See video of the speeches:
Monday, January 17, 2011
Sunday, January 16, 2011
In the News: The Sacramento Bee
At Free Farm in S.F., all veggies are given away
Published: Sunday, Jan. 16, 2011 - 12:00 am | Page 3A
SAN FRANCISCO – There was one common reaction when the Rev. Megan Rohrer said she wanted to start a farm in a weedy, glass-strewn vacant lot a few blocks from the Civic Center.
"People told me I was crazy," Rohrer said. "They said it was the wrong kind of space, you'll never be able to weed it, no one will come to work on it."
Yet the Free Farm will celebrate its first anniversary today, a year in which it grew and gave away more than 2,500 pounds of vegetables, making it the most bountiful of six gardens planted on Lutheran church-owned space in the Bay Area.
In an age when farmers markets are sprouting in every urban California neighborhood, the Free Farm is an unusual tale of success. Its "Hecka Local" brand produce, from tomatoes and zucchini to dwarf kale, pineapple sage and watermelon radishes, is prize-worthy, but is tended by volunteers and donated, no questions asked, to anyone who wants it.
"We want to provide an example of how to live based on generosity and sharing, instead of everything being seen as a profit," said a farm manager, who calls himself Tree.
He is joined Wednesdays and Saturdays by a dozen or more willing workers who mulch, shovel, weed and eat a communal vegan lunch. The volunteers come from all corners. There are students, teachers, members of a local temple, gardening mavens, food justice activists, the unemployed and people who describe themselves as living off the economic grid.
"We have eatings instead of meetings," said volunteer Pancho Ramos, as he sat with a bowl of bean stew and rice at the farm one day recently.
Ramos, who says he lives "without traditional currency," has watched the lemon and fig trees start to bear fruit and neighbors come by to get vegetables, surprised to find they are free.
"One woman took some zucchini and came back an hour later with empanadas," he said. "That's what a church should be."
Rohrer, executive director of Welcome, a faith-based nonprofit that works on poverty issues, saw the farm as a way to bring quality produce to inner-city residents. She had worked with the chronically homeless for about a decade and saw them struggling not only to keep housing, but also to afford good fresh food.
"The city wanted community gardens, but there was all this red tape," she said. "Everything was taking years, so I started talking to different Lutheran pastors about getting space."
One of the available spots was the lot on Gough Street, one-third of an acre that had had been unoccupied since a fire destroyed St. Paulus Church in 1995. Like much of the city, it sat in close proximity to wealth and poverty, blocks from the ornate Opera House, expensive condos and public housing.
Rohrer, who grew up in South Dakota, knew backyard gardens and had learned community organizing, but she turned to local experts for farming help. Tree and Lauren Anderson, founder of Produce to the People, which harvests food from backyards and community gardens, joined her.
Together with volunteers they built a ramp from recycled Christmas trees. They scrounged for old pallets, buckets, concrete and hardware. They fertilized the sandy soil and built a labyrinth with bricks salvaged from the burned church.
Today's scheduled celebration includes a greenhouse-raising. Tree hopes to use the structure for seedlings to plant and give away.
"I want to inspire people to pay attention to where food comes from," he said.
The Free Farm continues the work he's done since the 1970s, when he first started gardening and planting avocado trees in the Mission District. He took his name because of his connection to trees, he said, but prefers not to talk about himself. ("It's not about me. It's about the work we can do," he says.)
He started the Free Food Stand in the Mission District in 2008 to give away vegetables from community gardens and surplus collected from other farmers markets. The stand, which has given away more than 12,000 pounds of produce in the past two years, now also gets vegetables from the Free Farm. "Hecka Local" always goes first.
Saturday, January 15, 2011
Healthy Eating for Winter
According to Chinese Medicine’s Five Element system, the winter season is associated with water (element), fear (emotion), salty (taste), and kidney and urinary bladder (body organs). Winter is the strongest yin (cold, dark) time of the year and its climate (rain, fog) makes us seek inner warmth so it’s time to conserve energy (hibernate) and eat warming foods.
Instead of heading outdoors to The Free Farm, I stayed indoors at Yasue’s kitchen to participate in my favorite sport—cooking!—and help prepare lunch for tomorrow’s Greenhouse Barn Raising and One Year Anniversary Celebration. For winter seasonal eating, we prepared soup and salad featuring miso (fermented soybeans, high in protein and especially good for the circulatory and digestive organs) and radish (which helps dissolve fat and mucus deposits). Tree obtained Seasonal, Local, Organic and Whole (SLOW) food donations from Bi-Rite Grocery: thanks!!!
Like Water, For Stone Soup
Without food, we can survive for weeks, but without water we die of dehydration in a few days. Our body’s water needs vary, depending on our physical activity and diet, but an average 10 cups a day is recommended. We get about 80% of our water from beverages, 20% from foods.
Water makes up 60-70% of our human body, 80% of brain tissue, and 90% of blood. Water is needed to digest food, transport food’s nutrients to tissues, eliminate body wastes, circulate body fluids, lubricate joints and internal organs, and regulate body temperature.
Yasue, who has her own catering business (www.pachamanacafe.com/), showed us how to make a long-simmering miso-root vegetable soup. She explained that the traditional soup recipe includes pork, but omitted since only vegan food is served at The Free Farm to accommodate most people’s dietary needs (e.g., observant Jews and Muslims do not eat pork). In the absence of pork, the soup stock was rich in protein from miso (fermented soybeans), minerals from kombu (kelp) and heat-generating from sake (rice wine). Yasue also added shiitake mushrooms, which help the body discharge excess salts and animal fats. Here’s Yasue’s soup recipe:
Soup stock: water, kombu (pre-soaked), shiitake mushroom (pre-soaked), miso, sake
Chopped vegetables: burdock, carrots, daikon (radish), yellow onions, satsumaimo (sweet potato)
Hand crumbled konnyaku (jelly from wild mountain yams)
Sliced ginger root & scallions
SLOW Food Menu
Alena (j.alen.nye@gmail.com), a personal chef who has been volunteering at The Free Farm since last April, came over to make a colorful salad of baked delicata squash in miso-harissa sauce with kale, radishes and almonds. Kale, along with collard and mustard greens grown at The Farm, score highest on the aggregate nutrition density index (ANDI from www.eatrightamerica.com/andi-superfoods).
In addition to soup and salad for tomorrow’s lunch, Alena plans to bring home-baked vegan chocolate chip cookies and Yasue plans to make musubi with shiso (beefsteak plant or perilla, which is used in Chinese medicine to boost the body’s immune system).
Yasue, Alena and I were taught cooking by the best teachers—our Mothers! Yasue focuses on traditional Japanese and macrobiotic; Alena specializes in health recovery, dietary needs, allergies, organic baby foods, vegan/vegetarian and locavore; and I like SLOW food cooking with Chinese herbs. Traditional foods are our best medicine, having survived the test of time.
Like Salt, For Minerals
Most water is actually salty: in our bodies and in sea vegetables, water contains many mineral salts. The U.S. Recommended Daily Allowance for salt intake is 1 teaspoon of table salt per day, which includes all salt and sodium consumed, in cooking and at the table. Most Americans, who consume a highly processed Standard American Diet, eat too much salt.
According to TCM, too much salt will “injure the blood,” which relates to the Fire element and heart, directly affecting the kidneys. Kidneys function to maintain water balance and acid-base balance. Studies have shown that too much salt causes water retention, high blood pressure, kidney and heart problems.
Eat SLOW foods that support kidney and bladder functions: whole grains, beans, root vegetables, mineral-rich greens, small amounts of salt fermented foods (pickles, miso, sauerkraut; tamari/shoyu should be used only in cooking, not added to foods at the table). Avoid too much salt and fatty foods (red meat, hard cheese), which cause contraction of kidneys and can lead to high blood pressure or depression.
Finally, the American Dietetic Association has noted that foods such as soybeans, cruciferous vegetables and sweet potatoes contain natural goitrogens, but these foods have not been associated with thyroid insufficiency in healthy people provided iodine intake is adequate. So remember to eat iodine-rich sea vegetables (kelp in soup, nori wrapping in musubi) as part of tomorrow’s lunch!
“Let food be thy medicine and medicine be thy food.”--Hippocrates
Instead of heading outdoors to The Free Farm, I stayed indoors at Yasue’s kitchen to participate in my favorite sport—cooking!—and help prepare lunch for tomorrow’s Greenhouse Barn Raising and One Year Anniversary Celebration. For winter seasonal eating, we prepared soup and salad featuring miso (fermented soybeans, high in protein and especially good for the circulatory and digestive organs) and radish (which helps dissolve fat and mucus deposits). Tree obtained Seasonal, Local, Organic and Whole (SLOW) food donations from Bi-Rite Grocery: thanks!!!
Like Water, For Stone Soup
Without food, we can survive for weeks, but without water we die of dehydration in a few days. Our body’s water needs vary, depending on our physical activity and diet, but an average 10 cups a day is recommended. We get about 80% of our water from beverages, 20% from foods.
Water makes up 60-70% of our human body, 80% of brain tissue, and 90% of blood. Water is needed to digest food, transport food’s nutrients to tissues, eliminate body wastes, circulate body fluids, lubricate joints and internal organs, and regulate body temperature.
Yasue, who has her own catering business (www.pachamanacafe.com/), showed us how to make a long-simmering miso-root vegetable soup. She explained that the traditional soup recipe includes pork, but omitted since only vegan food is served at The Free Farm to accommodate most people’s dietary needs (e.g., observant Jews and Muslims do not eat pork). In the absence of pork, the soup stock was rich in protein from miso (fermented soybeans), minerals from kombu (kelp) and heat-generating from sake (rice wine). Yasue also added shiitake mushrooms, which help the body discharge excess salts and animal fats. Here’s Yasue’s soup recipe:
Soup stock: water, kombu (pre-soaked), shiitake mushroom (pre-soaked), miso, sake
Chopped vegetables: burdock, carrots, daikon (radish), yellow onions, satsumaimo (sweet potato)
Hand crumbled konnyaku (jelly from wild mountain yams)
Sliced ginger root & scallions
SLOW Food Menu
Alena (j.alen.nye@gmail.com), a personal chef who has been volunteering at The Free Farm since last April, came over to make a colorful salad of baked delicata squash in miso-harissa sauce with kale, radishes and almonds. Kale, along with collard and mustard greens grown at The Farm, score highest on the aggregate nutrition density index (ANDI from www.eatrightamerica.com/andi-superfoods).
In addition to soup and salad for tomorrow’s lunch, Alena plans to bring home-baked vegan chocolate chip cookies and Yasue plans to make musubi with shiso (beefsteak plant or perilla, which is used in Chinese medicine to boost the body’s immune system).
Yasue, Alena and I were taught cooking by the best teachers—our Mothers! Yasue focuses on traditional Japanese and macrobiotic; Alena specializes in health recovery, dietary needs, allergies, organic baby foods, vegan/vegetarian and locavore; and I like SLOW food cooking with Chinese herbs. Traditional foods are our best medicine, having survived the test of time.
Like Salt, For Minerals
Most water is actually salty: in our bodies and in sea vegetables, water contains many mineral salts. The U.S. Recommended Daily Allowance for salt intake is 1 teaspoon of table salt per day, which includes all salt and sodium consumed, in cooking and at the table. Most Americans, who consume a highly processed Standard American Diet, eat too much salt.
According to TCM, too much salt will “injure the blood,” which relates to the Fire element and heart, directly affecting the kidneys. Kidneys function to maintain water balance and acid-base balance. Studies have shown that too much salt causes water retention, high blood pressure, kidney and heart problems.
Eat SLOW foods that support kidney and bladder functions: whole grains, beans, root vegetables, mineral-rich greens, small amounts of salt fermented foods (pickles, miso, sauerkraut; tamari/shoyu should be used only in cooking, not added to foods at the table). Avoid too much salt and fatty foods (red meat, hard cheese), which cause contraction of kidneys and can lead to high blood pressure or depression.
Finally, the American Dietetic Association has noted that foods such as soybeans, cruciferous vegetables and sweet potatoes contain natural goitrogens, but these foods have not been associated with thyroid insufficiency in healthy people provided iodine intake is adequate. So remember to eat iodine-rich sea vegetables (kelp in soup, nori wrapping in musubi) as part of tomorrow’s lunch!
“Let food be thy medicine and medicine be thy food.”--Hippocrates
Sunday, January 9, 2011
Scenes from 4-Hour Workday at The Free Farm
Tree and Page watch Griff fill bucket with concrete
Stirring 80 pound concrete mix in 4 quarts of water 
Griff makes concrete without wheelbarrows behind him 
Griff and Tree measure out 20 feet distance for greenhouse
The Free Farm gave away over 20 pounds of free produce
Volunteers enjoy vegan lunch
Stanley keeps record of produce given away
Bolted lettuce for compost or salad?
Harvesting in labyrinth
Sam and Julia harvest lettuce
John and Zoe work on greenhouse to be built over bed of bolted lettuce Getup, Raise a Greenhouse & (How to) Increase Joy!
As noted in Tree’s January 4th blog, several of us recent graduates from the Gardening and Composting Educator Training Program (GCETP aka “Getup”) are beginning our 40-hour community outreach project here at The Free Farm. We each will take turns to blog about our experiences at the Farm so you’ll get a fresh perspective each week!
Prior to my participation in GCETP, my experiences in gardening and composting took place outside of SF. As an apartment dweller in SF, I don’t have easy access to land on which to grow food. However, I can do vermicomposting in my kitchen and gardening in SF community farms.
With my interest in local food security and whole plant-based nutrition, I’m here to support The Farm’s mission to grow organic produce to give away free to the community in an effort to combat hunger, aid health and nutrition, and increase resource sharing and care for one another. It was great to re-connect with Finn (also a GCETP graduate, whom I met last June when I initially came to The Farm for a composting toilet workshop) and Tree (whom I met in the Victory Garden outside SF City Hall during the 2008 Slow Food Nation Conference).
Yesterday’s activities at the Farm included reuniting with Getup classmates (Sophie, Stanley and Zoe), harvesting and giving away over 20 pounds of produce, carrying 80-pound bag of cement mix, laying the foundation for the two 20’ x 30’ greenhouses, and enjoying a delicious vegan lunch with an awesome group of volunteers. Tree’s Nothing but Blessings cartoon inspired me to count my own blessings:
1. Resourceful construction methods
During the greenhouse construction, Griff and Page had a spirited discussion on whether cement should be mixed on the bare ground or in a wheelbarrow; we opted for the former as Griff reminded us that most people in the developing world can’t afford wheelbarrows, and it worked out great! Earlier, I worked with John using an electric-powered driller to make holes in the wood frames and buckets—so grateful that we could afford this time-saving technology.
2. Bolted lettuce
When Finn suggested that I pull out the bolted lettuce, I asked her if she could show me where to find it as I was not familiar with that variety. I could identify oak leaf, swiss chard, arugula, etc.—but what does bolted lettuce look like? Finn pointed to patches of long-stemmed lettuce with small leaves and many flowers, explaining that a lettuce has bolted when it produces seed prematurely and abandons leaf growth. Bolting happens when the weather gets too sunny for lettuce, which prefers to grow in the shade and moist soil. Finn said bolted lettuce tastes bitter so it was best to also pull out its roots and toss the entire plant to the compost pile.
3. Bitter
My project at The Farm includes nutrition education so I’d like to discuss how bitter foods support overall health. Before agriculture, our ancestors gathered native, wild greens that tasted bitter. The bitter taste is associated with a plant’s naturally occurring toxins, which are a defense mechanism to repel predators. Bitters, which are perceived as poison, stimulate organs for protection, with a beneficial effect on digestion. Edible bitters stimulate all digestive secretions and peristalsis to aid bowel transit time and nutrient assimilation.
Many of today’s health problems, caused by poor digestion, may be due to a lack of bitter flavor in the modern American diet (the bitter flavor in many natural foods is diluted in cultivation or removed in food processing). Our gut is known as our second brain because mood-related hormones and transmitters (serotonin, dopamine, endorphins, etc.) are produced not primarily in the brain, but in the gut! Therefore, bitters that act to improve our digestive health can also improve our emotions or state of mind.
According to Traditional Chinese Medicine, bitter increases joy, the emotion associated with summer, the fire element, and heart and small intestine functions. Bitter functions to dry dampness, drain heat, move blood and send qi (energy) down. Bitter helps one to let go of anger, or stagnant liver energy, the emotion associated with spring, so one can transition to the next phase.
Briahn Kelly-Brennan, L.Ac., who teaches Everyday Healing Foods and Herbs at CCSF, notes that most Americans today have to work at getting bitters in their diet, except in drug forms—chocolate and coffee, strong herbs which can be draining. Briahn suggests an easy and better way to get bitter taste into our diet is to eat leafy greens.
Finn was right about the bolted lettuce tasting very bitter. But instead of tossing it into the compost pile, I ate the bitter greens as raw salad to increase my joy. So let’s grow plants, eat plants (bolted or not)! I’m looking forward to the Farm’s One Year Celebration and Greenhouse Barn Raising next weekend and I hope you can join us!
Prior to my participation in GCETP, my experiences in gardening and composting took place outside of SF. As an apartment dweller in SF, I don’t have easy access to land on which to grow food. However, I can do vermicomposting in my kitchen and gardening in SF community farms.
With my interest in local food security and whole plant-based nutrition, I’m here to support The Farm’s mission to grow organic produce to give away free to the community in an effort to combat hunger, aid health and nutrition, and increase resource sharing and care for one another. It was great to re-connect with Finn (also a GCETP graduate, whom I met last June when I initially came to The Farm for a composting toilet workshop) and Tree (whom I met in the Victory Garden outside SF City Hall during the 2008 Slow Food Nation Conference).
Yesterday’s activities at the Farm included reuniting with Getup classmates (Sophie, Stanley and Zoe), harvesting and giving away over 20 pounds of produce, carrying 80-pound bag of cement mix, laying the foundation for the two 20’ x 30’ greenhouses, and enjoying a delicious vegan lunch with an awesome group of volunteers. Tree’s Nothing but Blessings cartoon inspired me to count my own blessings:
1. Resourceful construction methods
During the greenhouse construction, Griff and Page had a spirited discussion on whether cement should be mixed on the bare ground or in a wheelbarrow; we opted for the former as Griff reminded us that most people in the developing world can’t afford wheelbarrows, and it worked out great! Earlier, I worked with John using an electric-powered driller to make holes in the wood frames and buckets—so grateful that we could afford this time-saving technology.
2. Bolted lettuce
When Finn suggested that I pull out the bolted lettuce, I asked her if she could show me where to find it as I was not familiar with that variety. I could identify oak leaf, swiss chard, arugula, etc.—but what does bolted lettuce look like? Finn pointed to patches of long-stemmed lettuce with small leaves and many flowers, explaining that a lettuce has bolted when it produces seed prematurely and abandons leaf growth. Bolting happens when the weather gets too sunny for lettuce, which prefers to grow in the shade and moist soil. Finn said bolted lettuce tastes bitter so it was best to also pull out its roots and toss the entire plant to the compost pile.
3. Bitter
My project at The Farm includes nutrition education so I’d like to discuss how bitter foods support overall health. Before agriculture, our ancestors gathered native, wild greens that tasted bitter. The bitter taste is associated with a plant’s naturally occurring toxins, which are a defense mechanism to repel predators. Bitters, which are perceived as poison, stimulate organs for protection, with a beneficial effect on digestion. Edible bitters stimulate all digestive secretions and peristalsis to aid bowel transit time and nutrient assimilation.
Many of today’s health problems, caused by poor digestion, may be due to a lack of bitter flavor in the modern American diet (the bitter flavor in many natural foods is diluted in cultivation or removed in food processing). Our gut is known as our second brain because mood-related hormones and transmitters (serotonin, dopamine, endorphins, etc.) are produced not primarily in the brain, but in the gut! Therefore, bitters that act to improve our digestive health can also improve our emotions or state of mind.
According to Traditional Chinese Medicine, bitter increases joy, the emotion associated with summer, the fire element, and heart and small intestine functions. Bitter functions to dry dampness, drain heat, move blood and send qi (energy) down. Bitter helps one to let go of anger, or stagnant liver energy, the emotion associated with spring, so one can transition to the next phase.
Briahn Kelly-Brennan, L.Ac., who teaches Everyday Healing Foods and Herbs at CCSF, notes that most Americans today have to work at getting bitters in their diet, except in drug forms—chocolate and coffee, strong herbs which can be draining. Briahn suggests an easy and better way to get bitter taste into our diet is to eat leafy greens.
Finn was right about the bolted lettuce tasting very bitter. But instead of tossing it into the compost pile, I ate the bitter greens as raw salad to increase my joy. So let’s grow plants, eat plants (bolted or not)! I’m looking forward to the Farm’s One Year Celebration and Greenhouse Barn Raising next weekend and I hope you can join us!
Thursday, January 6, 2011
More news about our big January 16th day coming up and how to help
- a few team leaders for different activities which basically means leading a group of volunteers in different tasks
- a few people to be sous chefs and help the main chef cut up vegetables and such on Saturday afternoon in the Mission
- we have a list of plumbing and wiring stuff for the greenhouse if anyone has that kind of stuff hanging around
- hardware cloth or some kind of mesh made of plastic or metal to construct the tops of greenhouse benches
- 2 x 4's
- a photographer to take pictures at the event
- carpenters and handymen or women
Tuesday, January 4, 2011
New Years Update
I just got back in town today from a too short retreat I took in the mountains. I am feeling refreshed and have new energy for the coming year at the Free Farm (and the Free Farm Stand too).
I want to first of all thank everyone from my heart to all you who have made our new farm so successful our first year. Not only did we grow over a ton of food literally, but I feel like we have made so many new friends and met many of our neighbors who live near the farm. Things are really feeling beautiful these days. Also, I continue to be grateful to St. Paulus Church for lending the use of their property (plus water and electricity) to grow food to feed those in need.
The New Year is already looking like it's going to be off the charts in terms of making more connections and growing more produce. Here are some highlights and dates to keep in mind:
Sunday January 16th from 10am- about 4pm is our big Greenhouse Barn raising event that we are working on with Temple Emanu-El. Every year they have a volunteer event in honor of Martin Luther King Jr Service day (which this year is on a Monday but our event will be the day before). They have decided to help us build a greenhouse on that Sunday. It will also be a celebration of 1 year of our Free Farm. Besides building a greenhouse, we will be also building a shed and a multipurpose space, have a lunch, some guest speakers, workshops and activities for kids and adults, labyrinth walks, and possibly some music.
To help us prepare for the event we will be focusing a lot on doing some construction work at our next workdays Wednesday Jan 5, a special workday Thursday January 6th, and Saturday January 8th. All workdays are from10am-2pm. Also, on Saturday January 15th we will also be at the Farm getting ready for the big day.
I have been getting excited about the things living in our soil and how we can work with the microbiology to help us be more effective growing produce in a sustainable way without fertilizers. I hope to be making some compost extract as soon as our greenhouse is built and up and running (we also will be growing a lot of start/seedlings for the farm and to give away).
On January 19th we will be hosting 12 students from the Jewish Community High School of the Bay.
Also, in January we will be having some new interns come on board who come from the Getup class at Garden for the environment
In April we are going to be involved in a city wide event called SF Refresh (The mission of SF Refresh is to create opportunities for San Franciscans to receive free whole body care in community gardens throughout the city. There website is http://sfrefresh.blogspot.com/
We are also working on making it easier for people to get involved with our farm project. We now have a rough list of roles and tasks that are available. Roles being jobs that involve being a leader or coordinator of some aspect of the Free Farm and task involve just helping out with some job. For example we now have a calendar coordinator (Finn) and we have tasks like making a vegan lunch once a month for our volunteer crew.
We are actually looking for people in the month of January to sign up on our calendar to prepare a lunch in January (or sign up to make a lunch once a month on a regular day...either Saturdays or Wednesdays). If you are interested please contact Finn wildoatsandnettles@gmail.com.
I encourage everyone to come out and visit us in the new year. Also, if you show up at the Free Farm in the next week I will have my latest cartoon that I will be handing out. I also will soon have fliers for our event and people can come by the farm to pick one up or contact me.
Here are some of the last photos I took last year at the Free Farm:
I want to first of all thank everyone from my heart to all you who have made our new farm so successful our first year. Not only did we grow over a ton of food literally, but I feel like we have made so many new friends and met many of our neighbors who live near the farm. Things are really feeling beautiful these days. Also, I continue to be grateful to St. Paulus Church for lending the use of their property (plus water and electricity) to grow food to feed those in need.
The New Year is already looking like it's going to be off the charts in terms of making more connections and growing more produce. Here are some highlights and dates to keep in mind:
Sunday January 16th from 10am- about 4pm is our big Greenhouse Barn raising event that we are working on with Temple Emanu-El. Every year they have a volunteer event in honor of Martin Luther King Jr Service day (which this year is on a Monday but our event will be the day before). They have decided to help us build a greenhouse on that Sunday. It will also be a celebration of 1 year of our Free Farm. Besides building a greenhouse, we will be also building a shed and a multipurpose space, have a lunch, some guest speakers, workshops and activities for kids and adults, labyrinth walks, and possibly some music.
To help us prepare for the event we will be focusing a lot on doing some construction work at our next workdays Wednesday Jan 5, a special workday Thursday January 6th, and Saturday January 8th. All workdays are from10am-2pm. Also, on Saturday January 15th we will also be at the Farm getting ready for the big day.
I have been getting excited about the things living in our soil and how we can work with the microbiology to help us be more effective growing produce in a sustainable way without fertilizers. I hope to be making some compost extract as soon as our greenhouse is built and up and running (we also will be growing a lot of start/seedlings for the farm and to give away).
On January 19th we will be hosting 12 students from the Jewish Community High School of the Bay.
Also, in January we will be having some new interns come on board who come from the Getup class at Garden for the environment
In April we are going to be involved in a city wide event called SF Refresh (The mission of SF Refresh is to create opportunities for San Franciscans to receive free whole body care in community gardens throughout the city. There website is http://sfrefresh.blogspot.com/
We are also working on making it easier for people to get involved with our farm project. We now have a rough list of roles and tasks that are available. Roles being jobs that involve being a leader or coordinator of some aspect of the Free Farm and task involve just helping out with some job. For example we now have a calendar coordinator (Finn) and we have tasks like making a vegan lunch once a month for our volunteer crew.
We are actually looking for people in the month of January to sign up on our calendar to prepare a lunch in January (or sign up to make a lunch once a month on a regular day...either Saturdays or Wednesdays). If you are interested please contact Finn wildoatsandnettles@gmail.com.
I encourage everyone to come out and visit us in the new year. Also, if you show up at the Free Farm in the next week I will have my latest cartoon that I will be handing out. I also will soon have fliers for our event and people can come by the farm to pick one up or contact me.
Here are some of the last photos I took last year at the Free Farm:
 |
| our last strawberry harvest |
 |
| the last of the trombone squash |
 |
| delicious Empanada from a neighbor made with squash she got from our Saturday Free Farm Stand...unfortunately not vegan and probably with some chicken flavor in it, but a beautiful gesture of sharing |
 |
| our neighbor who made the Empanada |
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