Free Farm Stand Alchemy

The chemistry of the Free Farm Stand is actually pretty simple. Throw up a tent and set up a table in the same place and with the same hours every week. By word of mouth let neighbors know what you are doing (trying to make the world better by growing organic food to give away). Then wait to see who shows up to get produce or helps out or observes the interesting scene. There are other details, but basically it is all about consistency and generosity in spirit and in deed.

The huge pile of bread showing up in the photos now is an example of that alchemy, and personally I find it pretty exciting. It started out with someone wanting to contribute something to the stand because she liked what was going on. She just started working in a bakery that was over baking and threw out fresh organic bread at the end of the day. Workers were allowed to take it home, so she started bringing bread on Bart for the stand. Then another neighbor offered to pick up the bread for her by car. She in turn gave some to her neighbors and to another woman who gives out food to people in her reading program. Then the Farm Stand wound up with eighty loaves of bread (one of volunteers counted them)! We had some left over that I will bring to the soup kitchen that I work in on Tuesdays.

It was nice to get a lot of help this week which allowed me to talk to people and to hand out fresh picked berries for tasting.

Summer is for gleaning

I got an email from a friend that sort of sums things up about the amount of fruit we had this week, it was a bit unreal: “As of late I am especially impressed by your resourceful fruit harvesting in the area! Here we make special trips to take oj to farms outside the city to see where much of our food comes from, and of course lots of it does, but you have really opened my eyes to the continual food production from nooks and crannies all around us.” Actually my eyes are opening too.

Saturday morning I had so many apples that I brought some to the Julian Food Pantry on 15^th and Julian. Some of them were the last apples from Candlestick Point that Jo had picked and some were from the apples we picked from my friend who lives in Glen Park (we also picked some pears there). On Saturday morning I picked more apples and lemons from a neighbor on Folsom at 23^rd. I also picked about a quarter of a bucket of apples from the tree overhanging Balmy Ave. I decided to use the fruit picker I have on a pole instead of hauling a ladder there. I prefer picking the fruit by hand so they don’t fall and break. After I picked the apples a woman came out her door that is right across from the tree and she didn’t know the tree was there (it might not be so obvious unless you notice an apple on the ground). I gave her one and she agreed with my that they were sweet and delicious. I want to go back there in the winter and get grafting wood from it.

This Sunday we had four milk crates filled with apples and at the end of the day we had less than a half left. And those were mostly the apples I picked off the ground that were damaged and funky.

A woman who didn’t speak English brought a bag of lemons from her tree. And two neighbors Steve and Kelly came by with beautiful extra produce from his dad’s home garden in Sebastopol…delicious dry farmed tomatoes, several varieties of raspberries, and red Serrano peppers that were out of this world!

It looks like Fridays and some Saturday mornings work best for me gleaning fruit. I plan to go this Friday to get more peaches and apples. One thing I have started doing is picking up the rotting fruit under the trees. It is a nice thing to do for folks and with apples helps prevent the spread of the codling moth worm that gets in the apples. I have even started hauling away the rotted fruit in cases where there is no compost pile (I imagine the fruit makes good compost).

Two friends from Morro Bay dropped by and brought some homemade applesauce. They “glean” produce all year long by visiting their local dumpsters. A lot of the fruit they get is organic (it is so expensive it tends to get thrown out first because people don’t buy it as much is their theory). They get so much food they give a lot away. John even brings his blender to the gym and makes smoothies for his friends after they work out. I realized from hanging out with them that I should get a fruit strainer so I can easily make sauce with the damaged fruit. They cut off the bad parts, no peeling or coring, and cook the fruit until it is soft and then throw it into their strainer. They have an old Hobart KitchenAid that has a fruit straining attachment that works well (apparently different than the models made now).

I was talking to another friend that wants to someday set up a food processing kitchen or a food processing tool library so we can share the equipment that we don’t need all year. I’ve got apples now I need to process if anyone has an unused fruit strainer lying around.

Here are pictures related to the fruit picking that went on this week:

Fruit picking with a view

On Friday, David, Brother Max and I picked apples and pears from a backyard above Laidley St. I think in the Glen Park neighborhood. The woman whose house it is said the trees were there before they moved in (20 years ago) and we were thinking they were maybe fifty years old. She said the apple tree fell over at one point and it is still producing tons of apples. The views from here place were fantastic.

It was fun going to a neighborhood in San Francisco you haven’t been to before (like we did last week to McLaren Park). David has been exploring stairway walks in the city for a while and told us we should check out the Harry stairs while we we there. So after the fruit picking we walked down the Harry stairs to Laidley St. and were amazed at the sense of being in the woods rather than in a city. The houses on Laidley St. are prety awesome too with some quirky architecture.

On that fruit picking trip I found two backyards with lemon trees that looked very unpicked.

The Vegetable Story

Our selection of vegetables continues to be modest. I am harvesting lettuce, kale, a few zucchini squash, cucumbers (actually one), hot peppers, lots of tomatoes, and some herbs. I have more seedlings started and I am actually behind in planting. I also have been behind in growing sprouts. Wow, being a farmer is a lot of work!