Enter the Mysterious

I was given a T-shirt found on the street (it was washed first) with Einstein riding a bicycle.  The quote on it started with “The most beautiful and deepest experience a man can have is the sense of the mysterious.” I find this true in my daily life, especially since I am a part time farmer.

When I am at the Free Farm Stand and the sun is out, and it is the most beautiful day,  the tables are loaded not only with Hecka Local produce, but a lot of yummy organic bounty left over from the farmer’s market too, the most beautiful volunteers and guests, and I am a bit exhausted and tired and yet feel this mysterious love vibe keeping me going,  like EveryReady batteries, that keeps me long lasting, and I find myself late at night finally cleaning up after making a boat load of tomato sauce and canning it.

When I am the Free Farm and I discover a gigantic trombone squash hidden in the climbing foliage, and I remember planting that squash from a tiny seed and I feel the mysterious power of creation  in my hands.

 When I am with the honeybees outside their hive home and everything about them is wondrous and mysterious and holy.

When I am with the flowers and I make bouquets  to give away, the patterns and colors are created by a mysterious hand.

Here are some pictures from the day:

apples  from York St.

lots of tomatoes from the Free Farm and Alemany Farm, plus ground cherries, peppers, zuccchini, and greens

Free Farm tomatoes…a labor of love to pick them and no tomato left behind

tomatoes from the farmer’s market

abundance of figs plus plums peaches and nectarines oh my

sheer amazing abundance

lots of flowers though some didn’t do too well in shipping

 Coming up  in a couple of weeks:

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…

 With all the abundance of Hecka Local produce growing on Hecka Local urban farms this article from the Bay Guardian is interesting and it talks about what I wrote about last week…http://www.sfbg.com/2012/08/21/farmville-real. I am still praying for divine intervention are you?


Good & Plenty

The last few weeks we have been bringing some beautiful produce from our Free Farm to the Stand. Last Sunday we brought some pepino dulce to the Stand. They are pretty good tasting like a cross between a melon and a cucumber is the best description I have heard to describe it. I like growing it because it is a perennial and it tastes good and is a beautiful fruit. Another uncommon fruit at the stand this week was Cape Gooseberry or Ground Cherry. They look similar to tomatillo but they are orange rather than green and are sweet and tangy. I just read on the Wikipedia page on this fruit that they are high in pectin and would be good to add to jam and jellies to make it gel or thicken.

I often have plants of this fruit to give away, but beware they can grow big and take up a lot of space.

I loved the variety of peppers we gave out this week, these grown in the hot house at the Free Farm.

I brought nine pounds of lettuce from my backyard to share, plus we had baby gem lettuce from the farm.

The collards and some of the kale and tomatoes were from Alemany Farm.  My friend Gary and Pancho gleaned pears from  a abandoned pear orchard behind a Safeway store in Moraga in the east bay. Some of the pears went to the newly forming Free Farm Stand in Fruitvale and we got 179lbs for our Stand.

We have a circle before we begin and one of things we like to do is give thanks for all the abundance and thanks for all the wonderful volunteer help we get . Right now the Free Farm Stand is mostly run by Goddess energy.

Rachel is an example of a  beautiful volunteer who has taken responsibility for giving out the seedlings and plants we give away.

This is a little handout we distributed about the Free Farm. Copies were made for the Outsidelands event where the Free Farm and Free Farm Stand had a booth. Pam our beekeeper and others printed this paper made from recyled clothes

Here is another great volunteer Julie who also helps at the Free Farm.

We had a lot of organic fruit left over from the farmer’s market.

Not to mention strawberries from our farm.

A friend sent me a link to this wonderful t TED talk by one of the co-founders of the  Incredible Edible initiative in Todmorden, England  that grows all  its own vegetables. I wrote about this town on my blog of January 9 of this year.  This is what we have got to start doing here in San Francisco is making our urban landscape here more edible. As  Pam Warhurst says it is not just about growing food, but starting a revolution. It is time “to invest in more kindness to ourselves and the environment”.  She is serious and is doing it! More here  http://www.incredible-edible-todmorden.co.uk/.   We can do it here as our small Free Farm Stand shows in the pictures  we post show and the fact we have recorded 30,000lbs of hecka local produce being grown and shared since 2009. (by the way already a new business has already claimed  a name for their business that is similar to ours Hella Vegan…they were part of the local street food festival held last Saturday on our neighborhood).

 

 

 

Farm Stand Angels

I believe that the Free Farm Stand is populated by the sweetest angels. They show up out of the blue and I am always charmed by their beauty and grace.

Last Sunday’s Stand must have set the Guinness World records book in terms of how much produce we had to give away. I showed up with a van filled with produce and I had to go back home to get the rest since it wouldn’t all fit in one trip. Besides the boxes of Free Farm produce there was extra left-over produce from the Farmer’s Markets, a large percent being fruit (over fifty boxes of various stone fruit and the farmers wanted to give us another fifty, but there wasn’t enough room in the Food Runner’s big truck).

The Free Farm Stand is more than just a food give away program and my emphasis has always been to create a network of neighbors growing food and sharing their surplus with those in need. So to me it is so special in my mind when others bring something to share that they grew or  gleaned. For example, I have been so grateful and appreciative of Sam from the School Farm who has been for the last month bringing some surplus produce to our Stand. The School Farm by the way is a 1/4 acre of land on the campuses of the School of the Arts (SOTA) and Academy of Arts and Sciences (AAS) and is  a “collaboration between Ecology Center of San Francisco (EcoSF), and the SOTA and AAS  school community”.  Sam is one of those angels I am writing about.

Another angel is Cristina who picked 14 pounds of plums from the Secret Garden and brought them by for us to distribute. It wasn’t like we were short of fruit, but I thought these plums and her picking them was the perfect example of what is really important. No food should get wasted and picking up the produce from the Farmer’s Market at the end of the day is a bit like gleaning and keeping good fruit out of the waste stream. But I think picking the fruit that is just a block away from the Stand is even more important, the more local the better.  It was interesting that the small plums from the Secret Garden are very popular and they were given away very quickly. Then Cristina went around the park with the basket of plums she picked and recruited two more angels to help her pick and they brought back 28 more pounds towards the end of the stand. As I was packing up I saw two neighbors collecting the plums they picked and I was surprised that none were wasted! It was one of those days too where one of our other volunteers brought plums from their community garden on Clipper St.

two women at the end going though the Hecka Local plums picked by the angels

I also found a few angels to come by after the Stand was closed to take home the mushy and soft fruit and do something with it. I am trying to create a soft fruit phone tree that I can call when we have left-over fruit that needs to be dealt with right away so all this good fruit is used and not composted. This week I  wound up with about 4 boxes of fruit that were pretty well picked over and too over ripe to deal with (though they could of been turned into wine or vinegar). I myself spent the day making and canning 15 jars of stone fruit jam and about two gallons of canned tomatoes (instead of writing this blog). Should I mention the angel that came by the Stand with a big bag of beautiful canning jars that were brand new that she found on the sidewalk, what great timing!