6" of mulch goes on top of that (we used some composted mulch and manure and soil that we used for planting the strawberries…on one layer we used just manure that was lightweight with a lot of composted sawdust and straw bedding material in it instead of mulch). Then we repeated those layers.

Kevin and I share the same crazy dream of seeing these towers of potatoes planted on sidewalks that have had their concrete pulled up (maybe his vision is to see them just sitting on the concrete sidewalks, but I like the water going into the soil). Anyone out there who wants to try this on their sidewalk?

I also met Robyn at the site when I first got there in the morning. She is a student at the California College of the Arts at Eighth St.and 16^th St. She is part of a group of students that have formed a group called FARM (The Future Action Reclamation Mob) who are planning on dealing with the toxic strip of land outside their school. It is a long 66ft by about 8ft long strip of mostly shady land they want to tackle.

They plan to detoxify the soil which is high in lead and build raised beds and plant food for the hungry. They are going to use permaculture techniques and they are not getting permission from the city to do this, using non-violent direct actions instead. Their web site is http://www.thinkdiscussact.org/farm/index.html. Depending on how much sun they actually get maybe they should be planting potato towers. Anyway I was tickled to meet her and I just love these people that want to make our world a little more just and beautiful. I think they are having an action Saturday March 28 if you want to join them in their fun.

I just got an email from my friend Joanna with whom I gardened with over a year ago at the All in Common Community Garden. She has been farming last year in Nevada City and wrote a beautiful article in Poor Magazine (http://www.poormagazine.org/index.cfm?L1=news&story=2184&pg=1) about her experience there as an intern. But it is also a rallying call for us all to take up farming and to grow food in our backyards . Here are a couple of snippets that I love "Every person, child, mother, father, sister should have the opportunity to experience life on a farm. The daily routine; getting up with the sun, feeding the chickens, watering the plants, playing in the dirt, weeding, and weeding, the repetition, and meditation. Shoveling compost, preparing beds, transplanting and fertilizing. Watching as seeds germinate and take root...In the Bay Area, with so much talk about local foods and green products we have to actually start living in a radically different way. As Frank Cook says, it's not about food miles, but food feet. We have to eat from our backyards. Let's celebrate the seasons, the harvests and moon cycles. Demand that all communities have farmer's markets- farm stands, and gardens. What's the point in elitist style clubs that only talk about organics for the people who can afford it. Every home needs a space to grow herbs and roots, tomatoes, and lettuce. The sidewalks could be turned into a farm." I can see that not everyone may want to live on a farm; some of us may be called to beautify the planet in other ways, like with art and music. We need that nourishment just as much. But I agree with Joanna that we can all still plant something somewhere and take care of it. That we need that connectedness to the soil.

Pastures of Plenty

2009-03-09T12:25:00.001-07:00

This past Sunday was the first Free Farm Stand we have had with no rain in several weeks and the park was filled with people enjoying the sun. We had so much food (more than I could fit on my wagon), so I had to make two trips moving it to the park from my house. By 2:30pm we had given out almost all the produce and bread, and by the time we were all packed up and ready to leave there was absolutely nothing left (a couple came and took what little there was, and they seemed to really appreciate the small bag of greens and the few small pumpkins we had left).

The day was extra busy and crowded with the garden work day happening at the same time. Kids were planting strawberries and adults were weeding and distributing mulch throughout the garden.

On Friday we had a great turnout for our workday at 18^th and Rhode Island garden. I was a bit concerned that we were not going to move all the mulch we had gotten from Bay View Green Waste Management (20 cubic yards!). I was wrong to worry because it was all spread out at the end of the day. Here is how we sheet mulched the entire rocky hill: We had 9 energetic volunteers who showed up. They moved two tons of cardboard and spread it over the remaining bare earth where ivy, oxalis, and fennel grew. The cardboard was watered down. There was a pile of mushroom blocks from Far West Fungi in the garden when I arrived. The blocks were crumbled up and then spread over the cardboard and mulch. The mushrooms will help break down the mulch. We also had some aged horse manure that was spread at the same time over the cardboard. Then the mulch, ground up wood chips and brush that has been ground up really fine, was dumped on top of the cardboard.

This Friday we will be ready to build and plant potato towers and some sunchokes. We also have more strawberries to plant and carrots.

Tuesday we were rained out and I didn't get to garden with the Jamestown kids in the Secret Garden. On Saturday there was a small cleanup day there and we got rid of a lot of garbage and took down the play structure to make room for more planting. This Tuesday we will plant a lettuce lawn and some kale and other greens, and maybe another potato tower.

My big goal this week is to pot up all the tomato seedlings we have started and hopefully plant more seeds. I love growing seedlings. We have the goal of helping our neighbors start their own gardens if they have room and seeing more food being grown everywhere there is sunny space to plant. We are promoting the idea of sharing the surplus produce and eventually having our neighborhood being a true Pasture of Plenty as Woody Guthrie wrote in a song. A neighborhood that is known for the food it grows, isn't that a trippy idea? The famous Mission grown tomato or apricot… Propagating lots of seedlings (and other edible plants) and distributing them for free is part of the dream. Recently someone sent me a link for a interesting project in Portland http://www.eatyouryard.com/services/plant-starts/ that has a similar vision, though they charge for their services, a CSA growing starts rather than food. What we need are some people to help me grow starts to give away at the Free Farm Stand and to neighbors that are planting gardens. I can teach people the basics of planting and growing starts, and what I need are people with some sunny space to put a cold frame or shelf (or greenhouse) and some motherly care to grow the starts until they are ready to give out.

Along this same train of thought, I recently rejoined the Seed Savers Exchange (http://www.seedsavers.org) and their newest catalog arrived in the mail. I now have access to seeds of thousands of heirloom vegetables. I am excited just reading about all the different kales we can try growing or tomatoes and then we can save the seed for the ones we like. I also got a copy of a book that Kevin highly recommended called Cornucopia II: A Source Book of Edible Plants by Stephen Facciola. It says in the introduction of this book that “There are approximately fifteen thousand plants recorded in literature as having been used as food by man. One hundred and fifty or more of these have been cultivated on a commercial scale…Yet today, most of the world is fed by approximately twenty crops…” The author is making the point that we should be utilize more of the food crops available. Kevin told me the other day he is excited because he finally found a source for a perennial broccoli he has been looking for forever and he wants to share some seed with me when he gets it. This is really what makes growing our own food so much fun and valuable. And it all starts with some form of propagation, planting seeds and growing starts or grafting or rooting cuttings.

The Invisible Gardener

2009-03-02T09:36:00.001-08:00

There is an invisible gardener tending his/her garden which we are all a part of. I am so excited right now with the love that is planted in this garden and that with a little tending and care is growing so abundantly. And this crop is available to all to harvest for free.

To speak more plainly this is almost like the summer of love cycling around again. What is cool is I keep meeting people whose hearts and ideals are very beautiful and they are doing such great work to make their dreams come true.

Jonathan is one man that I have just become friends with who really blows me away. He works at the Pe'ah Garden in Colma (http://www.emanuelsf.org/events_gi_peah.htm). Here is what their website says: By growing food for those in need at our cemetery in Colma, Congregation Emanu-El members perform the mitzvah of feeding the hungry. "Our garden name, Pe'ah (corners), derives from Leviticus 19, which commands us to not harvest the corners of the field but to leave them for the poor and the stranger…Our harvest is donated to the San Francisco Food Bank." He recently has gotten involved with SFglean and has already hit the streets, flyers in hand, looking for neglected fruit trees that need picking. I actually got the title of this blog from the movie he made about their garden project.

The Free Farm Stand this week was also a love fest in the rain. Three people came up to me to tell me how much they appreciated the produce, that it made a big difference in their lives. I also got a number of sincere hugs from people that felt the same joy I was feeling. It was raining, not hard, during the entire farm stand, but I swear there was an incredible sunshine from most everyone that came by. I can't really explain it, but I think I felt so blessed to have such a great crew of friends to work with and people to serve.

The produce on the table was doing its part to send out a bunch of vegetable love to those who came by. I had the biggest amount of salad mix that I picked from two gardens (the Secret Garden and Treat Commons). Three people from San Francisco State helped me cut the salad mix and some greens and we were all impressed with how much food we got from such a small space. The lettuce lawns are producing a lot of salad right now. We also had more fava bean leaves from 18^th and Rhode Island. I tried stir frying some with olive oil and garlic and they are a lot like spinach…maybe a bit fibrous or chewy. But very tasty. Steve and his friend (I am having a senior moment and am forgetting her name) from Potrero del Sol brought some various herbs from their garden plot and more tree collard cuttings for me to root. Tom came down from Santa Rosa with two crates full of the most beautiful Meyer lemons. The farmer's market leftovers included young onions, turnips, arugula, cilantro, stir fry mix, fennel, radicchio, small Savoy cabbages, leeks, small cauliflower, and various herbs. We had a lot of bread too and almost all the food was given away.

On Tuesday night Jenny and I went over to San Francisco State and talked to the Eco Students club about the Free Farm Stand. I wound up getting a list of 14 students that want to volunteer sometime with the stand. Then the fun started on Friday when we had a great work day at 18^th and Rhode Island. I enjoyed working with everyone who showed up. We got the "ivy hill" shaped and ready to sheet mulch next Friday. We also, cleaned up our storage area and now have various piles of manure, compost, mulch, and soil all stacked up under a tarp. Things are looking good. We also planted two varieties of short day or June bearing strawberries (Camarosa and Chandler).

'ivy hill" ready for sheet mulching next Friday workday

organic materials for making potato towers

some of the great crew on Friday

On Saturday I had three people who helped me plant seeds. The cold frame is full and I am ready to pot up seedlings to make room for the new seeds that will sprout soon.

SF Glean has a redesigned web page (http://sfglean.org/) and yesterday Page and Margaret walked around our neighborhood with flyers and looked for fruit trees that needed harvesting. Another project to get excited about.