Author: Tree

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).

 

 

 

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!

 

It is nice to take time off from writing this blog every once in a while, especially when it feels like there isn’t anything new to say. The Free Farm Stand feels like it is running on auto-pilot or cruise control and there isn’t much else to say but that it is a lot of fun, seems like a beautiful thing, and always gives me as lots of energy and inspiration back for all the effort I put into it. It is also a good feeling to hear how much people appreciate the free produce and or the experience of the scene. I have also heard volunteers say that being part of the Free Farm Stand community of volunteers has meant a lot to them.

We are in the harvest season, the season of plenty, with plenty of summer squash from our Free Farm (read the latest Free Farm  post by yours truly here …plus plenty of kale, basil, and lettuce leaves,  tomatoes, rocoto hot peppers,  and green beans. Also, we have been able to bring some flowers to the Stand which has always been one of my goals, to share flowers with those who come by. We are rejoicing…

Last week I attended a meeting Recreation and Park held to show the pretty much final drawing design for the new park at Folsom and 17th Streets. Although we didn’t get a food forest or a farm to feed low income people in the neighborhood, there are a lot of good things in the design: a community garden with only four raised beds in boxes (most of the garden will be run communally), a hedge of trees bordering the garden (I think they said citrus trees but this could be negotiated), and a large demonstration garden for wildlife habitat and conservation which will incorporate hands- on garden educational elements, outdoor classroom and amphitheater/stageand espaliered fruit trees. They also are open to the lawn being something different than grass, like perhaps a meadow with wildflowers. Here is a picture of the design:

 The presentation from the meeting isn’t posted yet, but should be here when it is http://sfplanning.org/index.aspx?page=2273.  What is important is that now is the time that people can suggest improvements to their design. One can write the following people if they want to make suggestions to the design:  Mary Hobson is the Project Manager mary.hobson@sfgov.org. Andrea Alfonso is one of the Landscape Architects Andrea.Alfonso@sfdpw.org. Marvin Yee is the one who will take suggestions for the garden Marvin.Yee@sfgov.org. One thing people can do is write him and tell him you support the garden being run communally no individual plots, like Alemany Farm is run. Also, Oscar Grande from PODER is the one to make suggestions for the demonstration/education garden ogrande@podersf.org. He is also the one to suggest a name for the park. Also, any ideas for art in the park could be submitted to the Mary or Andrea for now (in the presentation they said that the artist Carmen Lomas Garza has been chosen by the Art Commission to be the artist for the park). Some of the ideas I want to suggest are an outdoor sink (3 compartment?), some bins for storing manure or mulch or potting soil, a lath house for harding off seedlings, a shed big enough to store a wheelbarrow,  having a big tree central to the park and naming the park after the tree, like Chestnut Park, no grassy lawn but a meadow with wildflowers, a large wooden platform for yoga and stretching, park benches that are made out of cob or ferro cement with mosaic tile (let’s take some inspiration from Gaudi and Park Guell).

Yesterday I ran into my friend Eric that runs the website diggers.org which is the diggers archives. He recently put up the inspiring French documentary made in 1998 Les Diggers de San Francisco.  The link is here  or you can see it on youtube here. Check out towards the end of the video some footage of the soup kitchen Crumbz that our No Penny Opera ran.  What to me is really delightful is that today we have a zillion idealistic folks running around spreading the revolution like manna and making the magic happen again. The Occupy Movement was the start of it…now I got an email asking me to participate in the Human Be In(g):

“We are inviting everyone interested in creating a better world together to gather in Golden Gate Park Sep 15-16

As people offer workshops, skill shares, art, music, and other ideas, we will be posting information to
TheHumanBeing2012.blogspot.com

We have a general e-mail address at theHumanBeing2012@gmail.com”

I went to their website and found this interesting note at the bottom of the page:

“The Food Bank of America action was revitalized by the Space TranSFormers on Thursday, June 26th at 3pm at the Bank of America at 23d and Mission.  We will continue to give away boxes of free fruits and vegetables on Thursdays and demonstrate the possibility of a different world where free farms stands replace corporate banking monopolies and abundance replaces scarcity.”

 Wow!