Land Lovers

The Free Farm is gearing up for a large harvest of summer squash as we have harvested almost everything else. We also have lots of potatoes, tomatoes, peppers, basil, lettuce, and marigolds planted. We can almost go on auto-pilot so we can concentrate on figuring out our future.  Though we are making more compost every week...we may have to move our soil when we leave.

Beautiful people continue to stream through our farm. Two people visited recently.who haven't been around for awhile  but have been core people in starting our project and I love them a lot.

Griff stopped by visiting from Portland and he says he wants to attend a celebration party we are planing. (I am thinking it should be a celebration and work party).

Two land lovers

 Here is Pancho and Emmanuel now living in Fruitvale in Casa de Paz where they among other things run a Free Farm Stand on Sundays. Visiting with friends Juan and his sister from the part of the planet called Mexico.

Pancho and a volunteer standing in front of the same tree 3 years ago. Griff couldn't believe how fast our trees are growing and many have fruit this year

 

 a new visitor in the garden I discovered living under the mulberry tree
anyone know this flower?

People may want to know what the plans are for the site we are on and what the developer has to do to get the project approved. Here is the Preliminary Project Assessment (PPA) put out by the Planning Department: the plan. It is interesting that one of the first things that the Planning Dept. says is that the "property is currently vacant". Is that true?

We are moving ahead exploring all options and I believe there will be good work for us to do in the future. Already we have heard from two groups wanting help putting in a rooftop garden and another wanting a ground level garden. We have more options than we have volunteer power right now. We have a beautiful community that we have grown besides growing food and soil.  Help us keep it growing.

Please read our other blog at freefarmstand.org to read more news about Urban Agriculture happenings in the city.

Keep on Growing

Last Wednesday evening I got the news that the Free Farm must vacate the property it is on no later than December 31, 2013 (we have been given one more growing season). Like Hayes Valley Farm which is closing in June or like Esperanza Garden which must be out by May 1st. We knew we were on the land temporarily, we just didn't know when we would have to leave, and we thought we  might possibly have more time than this.

Esperanza Garden, which I helped start (and the Free Farm provided seedlings for) grew produce for the Free Farm Stand and has been growing on a small vacant lot squeezed between two buildings on Florida St. It has twice  been a garden. It was originally started by people in Cell Space (which recently closed because of  lack of funds for rent) and then it closed down and was resurrected into Esperanza Garden. I think it has been there as Esperanza Garden for at least four years. We always knew that the property could be sold at any time and around the end of last year we learned of it's fate. The new owner sold it to a developer who is going to build a condominium. I learned just the other night that the short deadline had arrived to move out.

 It was last year that we were notified that St. Paulus got an offer to sell their land to a developer who wanted to put market rate apartments on the farm land and they took the deal. I wrote about our feelings in a blog post August 7, 2012 and that we thought we could stay on the land maybe 2-3 more years more (that is what the church thought who has been very supportive of our work). I just stepped out into my backyard garden which I feel so lucky to have for now and the rain had cleared and the snails were happily crawling everywhere.  I was thinking the developers are like our beautiful snail friends. They are crawling all over our city now eating up all the vacant lots they can. Development in some eyes can seem beautiful, especially when it comes to housing. That is what we all want right?,  in this system it is about  growth and jobs and housing for all, but start with those who can afford it not with those who cannot. What is happening in San Francisco it has become easier for development to happen, there is a building boom happening, and with this developer they got the money (they call it an equity partner) to do this project quicker than was expected, so now things can go ahead. The one positive thing perhaps with the site the Free Farm is on is that now 100% affordable or below market rate housing is going to be built instead of market rate housing. Though it won't help my friend on SSI who just got evicted after 20 years in his rent controlled flat in the Mission, it could help someone who made at minimum $13,000.

Since like Hayes Valley Farm and Esperanza we knew we were temporary and want to be honorable with St. Paulus Church, who has not only let us stay on the land rent free for three years, they have paid an average of $600 a month for water. We will not cause a big scene and fight our eviction, but pick up our farm and move. I also learned that the developer technically now owns the land and is letting us stay for 8 more months because the church has persuaded them to, so it would be wise for us to keep on growing as much as we can and keep on truckin'.

So instead of being negative about this change we see the three years of beautiful work we have done and feel very proud.  In some ways it was  part of an experiment I started when we began the Free Farm Stand, to see how much food we could grow in the city and give to people in need. Out of the 39,667 pounds of produce that the Free Farm Stand has given away to people in need, of what we call "Hecka Local" produce, produce that we  grew or friends and neighbors grew, or we gleaned or Produce to the People gleaned for us, where we knew the farmer, 9.061 pounds of that produce came  from the Free Farm as of this date. We have always known though that the Free Farm has been more than food. We are growing soil, growing habitat for pollinators, we are growing community, and we are growing our spiritual selves. Now we have to move forward and create a new Free Farm somewhere else or perhaps a new project.

In the next month a few of us core people are going to put together a framework of ideas to plan our move and then we will call a meeting (it will probably take weekly meetings and a couple of all day retreats) to put together plans so we can show progress by September (I think the developer and lawyer are nervous that we won't leave). Our hope that people who really want to help will come to regular meetings and retreats and take home some work to do  so that we can move forward. It we are to make this happens I am very clear that we need not only a lot of help, but people that can make a big commitment  and be part of a team that builds the new farm or whatever and helps manage the project. Feel free to contact me if you want to go to a lot of meetings and help take responsibility for a new Free Farm project.

Our biggest challenge will be finding land. Some of us have already begun looking a number of months ago. I personally want to be in the Mission and have just one Free Farm Stand instead of two. I know right now we need a good detective or ferret who can do some serious research. For example, we are among many people  who have had their eye on the double lot next to Atlas Cafe on Alabama near 20th St. which would be perfect. We know the owners and where they live, but haven't been able to get a hold of them to see how much they would sell that land for. There are at least two other private properties I know of in the Mission that need more research. We are also open to finding a building that we can house farmers in and farm wherever we can find gardens or vacant lots that need farming or gardening.

Actually I haven't been writing about this because I wanted to not draw too much attention to a little bit of guerilla gardening I have been trying out, and wanting to see if we could get in a garden before the owners of a vacant lot found out...like a squatted garden. I have been inspired for a while by the Pennsylvania Street Gardens on an off ramp on Caltrans land (http://pennsylvaniagarden.blogspot.com/p/about-pennsylvania-garden.html) and how one neighbor just planted it without permission and then after it was planted they got the official ok and it is thriving and has inspired other garden to pop up. They are all ornamental, but beautify the neighborhood.

Right across the street from me is a big empty parking lot that is connected to a vacant super-market that has been empty for years.  A couple of years ago Fresh and Easy was supposed to move in but now they are backing out and the land will probably be vacant for more years. My  neighbor who lives next to the lot has walked through that parking lot for years to get to his house and claims he has easement rights. He has also maintained the property and fence that is adjacent to the parking lot and has recently started building planter boxes and doing edible landscaping along the edge of the property line. It is a south facing wall that would be ideal for planting and Fresh and Easy said at community meetings that they would include edible landscaping in their final design of the parking lot. At some point I figured I needed to be part of this and told new young friends, who are connected to the "Space Transformers" who took the brave action of defending the closing of the Hanc Recycling Center and Garden. It eventually got evicted. I let them know about the vacant lot and they got involved and started moving the rescued garden beds from the Hanc Garden and soil from Hayes Valley Farm  onto the lot. We actually got two sunflowers planted in pots and a number of beds built but not filled with soil, before the locks to the gates were changed by Fresh and Easy. Now my neighbor has been given a hand delivered note that Fresh and Easy is planning on clearing the lot at 10am on Saturday. I think on Friday the beds without soil will be moved out, but  on Saturday the beds with dirt in them will be planted. It may be a very short lived garden.

We really need to be dreamers here since not only do we not have land we have no money to buy land. The good news is that the Free Farm was really created more with tremendous volunteer energy and creativity than with a lot of money. So we are totally open to collaborating with other groups with a similar mission of service to the poor and building a beautiful loving and compassionate community.

Here is a dream that should be planted in San Francisco. A Free Food Forest like they are planning in Seattle (http://www.takepart.com/article/2012/02/21/its-not-fairytale-seattle-build-nations-first-food-forest). Will the Free Farm morph into a Free Food Forest? That takes a permanent location...already we have a lot of trees to move...maybe they can be the first trees in the next project.

Here is an article I read called Beyond Money and it reflects the philosophy that is behind the Free Farm and the Free Farm Stand.
Last Saturday we had a group of college students from Hamiline College in Wisconsin volunteering with us as part of their Volunteer Service Spring Break. We love these kids who come to San Francisco to help out in not only in soup kitchens, but on an urban farm. So much got done and the the farm is looking so good.  One thing that was exciting is that some of the crew volunteered at Martin de Porres  the previous day that I was there. That got to see the connection between the kitchen and the farm because I saw all the vegetable scraps from the kitchen and brought them to the farm to make compost. They got to help in that process.

Talking compost, we have been making the most wonderful compost recently and I keep praising it. Mainly that is due to the large amounts of juice pulp that we have been mixing in with fine wood chips, vegetable scraps, weeds, and prunings from the garden. We also add it to our worm bin. The juice pulp is dropped off at my door by a fabulous woman Maria who runs a non-profit called Dirt to Dish (http://www.dirt-to-dish.org/) that who we met while picking unsold vegetables at the stonestown Farmers' Market. "Our non-profit raw juice cooperative acts solely as a fundraising vehicle with the goal to launch an after school program in a Family Childcare Licensed urban garden and home in the Bayview-Hunters Point District, San Francisco."  Now I am wondering are we going to move all the soil and compost we are making?  Should we stop making soil? Hayes Valley Far is trying to move all their wood chip compost before they close.

The compost pile above was started around Feb. 25 (check the post The Revolution will be Compost published  that date to see what we started with)

We continue to offer free yoga when we can at the Free Farm and what better time to stretch and relax when all this stress is flying our way? Monique will be leading us all for 45 minutes starting at 9am this Saturday April 6th.

Farming Friendships

I thought I would do something different this week. I want to write about the Free Farm Stand and the Free Farm since both projects are so connected. And both projects are a blast, though this week it was especially fun being at both places. Both projects are about making and keeping in touch with friends.

To me it is pretty amazing how much produce we have been harvesting at the Free Farm this last month. I knew we put a lot of greens into the ground at the end of last year, but I didn't realize how productive they would be. We have now grown about 9,000lbs of produce at the farm. It has actually been a bit frustrating that we have had so many greens that we haven't been able to get them all harvested yet.  Between keeping the greenhouse well stocked with new starts/seedlings and planting out things that are ready go in the ground, we have been a bit shorthanded on Saturdays when we harvest things.

Farming is a lot of work there is no doubt. My two friends at Little City Gardens talk about this on their blog (http://www.littlecitygardens.com/)  and how they are scaling back their efforts this year and focusing on growing less variety and more perennial crops. Of course they are trying to make a living farming and they sell their  stuff,  a pressure we fortunately do not have.

Farming  and growing gardens is something that is so needed in cities right now for all kinds of reasons that most of us know about. The challenge that we all seem to share is how to find time to get soil on our hands and under our fingernails and at the same time live in a city that has too high of rents and everything costs a lot.

My solution has been to create real community like churches, synagogues, mosques, and temples do.  Ideally I think we need to live together and share income, but perhaps we can start moving in that direction by moving away from engaging in commerce among each other, sharing resources, helping friends and strangers when we can. We need to build a community based around generosity and compassion.

 my two little friends who came out to farm

 perpetual chard doing great

 lettuces

 lettuce, collards, and chard oh my!

 the sweet peas planted in October are delicious

 

the labyrinth ...it needs attention

we have been using the solar oven more now that the sun is higher in the sky

Here are some pictures from the Sunday Free Farm Stand:

 the red kale was really beautiful

 super sugar snaps

 this lettuce was from Alemany Farm

 

two of our lovely volunteers with oxalis flower bouquets

Yoga is coming to the farm starting this Wednesday. One of our volunteers is going to lead those interested in getting stretched out before we begin farming.  It will start at 9am in the morning and end around 9:45am. Bring a mat if you can.

Here is a link to an inspiring video that a volunteer sent me."Gardens build community. Period". Last week I posted on the Free Farm Stand blog a TED Talk featuring Ron Finley that was was also great (I enjoy his one liners).

The Revolution will be Compost

I am excited about our compost pile  among many excitements at the Free Farm these days. Thanks to dirt to dish raw coop and Maria http://dirt-to-dish.org/juice we have been getting tons of raw juice pulp and we have been making some awesome compost. Compost is really the heart and soul of our farming efforts and I love it. I love the compost and I love the soil we are making at the Free Farm. I have been watching free online lectures on permaculture here and learning a lot. I liked the lecture on Vermicomposting and one on Soil Ecology. We should all sing praise to soil life and photosynthesis, and the wonderfulness of the carbon cycle.
 I am getting our worm bins in better shape by adding some of the pulp to feed the worms and also adding the pulp to our growing compost pile (in addition I have been adding horse manure, compost which is mostly fine wood chips from Bay View Greenwaste management, vegetable scraps for Martin de Porres Soup Kitchen, and compost from a couple of neighbors who don't have a green bin or choose to give us their scraps rather than to Recology.

 making layers

 our goal is 130 degrees

stacking it high

 I can't do justice to how beautiful our red kale
 looks... you have to see it in person

 ditto the prepetual chard

 

 more prepetual chard that looks better in person

 we have been getting some great tasting oranges

 the Lamb Haas is in flower...avocados soon?

 handsome lettuce in containers

We have been getting some great help these days though most times it seems  our help is down, but we seem to get a lot done. John from Alemany Farm may soon be working more at Alemany Farm since they now have their own greenhouse and we are trying to train some new folks in plant propagation so we can continue growing lots of seedlings (we are giving them out to gardens across the city).  Already we have hundreds of seeds planted and the seedlings are coming up. I think things are looking really beautiful probably because of this warm spring like weather.

Becca with harvest of greens

I discovered that we have a yoga teacher among us whom I think will teach a free yoga or stretching for gardeners class at our farm if we can create a space to do it.We once had the idea of building a platform but that never happened. Now we are thinking if we could get some large carpets that were bug free and clean or large gym mats we could be in business so we are trying to manifest this by getting the word out. We wouldn't mind a large deck or platform either.

We are also in need of more six packs or similar cells for starting seeds in.

Please check out our other blog at freefarmstand.org where you can see where some of our produce goes (there is also a picture there of a sweet potato from our small harvest of taters grown in a large pot in the greenhouse...another one of my excitements).

Digger Farm

The Free Farm has been hoppin' with activity recently, despite it being winter time. The weather has been pretty fantastic.  On Wednesday I got to the  Free Farm early because I really wanted to plant the bare root strawberry plants that we got free. Once I got there I realized that the project was much bigger than I thought if I were to do it right.  Not only did I want to plant the new strawberries, but the old ones needed to be taken up...they loose their vigor  after 2-3 years and the way they were planted in the first place  made the hard to harvest. After thinking about the design of the new strawberry bed I came up with the idea of making a hugelkultur bed. Almost everyone I tell them about the hugelkultur idea  they say "what?".  I heard about the idea from a man named David Mudge whom I met last year at the 2012 scion wood exchange  and is involved with the who is  Martinez Permaculture Center across the bay. Looking it up online I got the basic idea of creating a raised bed with very wood material that eventually breaks down into compost. I was eager to get rid of our pile of woody materials (though we didn't have any real logs), so my idea was to use it in a hugelkultur bed: Bury it part way, add some vegetable scraps, fresh green weeds, and manure. Then put the dirt back on the pile and then on top of that add compost and then plant the strawberries. I wasn't sure how many volunteers would show up I jumped right in  It turned out a good number of people showed up, more than we have had in a while and a group of people got the job done by the end of the day (short of  actually planting the strawberries).  On Saturday again I started early, terracing the area around the raised bed we built on Wednesday. A young man showed up to help which was really great. He actually came by on Wednesday as I was opening the gate. He said he had been sleeping in the parking lot next door where the boarded up buildings were that the Occupiers occupied for a while and that he stashed his sleeping bag and a bag of clothes in the greenhouse so they wouldn't get wet (it looked like it may rain).

Here are some photos of the project:

Besides planting the strawberries on Saturday, we had our Tu B"shvat tree planting. Thanks to Congregation Emanu-El who paid for the trees and Friends of the Urban Forest working with the Department of the Environment, we put 8 trees in the ground. We had one of the largest turn-outs in a year...about 30 people showed up to help out. It was a real blast! We planted three apple trees, two Asian Pears, two plum trees, and a male and female Sea Berry.

 we cut the trees after they were planted to about

 knee high to keep them growing less tall

 how cool it is to have kids planting trees!

 this one is going to be growing flat against the wall

Our seed order arrived and I can't wait to start planting! In the coming weeks we will be planting peppers, tomatoes, basil, squash, kale, and lettuce, plus other things too. We also have potatoes to put in the ground, and trees to graft (hopefully we will do some grafting next week). It's going to be a great year so please come out some work day and join us.

Our blog over at freefarmstand.org , this week I share the  inspiration that I got from the Diggers of San Francisco (who turned me on to the 1649 Diggers of England). When we first started the farm we were thinking of names and one that came up was the Digger Farm. I still like that name and though I don't like plowing and digging up our vegetable beds too much, and I continue to be inspired by Ruth Stout who promoted the no dig garden method and Masanobu Fukuoka and his One Straw Revolution. But like this week, once in a while all the shovels come out of the shed and us Free Farmers have to dig...dig holes for trees and dig to redo a strawberry bed. So "You Diggers all stand up for glory. Stand up now." (from the song World Turned Upside Down by Leon Rosselson.)