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

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