Saturday May 8th workday

Despite the windy and blustery day, we had a wonderful workday at the farm.  The cool weather made for a good day for planting, which we took advantage of, and created lavender hill in the labyrinth.

Jonathan, from Feel the Earth, came by and checked on the trays of seeds he supplied and there are lots of babies.

Thanks to Jonathan we not only have plenty of seedlings (for the farm and the stand, as well as the various gardens Jonathan supplies seedlings to), we now have a strawberry bowl that is going to be awesome once it takes hold.  Speaking of strawberries, Strawberry Hill is coming along and producing lots of beautiful, and tasty, strawberries.

It was a bountiful day, as well, with 80 pounds of produce harvested (of course, Pancho had to munch a little as we worked). There were collard greens; Kohlrabi; lettuce, and 13 pounds of greens from our lettuce lawn!  The lettuce lawn is a new concept to me, and I will have to try it again.  In all, it was a lovely day, and once again, we gathered together and brought with us our love, and spirit of sharing, to produce beautiful, locally grown, organic produce. 

Local Food Economies at CounterPulse

Come check out the local food economies talk at CounterPulse tonight at 7:30pm. We'll be there representing the Free Farm! See you tonight!

Big Harvest!

On my latest blog post over at  http://freefarmstand.org/ I talk about the record amount of produce we harvested last week from different gardens in the city, including the Free Farm. ...57lbs of greens, lettuce, and kohlrabi from the Free Farm. This garden is rocking but as the weather warms up we need more hands to water (we do have some things on drip). I just got a lot of hose and sprayers.
 There is also plenty of work to do for aspiring urban farmers who want to help feed those in need.

In the News

Check out this great story about the Free Farm from KQED's Bay Area Bites Blog.

excerpt:

Or, what about starting from the very beginning, and growing more food from scratch right here in the city? Even in cities as highly populated as San Francisco, Oakland, and Berkeley, a surprisingly amount of arable land is still available. Just look at the Free Farm, which was started on a vacant lot at Gough and Eddy Streets in January of this year.

Pastor Megan Rohrer, a young Lutheran pastor who works with a variety of homeless communities around the city as the executive director of Welcome Ministry, wanted to expand the work she was doing, going from feeding the hungry of San Francisco to growing food for those same communities. The St. Paulus Lutheran church was willing to offer an empty lot it owned to her and a dedicated community of volunteers to make a garden.

Meanwhile Tree, a longtime food-justice activist and community gardener as well as the founder of the Mission's popular Free Farmstand, was looking for a place to grow more local food to supply the farmstand. Once Megan's church connections met Tree's gardening expertise, the Free Farm was born. With grants from the Mesa Foundation along with several local Episcopal and Lutheran churches, plus a whole lot of wheelbarrow-pushing volunteer labor, the weedy lot has undergone an astonishing transformation.

What was once a trash-strewn, needle-littered eyesore that neighbors called "The Pit" is now a welcoming, mural-lined space full of neatly mounded raised beds planted with salad mix, potatoes, beans, broccoli and lettuce. Bricks salvaged from the St. Paulus church (which stood on the space before burning down in 1995) now form strawberry beds on the hillside and a winding spiral bed planted with flowers, herbs, and vegetables. Cold frames and a newly built greenhouse are filled with trays of tiny seedlings, everything from kale to tomatoes to marigolds started from seeds donated by church communities across the country. Bright garden-themed murals by local artist Leanne C. Miller cover the concrete wall on the west side, and there are plans to bring more artists and sculptors into the garden to create site-specific works.

Volunteers get down and dirty every Wednesday and Saturday from 10am to 2pm, building infrastructure, hauling mulch, manure and compost, planting seedlings, waterings, and more. A volunteer-made vegan lunch, often featuring produce harvested from the garden, is shared by all. Volunteers will also share in the harvest, with excess supplying the Free Farmstand (Rohrer hopes to establish another neighborhood Free Farmstand on the site) as well as providing fresh local produce for twice-weekly homeless dinners organized by Welcome. (For more information on Welcome's additional garden projects around the Bay Area, go to Urban Share.)

Read the whole article and leave comments about the article at: KQED's Bay Area Bites Blog

Today's workday at the Free Farm

Today at the Free Farm, we started putting some succulents in containers on top of the concrete structures near the sidewalks.

Each week, we have a group of volunteers who take the baby seedlings and put them into individual seedling trays so their roots can get strong enough to get planted in beds. Here are a few of the people who help sort some seedlings this week.
Lauren and Case, built some shelves from pallets so that we could fit more seedling trays in the green house.
Here are some photos of today's harvest

3rd Harvest at the Free Farm: 6 pds

Today, 6 pounds of lettuce (6 1/2 pound lettuce heads 3 pounds lettuce mix) from the Free Farm was given away at the Free Farm Stand. When we start having more bountiful harvests, we'll be opening a stand at the Free Farm to give away produce and seedlings.

A Saturday at the Free Farm

 Here is a photo from the Bay Guardian that wasn't on line:

Since the Free Farm is such a big focus of the work I am doing it seems to be getting more attention here on this web site. On Saturday at the farm we had a Blessing Ceremony that I really enjoyed...Read more at http://freefarmstand.org/