The Free Food Forest

Last week I attended the monthly Permaculture meeting where the guest speaker Toby Hemenway author of Gaia’s Garden: A Guide to Home-Scale Permaculture spoke. Most of what he talked about is here on his website: http://www.patternliteracy.com/203-is-sustainable-agriculture-an-oxymoron. He also quotes Jared Diamond who wrote the article "The Worst Mistake In The History Of The Human Race" referring to the "adoption of agriculture" by humans (http://anthropology.lbcc.edu/handoutsdocs/mistake.pdf).

Toby Hemenway was making the argument that the development of agriculture was a big mistake. "Agriculture in any form is inherently unsustainable. At its doorstep can also be laid the basis of our culture’s split between humans and nature, much disease and poor health, and the origins of dominator hierarchies and the police state. He was proposing something in-between hunting and gathering or foraging and agriculture. He calls this horticulture or gardening, "using simple methods to raise useful plants and animals." Horticulturists use polycultures, tree crops, perennials, and limited tillage, and have an intimate relationship with diverse species of plants and animals." In other words, permaculture is the way to be growing food according to Toby.

His talk resonated with my own feelings, though I have never thought of myself as a permaculturist, I have always liked the idea of planting trees and more perennials. I started thinking that we should go further in that direction at the Free Farm. Even though we don't know how long we will be on the land at Eddy and Gough, we should plant more trees anyway and perennials, and make our Free Farm more of a Free Food Forest. We have already started already moving in that direction as Ross went to the Merritt College plant sale on Saturday and brought some perennial plants to the farm that we will be planting after they grow a bit more.

We have had some wonderful visitors to the Free Farm in the last few weeks. One day we had about 14 people visiting from a company called UBM (United Business Media) who were on a "quest" with a group called Leaders' Quest. They got their hands dirty as well as learned about the Free Farm. The purpose of their quest was ".... when we expose people (especially younger managers) to inspiring leaders working in different sectors from them, we can have an impact by causing them to think differently about the impact of their work, how they do more good and less harm, how they affect communities, and so forth." Last Saturday we had two women visiting from San Palo Brazil who are working on a project called Cidades para Pessoas (Cities for People). "we travel around the world with our folding bikes looking for good ideas that improved the cities for its inhabitants." They were a lot of fun to meet and work with and some of us will be in a short movie posted on their website (in Portuguese). Here are some nice photos from Julie who is one of our really helpful and always cheerful volunteers who is a great artist and vegan to boot. You can see all her photos from last Saturday here: http://www.flickr.com/photos/funcrunch/sets/72157631718215069/. Her blog that she writes is here has a lot of good information about vegan cooking and next week she is going to write about the Free Farm: http://funcrunch.livejournal.com/tag/veganmofo2012.

Juliana and Joyce who retured after a few weeks of illness

 still getting strawberries

 Natália and Juliana from Brazil harvesting

Yacón root

 

 

our seed collection

Turning Over a New Leaf

The Free Farm is changing seasons and and most of the summer harvest is gone (we are still harvesting the summer tomatoes) so we are having less to harvest. Here is a photo from the Free Farm Stand in the Mission of the one large onion we grew and a big zucchini from our second planting of summer squash. In the photo there are also some small trombone squash that we are still harvesting.

We have also been harvesting Pepino dulce and the last of the rocoto peppers (we love perennial plants from the Andes)

I didn't photograph the over forty pounds of leeks we harvested nor the raspberries or strawberries that are going strong. Nor did aI get a shot of the beautiful Brussels Sprout plant we pulled up...one in about 6 plants had large enough to harvest sprouts. In fact , I didn't take photos at all at the last few workdays, because I get too busy trying to keep all the volunteers busy.

The leaves haven't started falling off our trees yet and in fact we still have unripe peaches on our late peach John Muir. Also, the fruit on our fig hasn't ripened yet and the sunchokes are getting close to harvesting. But fall is coming or maybe it is here and it's time to turn over a new leaf.

Please come by and help us get the the winter vegetable plants in the ground. We have a lot of cabbage, beets, lettuce, and carrots that need planting.  In October we will plant garlic and fava beans too. Plus the greenhouse keeps us busy as well growing the seedlings not only our farm and Alemany Farm needs, but we support  other gardens and gardeners around the city. 

Here is a notice from Esperanza Gardens whom we grow seedlings for:

Next SUNDAY, SEPT 30th from 12pm to 5pm...... We will be having a beautiful gathering at Esperanza Gardens. There will be musicians from Zambaleta performing, the cob oven cooking up pizzas with garden grown veggies, and fall/winter seedlings to put into the Earth. But the most important thing is that you will be sharing and participating in all these activities with new and old friends, out doors, in the lovely mission district. As we transition into fall and winter we need to be reminded of our community, our friends, our support! This is an event not to be missed.  Check out the flyer for this event on Facebook. If you would like to perform or volunteer with set up, cooking, break down, please contact me directly at alanacorpuz@gmail.com ESPERANZA GARDENS Florida ST btwn 18th and 19th SUNDAY, SEPT 30th 12pm to 5pm .....Also, the garden is open to the public every Wednesday from 3 to 5pm. Come on by. If you would like to garden other days please just let me know!

Going Steady

We are going steady at the Free Farm with Mother Earth, Sister Soil, Brother Bug, Bee, and Bird. At the same time the Free Farm is going steady. This picture of our seedling collection sitting outside the greenhouse,  baby plants toughening themselves off for the real deal of life in the farm fast lane says it all. Plus one of our Free Farmers, Pancho who is in the photo completes the story of  what makes the Free Farm tick, it is the hands of many great volunteers with a passion to grow food for those in need.

This is going to be quickie in terms of writing this week. I am about to take of for the The National Heirloom Exposition being held in Santa Rosa (http://www.theheirloomexpo.com/). It is being held in conjunction with the California Rare Fruit Growers Festival of Fruit which I love going to when I can. These kinds of events are where I learn the most, by meeting other plant enthusiasts, especially on tours of quirky gardener's home gardens and orchards. Last year I also scored some really beautiful squash that we gave away at the stand.

The Free Farm is growing well and we seem to be in transition. There are a lot of beds opening up and we are working hard to get plants in for the winter season.  So the greenhouse is busy as well as outside the greenhouse as we plant, plant, plant, and prepare beds.

Last week we had a wonderful visit from the Thomas Wang and his City College students He is the new City College teacher of horticulture who luckily replaced Pam Pierce and kept her class going.  It was nice having him around, I learned a lot walking around with him and his class, giving him a tour and the same time learning the names of flies and weeds. Here is a weed I have been wondering about...he called it horse weed:

I looked it  up it's scientific name is  Conyza canadensis (in the Sunflower Family: Asteraceae). Also know as mare's tale. I love knowing what is growing in our garden. While looking this up I found this guy who has made all these cool and educational videos and he made one about this: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=T2hAt6oFDfU.
Herre we are checking out the lovage:

Here are some pictures from the week before...we had a huge harvest:

 Stanley weighs it all

 some of the stuff on our cart to give away

 a handsome cabbage

artichoke

Two announcements:

My friend that teaches at USF and is a wonder woman in all the great things she does in promoting urban agriculture and homesteading sent me this flier. The meal has vegan options and she thinks it is vegetarian too. The Farm Stand is "by donation and covers the ingredients not available to us in our garden and needed to cook the fare at our farm stand and the free dinners. No one is ever turned away for lack of funds."

Then there is the Human Be In: http://humanbein.org/?page_id=206
Pancho and I are doing a skillshare and despite the title ( I like it  but is only part of  what I want to share), I will hopefully be talking about how to start a karma yoga type project and make it work.)

Spreading the Good

One aspect of our Free Farm is that it is home to a number of pollinators including hummingbirds, butterflies, native bees, and our honeybees.  They come around to check out the plants we are growing to attract them and they do their thing of moving pollen around and spreading it from male to female flower.

We need the pollinators. They pollinate we eat.

The other pollinators we have are the human type that drop in our farm either to visit or to lend a hand. They bring stories to share of places they have been or where they have worked or played. I am always amazed how each week someone new arrives, an not just a someone, usually a beautiful someone, a someone with something inspiring to share, if not just themselves.  I have trouble keeping up with all the names of our visitors, but I love them all and the riches they bring to the Free Farm.

Like all pollinators we need the human type too to help us grow our spiritual food and community. It is so sweet for us all to inspire each other. 

our raspberries are coming in

One week it was like international day with visitors from Quebec, Italy, India, England, Virginia, and a few other places I can't remember. Last week a woman and her daughter came by, the mother visiting from Puerto Rico. Of course, often the conversation turns to plants and food and the mother and daughter shared some exotic  fruit they like to eat from Puerto Rico. It is called Quenepa (Melicoccus bijugatus)and it is sort of like a lychee fruit, only it seems to have less flesh and a bigger seed. You have to suck the fruit more than eat it.

 

our last blessing circle at lunch included new visitors/farmer/beekeeper/family from Half Moon Bay and Jeanette from Peru who came to us via Pancho his the meditation Friday evenings

The Free Farm has been so off the hook with green beans, tomatoes, summer squash, strawberries, basil, and kale.  The peak  of all those foods has been reached as we move into fall. John from Alemany Farm has heroically taken on the greenhouse and seedling production, but just keeping the beds full with the next crop of plants has been a bit of a challenge.

I wrote about the Human Be in coming up in September over at our our blog for the Free Farm Stand, http://freefarmstand.org/.

I wrote:"Pancho and I are doing  a skill share  starting at 3pm on Friday at HANC  recycling center and Kezar Gardens ” (at 2:300pm sitting in receptive silence…bring a cushion for your tush) called Creating Community Through Serving: Living without Conventional Currency; and Disobeying with Great Love. This will touch on how to start a sustainable Free Project and Doing things Free plus insights into Living with Little or no money plus…" Also I mentioned this article in the Chronicle that talks about the loss of  Urban Farms in the city, and the Free Farm is on the list of farms to possibly go bye bye. http://www.sfbg.com/2012/08/21/farmville-real.

Instead of worrying about eviction which may take 2-3 years, we have a lot of farming work to do, so we continue to plant and grow soil. Please join us to share this wonderful opportunity to be of service in such a fun way. We continue to need people  who want to learn farming and who can eventually take lead workdays. also, since we provide a vegan lunch for the volunteers, we can use more regular cooks.

Labor of Love

I have been giving a lot of tours recently and talking a lot about this and that about our Free Farm.  Thinking about the farm now, the thing that stands out in my mind   is that we have such an excellent bunch of volunteers and that they are the ones that somehow make our farm work so well. So this is a shout out and thank you to all the many people who show up and help out in some way.

One of our wonderful volunteers who was around for too short a time, Pam O'Dea, who often gave wonderful massages to our volunteers and others, has been keeping in touch through email. She had to leave town as I understand it because the high rents here pushed here out. Now she is on Cape Breton Island in Nova Scotia. Inspired by her work on the Free Farm she took up planting a vegetable garden and she just wrote me that her first harvest is in.

I also want to say that we have so many talented Free Farmers, like our bee keeper Pam, who with some other Free Farmers, printed a beautiful handout on handmade paper for OutsideLands (see previous blog post), plus making oragami pots for the event also. Then there is K who often leads us in singing at our volunteer lunch (I loved the "Thanks" chant last week). She also is an amazing pianist who played at our volunteer appreciation night and here is a heads up for a free recital she is playing soon:

"I will play classical music (Bach, Beethoven, Chopin, etc.) and improvise on some of my original compositions.

My students:will play more traditional, classical, and jazzy tunes +duets.

These kids are amazing (ages 10, 10 and 9, respectively) and I'm pretty proud of them.

Come one, come all--it's guaranteed entertainment! "

When: Sunday, August 19th @ 5 pm - 6:30 pm

Where: Sherman Clay piano store, 647 Mission St (between 2nd and 3rd, close to Montgomery BART Station)

Reception to follow.  Free.  Donations welcome ($5 - $10 suggested).

http://www.facebook.com/events/402212269837392/

This is what makes the Free Farm so special in my mind is the community of beautiful stars shining in their unique way and spreading the light and love around them.

Last Saturday we hosted 23 visitors from around the country that were part of the bicycle tour for the American Community Garden Association conference being held here in San Francisco. I was part of the team that made lunch for everyone and I lead them all on a 30 minute tour. They were all such a great group of people, almost all gardeners and many involved in wonderful projects themselves. When they left, I felt they got something out of the tour and they seemed very happy with the visit.

Here is a photo of one my favorite things we grow at the Free Farm, pepino dulce (Solanum muricatum). We harvested a bunch on Saturday and brought them to the Free Farm Stand on Sunday:

The pepino are the small fruit with purple stripes and tastes like a cross between melon and cucumber.

The Free Farm Plants Inspiration at Outside Lands

Outside Lands Music and Arts Festival took place in Golden Gate Park August 10-12 to a sold-out crowd of 195,000 people.

With a line-up including bands like the Foo Fighters, Neil Young, and Metallica, there was something for every musical taste. And for the times in-between sets, there were many attractions scattered throughout the park. 

One attraction, Eco Lands, invited The Free Farm to participate in their Urban Gardening section and we were thrilled to have the opportunity to get people excited about urban farming.

Little Pots with Big Impact

Our project was showing people how to make origami pots out of newspaper and plant vegetable seeds in them. They could either take the pots home or leave them with us to plant at The Free Farm. 

Erk (one of our fantastic volunteers) waiting to show people how to fold. He practiced at home until he could fold like nobody's business.

Here are the instructions on how to fold the pots. They are very easy to make and are a great way to use up all those old Examiners.

People really seemed to enjoy getting their hands dirty.

We had several different seeds to choose from so folks could plant what they liked best. These girls are planting kale.

K (another amazing volunteer) showing someone how to fold a pot.

The beer in his hand may have made the folding challenging but he was determined to make a pot. As K said: "I think it changed his life." 

Our involved, interactive project gave people a chance to take a pause from all the  high energy in the crowds and really, isn't farming all about the slow process anyway?  These two are interested in volunteering at The Free Farm.  We hope to see them soon.

It was great to exchange stories about urban farming. The woman on the right was visiting from Alaska and wants to pursue urban gardening there. Maybe she'll use newspaper origami pots for her seedlings.

It was fun to see the surprise on people's faces when they'd open up the newspaper  and it was transformed into a pot.

Zero Waste, Maximum Magic

In the true spirit of Eco Lands, not only did we not create any waste with our project but we also managed to up-cycle materials that were otherwise headed for the waste stream. Old t-shirts and coffee sacks were used to make the paper we hand printed with the history and contact info for The Free Farm.

Thank you to our many volunteers who committed their energy to create a magical Free Farm experience at Outside Lands – the photos here give just a glimpse of the fun and community building that happened over the weekend. 

And of course, anyone can get the full Free Farm experience by joining us on Wednesdays and Saturdays from 10:00 AM to 2:00 PM and the first Sunday of the month from 10:00 AM to noon at Eddy and Gough! Click "Get Involved" in the main menu above to learn more.  

Land and Liberty

Last Saturday we had planned a special event and the idea was to work with some employees from Kaiser Permanente who is giving us a small grant to buy seeds and supplies for the farm. Just before 9am Supervisor Christina Olague walked in our gate as we arranged she came to speak at our event. She seemed to be a nice person and we spoke looking out over the hillside planted with pollinators and habitat plants. I explained that we saw ourselves as a resurrection of the church that burnt down years ago. That we felt that the farm was a sacred space and that feeding our spiritual selves was as important as growing food and giving it to people in need. I saw that she really perked up when I mentioned that and that she could relate to what I was saying. I also mentioned that bees and the birds were part of our congregation as well as the many people that come by and that when we have to move they will too.

 I was the first person to speak and I just welcomed our small gathering to the Free Farm (there were mostly free farm volunteers, I didn't see any Kaiser employees, and Pam from St. Paulus Church was there). I mainly told a little about our history and mentioned the fact that we have grown over 7,000 pounds of produce since we began. Then I introduced Supervisor Olague and I pointed out that she was a supporter of urban agriculture and was one of the first members of the Board of Supervisors to support the recently passed new urban agriculture legislation to create a sort of Department of Urban Agriculture in San Francisco. The supervisor mainly spoke of her support for projects like ours, Hayes Valley Farm, Alemany Farm, and the Kezar Gardens at the HANC Recycling Center. She said that she wanted to see if there could be a way to have more permanent spaces available for agriculture projects in the city. Later in the day she tweeted " Urban Ag is an exciting movement in SF - visited Free Farm at Eddy and Gough today-committed to finding permanent spaces" The last person to speak was Steve from Kaiser Permanente, who shared with us that he used to be a Forrest Ranger and is a gardener. He explained that what Kaiser wants to do is make it easy for people to have good health, So they see having gardens as making it easy, having open space as making it easy, having access to fresh vegetables and fruits makes it easy. That is why they are supporting projects like ours. He gave us a framed certificate that I spaced out on reading, but I guess it officially states that they like us and support our work. Hooray!

The ominous black cloud of doubt did hang over us though, doubt that we can stay on the land for more than two or three years. Personally I am always just trying to go with the flow and believe that the divine powers that be will take care of us. We just need to keep serving and spread the love.

Now I want to talk about urban land and the need to have what Supervisor Olague said as more permanent places available for urban agriculture. First of all, I think what is needed is both more permanent open space and urban farmland. I think there should be a halt in development in the city and that we try to reuse any buildings first, especially unused buildings, before we tear down or build more new buildings.

 I got this inspiring email below the other day: Hi Free Farm,

Thank you for all the hard work that goes into creating and maintaining one of San Francisco's brightest spaces. We in the Space TranSFormers are very disturbed by the possibility of your eviction and are starting to take some action to inspire all of San Francisco to stand up for keeping your educational, food-bearing, green space just where it is. We understand the temporary use agreement of your space. We also think it is therefore up to the people of San Francisco to stand up and say: "We want to keep our green spaces. We want more permaculture in the city. We want the Free Farm to stay right where it is." Anyway, we love you all.

To start building some momentum to retain the Free Farm, along with Haye's Valley Farm and the HANC community garden and native plant nursery, we are inviting people to a gathering in Golden Gate Park September 14th through 16th: the Human Be In (g) 2012 ! We invite people to come together, teach a workshop, share a skill, play music, make art, cook a meal, and simply be. Through this, we hope to lay the groundwork for an edible forest garden in the city, similar to Seattle's Beacon Hill Forest Garden, the first public food forest in the nation.