Location, location, location

Free Farmer Evan’s relocating for shorter growing season
Today was Evan’s last Saturday at The Free Farm. He will be relocating to western Massachusetts where his girlfriend will be entering graduate school. We will dearly miss Evan, who has been with The Free Farm since inception, building soil as our Compost Champion and raising hell as our Resident Anarchist with a Cause (Food Justice)! We held an Appreciation/Celebration for Evan during our lunch hour.  He missed our Volunteer Appreciation/Celebration Party earlier this year because he spent that night in jail after being arrested while exercising his right to dissent (during Occupy demonstration). Since it was one-night only, Evan didn’t get a chance to start an edible garden in jail, but we expect indefatigable Evan will start a Free Farm satellite in his new locale soon :-)

We'll miss Princess Polly, too!

Our best wishes + cheers :-) card for Evan

The Free Farm Family

"San Francisco (Be Sure to Wear Flowers in Your Hair)"

Work

We had quite a turnout of volunteers from Alemany Farm, CCSF Environmental Horticulture and Stanford Food and Community--as well as those who came individually.  Many thanks to Page, who did double-duty working on Garden Table project with CCSF students and guiding service learning project with his Stanford students.  Kevin said that he planned to return with his SF Newbies in the 20s group (http://thefreefarm.blogspot.com/2011/10/we-are-99.html) but was asked to reschedule as we want to make sure that everyone who joins our workdays gets the proper attention for a positively enriching experience! 

Wendy, John and Jessica in greenhouse

Jessica and Jenny in greenhouse

Jordan harvests kale in another warm, dry, sunny workday

Harvesting arugula and preparing to plant tomatoes in hothouse

Shovel and spade

Container gardening

Garden Table planning

Garden Table materials

SF Newbie Callie plans to transplant these in garden at Chinese immersion school where she teaches

Katie and Erik ("you gonna blog about our log?") maintain planting log

Katie harvests shiitake mushrooms

Rest
Margaret and Page brought lunch spread of chili and salads.  Tree made delicious chocolate cake, gluten and non-gluten versions--both so dark and moist like our hecka local compost!
                           

Margaret, Page, Wendy and Mary find common ground: Margaret and Wendy attended Smith College; Margaret, Page and Mary are college faculty members

Wendy and her mother look like sisters

Pia and Mary are long-time members of SF Vegetarian Society.  Pia just returned from 2-week trip to China with a group of German vegetarians. Getup classmate Lynn (who interned at The Free Farm last year before relocating to LA) recently posted this thoughtful piece about how her parents from China modeled green living at http://lynnfang.com/2012/04/9-green-lessons-from-my-asian-parents/

Locating beehive
This beehive/swarm located in our tree collards nearly upstaged everything else during our workday when beekeeper Pam (in beekeeper outfit) and Erik (with exposed arms and legs!) relocated the hive to its wooden home.

Plant porn:  many shades of green 

Oranges from Stanford Glean and aloe from Tree's home garden!

Locating urban farms

Stephen gave us the heads up about Monday’s event on How SF Can Better Support Urban Agriculture (see Public Service Announcement below for details).

Enjoy Earth Week and visit us soon :-)

Public Service Announcement

Mon., Apr. 23, 2012, 11 am, How SF Can Better Support Urban Agriculture Michelangelo Playground & Community Garden, Greenwich St. between Leavenworth & Jones, SF
Eli Zigas, Food Systems and Urban Agriculture Program Manager at SPUR and co-author of Starting a Garden or Urban Farm in San Francisco (http://www.sfuaa.org/start-a-gardenurban-farm.html) will join a discussion about finding public land for urban agriculture, Supervisor David Chiu will announce new legislation aimed at better coordinating city support for urban ag, and SPUR Co-coordinator Antonio Roman-Alcala will talk about how all of this connects to the SFUAA's platform. http://www.sfuaa.org/