The Stand in Pictures

I thought I would tell the story of the Free Farm Stand this week mostly in pictures with captions. It was Pride Day and perhaps the crowd was a bit smaller, but I couldn’t really tell and we gave most of the produce away by the end.

Tim is one of our Stanford summer interns who is helping us at the Stand and at the Free Farm. We also have Brittany another summer intern from Stanford. She isn’t in any of these photos because she was behind the camera. I really appreciate all the help these days since I am trying to have others run the stand so I can concentrate on the Free Farm and growing seedlings, food, and flowers.

Here is our amazing Mike, a long time volunteer. I thought about calling him the Free Hummus Guy, but he has branched out into jams with all our over ripe summer fruit and delicious pickles. Really his pickling efforts have inspired me to try making them myself, he says they are so simple. He says he learns everything from YouTube.  He was also responsible for bringing surplus dry pinto beans and brown rice and relish to the stand this week.  Are we becoming more like a food pantry?

I brought  new fliers in English, Spanish, and Chinese explaining to new people what the program is all about. Guess what it isn’t all about being a free food giveaway (you can read the English version of the flier  at the end of this blog). Behind the fliers are seedlings we gave away from the greenhouse at the Free Farm. They were very popular although I think we grew too many collard seedlings. I am working on putting more sprinklers in the greenhouse (see our Free Farm Blog) and hopefully that will improve the quality of the starts, because they seemed to me a bit stressed out and yellow. Maybe they need a drink of compost tea also.

Here is me with a basket of loquats I picked from my backyard tree that morning (the fruit does not store well). I had to climb my 14 foot tall orchard ladder to get to them and I also used a fruit picker on a pole to get some of them. Most people liked them, though many people didn’t know what they are. Once they tasted them they were hooked. Also, in the photo are some zucchini from the Free Farm and a few Japanese cucumber that grew in our hothouse.

 

Quite a summer spread as usual

Mike’s pickles and jams

Many kids wanted to take home seedlings. I think we all have at an early age a connnection to the wonderment of nature and somewhere along the way we lose it.

Like I said the seedlings were popular and I hope to grow more variety and better quality seedlings soon. By the way we can use more potting soil, if you have  a source for this valuable resource. So far we haven’t had to buy any.

 

At least one person suggested we try to let people know what we are doing, what the vision of our stand is. I tried to explain it here and had this translated into different languages to help with the communication. A number of people told me they appreciated the flier and a couple people said they liked what we were trying to do. There was still a bit of pushiness in the line around the time the second load of food came. I can understand it as the producce looked so abundant and delicious, especially the strawberries and fresh fruit. Hopefully everyone will have time to read the flier when they get home.

Yay Summer!

I just love these long sunny days and as we enter into summer, it seems so right. I wasn’t at the farm stand yesterday, but got reports that it was a beautiful and bountiful day. I knew that because I loaded the van with many boxes of produce left over from the farmer’s market and also with a small amount of produce from our free farm. We have been harvesting our summer squash.  Here are a couple of pictures from the Free Farm Stand yesterday.

As I may have reported in previous blogs, I am trying to find others to keep the Free Farm Stand running every week.  I love the project and I think what we are doing is unique among programs that try to fight hunger and food insecurity in our city. If we all believe in creating a world that is sustainable, we also have to look at our own lives and figure out how to make things workable. That includes maintaining relationships with friends and family  as well as self. Making room and time to breathe deep in all ways. So I realized that I am over extended and that I have to find people to help run some of the projects that I have sort of fallen into. I want to shore up other projects that need more attention, like growing more food for the stand and especially growing more seedlings. I also have new projects that I want to help launch. One is growing flowers to give away (reccently a friend typed up a beautifully detailed 7 page plan called  “A Free Flower Stand…How to Make it Happen). The other crazy dream I have is to figure out how to get a building to start a commune that can help run some of these projects. I have always believed that the most efficient way to do service work is by living together with a bunch of people and sharing income.  In the old days we called it intentional communities.

I have talked in a past blog of the Urban Kibbutz and I am also inspired by the Catholic Worker model of houses of hospitality. Recently I got a newsletter from the Catholic Worker Farm in Sheep Ranch. It mentioned a gathering of Catholic Worker Farmers and Urban Gardeners that happened in January at their farm. They were celebrating the spirit of Peter Maurin who co-founded the Catholic Worker movement with Dorothy Day in 1933. One of Peter Maurin’s ideas was to form rural farming communities to teach city dwellers farming and back to the land ideas. I think now more than ever we need to not only to form rural farm communities, but  urban farm communities. So the idea of combining urban farming communities with service to the poor  and down and out would be my ideal way of living.

So as a step in this direction I am trying to take off at least two days a month from the Free Farm Stand until we can get more people to do other days. This week while I was gone from the stand I actually went on a field trip to the Stonestown Mall Farmer’s Market to see where our second shift of left over produce came from (I like to  know where the food comes from that we give out). It is a pretty big market with about 26 farmers present. Like I knew already not all the farmers are organic. If you go to this link you can see the list of the farmers who go to this market : http://www.agriculturalinstitute.org/index/getMarketDetails?type=Markets&id=20090528140518.active. Here is the biographies of some of these farmers: http://www.agriculturalinstitute.org/index/biographies.  I noticed a sign up saying that they no longer will allow farmers to put up signs saying no sprays because they are too confusing to shoppers. So the best way to find out what is likely to be on your food that you get is to ask what methods the farmers use to control bugs or how do they fertilize their crops. Of course if you grow your own food or get it from the Free Farm or other gardeners that bring produce to the stand  you don’t need to worry about how it is grown it is all organic.

Right n

Hecka Local Bites the Dust

I have been trying to take off two days a month from being at the Free Farm Stand on Sundays (the first and third Sundays of the month) and from what I have heard everything worked out well last week while I was gone. Sorry if there is no one blogging yet for those times I am not there.  I heard that there was a large harvest from the Free Farm; because of the rainy weather on the day of the Saturday Farm Stand, not many people showed up, so there was more produce for the Sunday Stand.

This week the harvest at the farm was pretty minimal and it was all given away at the farm.  I felt sort of bad that there was so little our Hecka Local  brand produce this week on our table. I felt it not worth putting out the signs labeling the two kinds of produce we had.  There was a lot of produce from the farmers market, a huge amount, and it’s now a fact that we are now getting  tons of summer produce left over from local farmers. I am still overwhelmed what an abundant society we live and there is so much waste everywhere. Just the other day a local market was throwing a lot of non-organic slightly damaged or ripe produce into a green bin. At least San Francisco has green bins and composts some of the waste. It seems that if one wants to live sustainably in the city, besides growing one’s own food and harvesting fruit trees that need picking, we need to live off the waste. Fortunately the Free Farm Stand for now has a great free resource for locally grown, mostly organic and all fresh produce. It is hard at times to think that this produce is really a waste product, but it is.

I did have some lemons that my friend Erik brought on his way back here from Southern California and as lemons go these were particularly beautiful and big. I also brought the first of the loquats from my huge backyard tree. Fruit is coming into season. The Secret Garden has lots of cherry plums starting to redden up and we are looking for someone with no fear of heights to climb a large ladder and pick them some morning. I was super happy that Pam showed up with a lot of bounty from the City College garden  including a large amount of beautiful lettuce and a handful of boquets from flowers she picked (sorry no one photographed her treasures). Mike amazed us again with homemade pickles from cucumbers from last weeks table. This was his first try making pickles, using a recipe from youtube. They were simple and delicious.
Mikes pickles
As you can see in the photographs, I did manage to bring seedlings to give away and they were pretty popular. I met a woman named Lilian who took some seedlings and told me she made a Foosball Planter and planted the seedlings she gathered before from the stand. She sent me an email today with photos of her planter and wrote this informative and sweet email: “With the Free Farm Stand’s donation, we were able to get things going in our container garden and eventually transfer them over to the foosball table: Chard, Kale, Cherry tree, Tomato plant, red lettuce, garlic, and potato… thank you for contributing to this wonderful community-based agriculture educational experience. This is what makes San Francisco truly a wonderful place to call home” I agree and this to me is some of what the core philosophy of the Free Farm Stand is about: A neighborhood of people helping each other grow food and sharing their surplus if they have it with those in need.  Here are some photos:
I am always saying this but I think one of the best things about the stand is that I meet so many wonderful people every week.

The other excitement going on these days is at the Free Farm. Thanks to Carmen, we have a lively blog these days at http://thefreefarm.org/ and she documents the amazing work going on there every week. At the farm there often seems to be new challenges coming up from rats eating all our seedlings to night visitors taking things that are not locked up. What really amazes me is that despite our setbacks and at times what seems like lack of organization, we get so much done at the farm. I love it. Right now we are in need of a driver with or without a big truck to drive to Oakland probably to pick up a load of manure. That’s what make our farm grow and brings food to our table.

There is an article in today’s Chronicle about Urban Homesteading http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/c/a/2011/06/12/HOO91JL14L.DTL.  A friend Ruby is organizing a tour of urban farms in the eastbay this Sunday June 19th and no one turned away for lack of funds. I personally love garden tours and that is where I often learn a lot. I must admit though as much as I love animals and gardens together, I don’t like the idea of popularizing the butchering of animals  as a cool thing to do.  Most of these gardens/farms have animals it looks like and I wonder how many kill the male offspring or off the old chickens. Some raise rabbits for meat. In the article there is some mention of the controversy around changing the zoning code in cities to let people raise animals. Ruby makes the argument that “Look at the number of people who take really poor care of their cats and dogs, and yet it’s completely legal to have six cats,”.  If we were to change the law to let people raise dogs and cats to butcher and eat, I wonder if urban homesteaders would be ok with that? Would they complain if their neighbor was barbequing a home grown cat?  I know these are all personal choices whether to eat meat or not and it is probably better that people who eat meat grow and kill it themselves, but I am one of those NIMBY people I guess. You can learn more about the tour and register here: www.iuhoakland.com/farmtour.html.