Free Farm Stand Mojo

As fall is slipping away and the new year approaches, I get a bit nostalgic about the early days of the Free Farm Stand, when we had a small table inside the garden and the project was in it’s sweetest most personal incarnation.  Here are some pictures from the first day in 2008:

all the produce from my backyard and a neighbor/friend down the street

all brought to the park by bicycle cart

a neighborhood family whom I still see around

This is also a season when I spend more time slowing down and reflecting on things and of course trying to count my blessings a little more than I normally do. This project we call the Free Far Stand is really not just about fighting hunger and food insecurity, nor just about teaching people to pay attention to where their food comes from (and getting a chance to have a relationship with urban farmers), or paying attention to the connection between diet and health, or even  just getting people to know their neighbors more.

What we are about at the core is hoping to inspire people to shift their mindset and world view.  To get in touch with the abundance that is out there and to act out of generosity and compassion. To believe in magic, the power of dreams, and miracles. To be thankful. To make love in many ways. To have faith.This is different than the propaganda that is fed us today from various sources…like the message to get ahead as a first priority (with a career or a job), to consume,  to buy and sell, in short to get real.

From my experience having lived in the crazy world I describe above, the rewards have been too many to describe. One example I can give, is that when I come home from the Free Farm Stand although I am exhausted, I feel great happiness and a certain stillness inside.

Here are some photos from the yesterday’s Stand:

28 lbs of sunchokes from the Esperanza garden (the Free Farm was closed on Saturday

 and thus no Free Farm Produce at the Stand

passion fruit from the garden down the street…I just put some fruit in a smoothie and it was delicious

the African Blue basil in full bloom still attracting the bees

free lettuce seedlings 

we had boxes of green beans left over at the end that came in the second shift

I love these two pictures above. Clara and her twins are in Oakland, but still with us in spirit. Cristina took her some lettuce starts to put in her new garden.

On a subject that has nothing to do with Farm Stands, but is one more thing to be grateful for, I stumbled upon this internet site that is about “sharing the sounds of birds around the world”, if you need a break from farming or whatever:  http://www.xeno-canto.org/ Then you can get  back outside and hear the bird sounds live and say thanks..

Beets not Bombs Romaine not Rockets

We are coming up on my favorite holiday, a special day of the year for us all to be Thankful. Yet it seems difficult to talk about  my feelings of gratefulness and thanks when the world is filled with war and the suffering it brings to everyone caught up in that violence.  I am particularly thinking about the Mid East right now and the multiple conflicts going on in that part of the planet.

One has to believe in peace and the power of acting out of love and kindness towards each other. That is my prayer as we move into the holiday season of Peace and Joy.

At the Free Farm Stand we are so blessed with abundance, not only a wealth of good produce but good people. A place where neighbors meet neighbors and talk. In an article I read recently about the anti-GMO initiative that lost at the ballot,  Michael Pollan wrote “Confirming the obvious, one social scientist found that people have 10 times as many conversations at the farmers’ market as they do at the supermarket….City meets country. Kids discover what food is. Activists circulate petitions. The farmers’ market has become the country’s liveliest new public square, an outlet for our communitarian impulses and a means of escaping, or at least complicating, the narrow role that capitalism usually assigns to us as “consumers.” At  Free Farm Stand  (which could be thought of as a Free Farmer’s Market), fruit and vegetables are free and we promote sharing of surplus and helping those in need. There is an opportunity for neighbors to not  just be consumers, but to participate in the show being put on, either by bringing something to share that they grew or by volunteering. I believe this is what rejuvenates our society and specifically our neighborhoods, promotes local food growing and eating healthy, and is an opportunity to balance the negative in the world with something positive.

This week we had a parade of giant vegetables:

giant beet

Beets not Bombs…yes

giant kohlrabi that we cut in half

our “Hecka Local” produce including the one sweet potato grown at the Free Farm

we also had a lot of lettuce both from the Free Farm, Alemany Farm, and left over from the Ferry Building farmer’s market (and we gave away a lot of lettuce starts too)

Over Crowded

These days there is  outsourcing , open sourcing and now we also have crowdsourcing.  People who get online on the internet are seen as a crowd that can be hit upon for all kinds of things. And out of crowdsourcing came crowdfunding,  with sites like kickstarter and indiegogo (“an international crowdfunding paltform”), where people are going to the crowd of people on the internet to raise money for their thing whatever it is. Another twist on crowdfunding is the thinking that there is not only crowd creativity but crowd wisdom which is really crowd popularity or crowd fan clubism. An example is the grant (see sidebar) that we applied for from Seeds of Change.  I thought I was applying for a regular grant for $10,000, but to my frustration  I realized later that part of the grant depends on this crowd funding permutation. The grantors are depending on the crowd to help them choose who to give the money to, one of the 12 winners of the grant will get more points the more people who nominate their favorite farm project.

I myself get so embarrassed with this modern day approach to fund raising and having to basically promote yourself to everyone who might know you or to people who don’t know you but know a friend who does. I still like to hang on to the idea that we should be more involved in divine sourcing and counting on prayers than counting on votes.  After all our projects are not trying to add more brick and mortar to the material world,  but we are more involved in whipping up delicious dreams we can feed our souls on and perhaps inspire the crowd in this over crowded world.

I took on the job of handing out numbers this week as Cat our wonderful regular number hander-outer wasn’t around. Talking about crowds, when the sun is out in the park no matter the season, we still get lots of people looking for some free local organic produce. I had to warn everyone that we didn’t have a huge amount of produce, that winter is about here, that we are a seasonal production, and we are just not growing as much nor are the farmers who donate their left-over produce to us. I was pleasantly surprised that almost everyone I talked to was so appreciative of any amount of food we had.

The odd thing is that we are still getting lots of summer vegetables (at the Free Farm we harvested the rest of our zucchini and I think we will be pulling up the last of our plants next week). Even in my backyard I still had trombone squash that was small but making fruit in almost total shade (and 18th and Rhode Island garden donated some surplus trombone too).  One big surprise was that we got literally hundreds of pounds of dry farmed organic Early Girl tomatoes and also boxes of eggplant, and it is getting close to the middle of November!

red and green bok choy from the Free Farm (we gave away seedlings too)

Our new sign

Lolita with artichoke flower from her garden

Zoila & Annamaria two other great volunteers