Monday, February 25, 2013

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).