Author: Tree

I took a break last week and alas there was no write up of what went down.  This week I was there for all the glory.  The weekend started out with a bang at the Free Farm where I heard the count was forty volunteers. Among those, my friends from Casa de Paz from Oakland plus some of their sparkling visitors showed up and quite a lot of work got done. Read Pancho’s account below of the  Free Farm workday and also his belated write-up of last week’s Free Farm Stand.  There is also a rather long write-up with fabulous photos at the Free Farm website here.

That night the Casa de Paz crew and visitors (five adults and one baby) spent the night at our place so they could help out in the morning loading the van and setting up and running the stand. The energy was pretty high and though we were a little crowded for my small abode and I enjoyed the community spirit. I have already started trying to manifest a larger place in the Mission to start a  home focused on service.

Recently I have been inspired by a Jewish group in Berkeley called Urban Adamah. A while back a few of the people involved with that group came by and visited us at our farm. They have a three month residential program for young adults that includes a 1 acre organic farm, social justice work, and living and learning together.   I love their curriculum which is Service of the Field, Service to the Community, Service of the Heart, and Study. I think now is the time to launch something like that here and just by putting the word out now I hope is the first step towards making this happen. If Eden is our divine home including it’s lush garden or farm with buy selfless worker bees, we need Eden now.

When people tell me they want to volunteer at the Free Farm Stand there is always work to do there, especially during the summer when more food comes in. For example, early Saturday morning I actually drove down to the Farmer’s Market at the Ferry Building to visit Green Gulch Farm who has a stand there. Sarah who has been a regular volunteer at our farm is working there during the summer and she and some other students gleaned five boxes of greens from their fields before they were turned under. It was a beautiful harvest, but the baby lettuces needed to gone through and cleaned up making it easier to give away. Besides the work at the stand on Sunday there is a lot of work beforehand that I hope I can find and teach others to do like driving to Martins to pick up the produce and unload it.

The Sunday Stand was a blast as usual with a lot of food and a lot of people helping and getting food. Our hummus/pickle/jam guy Mike was away so we had to get by with a small jar of jam left over from last year’s bounty of fruit. It is not the same without him. Besides a small amount of Free Farm Produce, Kim brought a beautiful display of vegetables from the Secret Garden. We also had some plums picked by Produce to the People and some more collard green starts grown at the Free Farm .

cleaning up baby lettuce a work of love

beautiful monk

beautiful baby

beautiful mom and baby from

beautiful kids eating beautiful strawberries

beautiful baby collards

beautiful Secret Garden produce with Kim

life without Mike (see small jar of jam?)

Below is the post  by Pancho (with some editing from me, the whole version can be found here):

Belovedhood: Feed all, serve all, love all

We are not growing fruits and veggies. We are facilitating the growth of soil and community. The food is a byproduct. We most give back to Mother Earth and enjoy, in the process, the co-creation of the  Beloved-hood.

This is the revelation I got when I met hermano Tree. From my perspective, this is Gandhi’s constructive program of the 21st century at its best. For the last few years, I’ve been close to him to learn how to facilitate this growth. Now some of us, at Casa de Paz, have been volunteering full days by his side. I have felt very inspired to anchor the Free Farm Stand the first Sunday of the month. The downside, as you can tell, is that I’m a slow writer and the updates of June 5th and July 2nd are coming only until now. But hey! you can talk about the (r)evolution or live the (r)evolution [and write a little bit about it ;-)].

The Free Farm Stand is definitively a great experiment in the joy of serving our diverse families in the Earth Community. We were thrilled to see that now there are entire families from the Mission who are coming to the Stand. Families from the part of the Planet we call China, Mexico, Guatemala, Yemen, India; people who speak Spanish, Cantonese, Mandarin, Farsi, Arabic, Hindi, English; and lots of children, plenty of children. It is a wonderful experience to foster this intercultural interaction and get nourished by their smiles and laughter. Some of our fliers are now in Spanish and Chinese.

Last Sunday (July 3rd), the stand was overwhelmed by the abundance of food provided by  additional sources of food donations. Plums, peaches, apricots, squashes, aloe plants, and greens flooded the stand’s table’s, to the extent that we were hardly able to give it all away over the three hour period (1:00pm-3:00pm) that the stand operates.

So too is the Free Farm an experiment.

As Britney and I write this piece from the Free Farm, there are people: harvesting for the free farm stand; building a terrace; beautifying the labyrinth; watering the beds and isolated pots; preparing the table for the vegan lunch at noon; planting seeds in the greenhouse; washing the produce for the 1pm farm stand; guiding visitors to show some of the magic of the farm; carrying wheelbarrows –or taking a nap in one of them– full of mulch to nourish the paths; turning the compost; taking pictures for the blog and writing a post to celebrate all of this work and the work that can’t be described with metrics.

The diversity of the people volunteering honors and matches the rich diversity of life in the farm. On the one hand, the farm is filled with people of brown, black, white skin; a 1 yearold whose mom joined the yoga and meditation sessions in the morning; young people from both Stanford and  UC Berkeley; teens from all backgrounds sharing their wisdom; enthusiastic elders from the neighborhood; people without houses and without money giving away all they have: their time, love and energy; Christians, a Buddhist monk, secular people, anarchists, Jews, Muslims, Native Americans all united in this church without walls. With this diversity, we come together, work together, learn together, and share. On the other hand, the farm is inhabited by a red tail hawk who has made the farm her source of mice and rats; by ravens, hummingbirds, pigeons, worms, snails, ants; bees that live in hives and bees that live buried in the soil, who knows what fascinating interactions are happening beneath the surface of the beds. We learn from this animal world too, just as we learn from the diverse human worldviews that the farm draws together.

Many of us enjoy our volunteer work at the Free Farm because we believe that healthy, local food is the foundation of social justice. While 93 percent of the varieties of crops have gone extinct in the part of the Planet we call the U.S. –and all over the World– city kids, like many of us, are learning how to facilitate the growth of food and how to let crops go to seed. The concepts of both regeneration (not sustainability) and community are being shared and practiced. We are planting seeds of generosity and harvesting kindness to and from the community.

With this growth of soil and community, local neighbors are getting more and more involved. As these neighbors volunteer at the farm and receive its produce, a circle of giving and receiving is emerging. In this gift economy, we are able to provide for one another and cultivate compassion and care. As we shared before, the effects of the farm do not end within the Western Addition neighborhood here in San Francisco.  They carry over to the Mission, where the surplus food produced by the stand is given away as an act of unconditional love.  We don’t believe that in a pollution-violence based economy only people with financial resources can consume healthy local organic food. We believe and practice that everybody can and must be nourished with healthy local food and healthy entertainment. We are doing our best to treat each other as family. And our family is widening, indeed. There is a palpable love and acknowledgement to take care of our elders and our children.

Through the act of freely giving away healthy and local produce, unjust food systems–like the one in this part of the Planet, where kale is often not affordable for many, yet unhealthy hot dogs cost less than a dollar–are challenged and a community is built.  It is the love and dedication of volunteers that makes this possible.  And it is this same love and dedication which has an infectious tendency on others, keeping the farm and the stand energized and thriving.

In other words: feed all, serve all, love all.

These were our two seeds as Free Farmers, ;-)

May all become compassionate, courageous and wise.

Britney, Pancho and Adelaja.

Here is a link for a movie that is being worked on called Growing Cities. These young men came out and filmed us at the Free Farm and the Free farm Stand (at the end of the day) and some of the other farms they have visited across the United States seem pretty interesting.

 

I thought I would tell the story of the Free Farm Stand this week mostly in pictures with captions. It was Pride Day and perhaps the crowd was a bit smaller, but I couldn’t really tell and we gave most of the produce away by the end.

Tim is one of our Stanford summer interns who is helping us at the Stand and at the Free Farm. We also have Brittany another summer intern from Stanford. She isn’t in any of these photos because she was behind the camera. I really appreciate all the help these days since I am trying to have others run the stand so I can concentrate on the Free Farm and growing seedlings, food, and flowers.

Here is our amazing Mike, a long time volunteer. I thought about calling him the Free Hummus Guy, but he has branched out into jams with all our over ripe summer fruit and delicious pickles. Really his pickling efforts have inspired me to try making them myself, he says they are so simple. He says he learns everything from YouTube.  He was also responsible for bringing surplus dry pinto beans and brown rice and relish to the stand this week.  Are we becoming more like a food pantry?

I brought  new fliers in English, Spanish, and Chinese explaining to new people what the program is all about. Guess what it isn’t all about being a free food giveaway (you can read the English version of the flier  at the end of this blog). Behind the fliers are seedlings we gave away from the greenhouse at the Free Farm. They were very popular although I think we grew too many collard seedlings. I am working on putting more sprinklers in the greenhouse (see our Free Farm Blog) and hopefully that will improve the quality of the starts, because they seemed to me a bit stressed out and yellow. Maybe they need a drink of compost tea also.

Here is me with a basket of loquats I picked from my backyard tree that morning (the fruit does not store well). I had to climb my 14 foot tall orchard ladder to get to them and I also used a fruit picker on a pole to get some of them. Most people liked them, though many people didn’t know what they are. Once they tasted them they were hooked. Also, in the photo are some zucchini from the Free Farm and a few Japanese cucumber that grew in our hothouse.

 

Quite a summer spread as usual

Mike’s pickles and jams

Many kids wanted to take home seedlings. I think we all have at an early age a connnection to the wonderment of nature and somewhere along the way we lose it.

Like I said the seedlings were popular and I hope to grow more variety and better quality seedlings soon. By the way we can use more potting soil, if you have  a source for this valuable resource. So far we haven’t had to buy any.

 

At least one person suggested we try to let people know what we are doing, what the vision of our stand is. I tried to explain it here and had this translated into different languages to help with the communication. A number of people told me they appreciated the flier and a couple people said they liked what we were trying to do. There was still a bit of pushiness in the line around the time the second load of food came. I can understand it as the producce looked so abundant and delicious, especially the strawberries and fresh fruit. Hopefully everyone will have time to read the flier when they get home.

I just love these long sunny days and as we enter into summer, it seems so right. I wasn’t at the farm stand yesterday, but got reports that it was a beautiful and bountiful day. I knew that because I loaded the van with many boxes of produce left over from the farmer’s market and also with a small amount of produce from our free farm. We have been harvesting our summer squash.  Here are a couple of pictures from the Free Farm Stand yesterday.

As I may have reported in previous blogs, I am trying to find others to keep the Free Farm Stand running every week.  I love the project and I think what we are doing is unique among programs that try to fight hunger and food insecurity in our city. If we all believe in creating a world that is sustainable, we also have to look at our own lives and figure out how to make things workable. That includes maintaining relationships with friends and family  as well as self. Making room and time to breathe deep in all ways. So I realized that I am over extended and that I have to find people to help run some of the projects that I have sort of fallen into. I want to shore up other projects that need more attention, like growing more food for the stand and especially growing more seedlings. I also have new projects that I want to help launch. One is growing flowers to give away (reccently a friend typed up a beautifully detailed 7 page plan called  “A Free Flower Stand…How to Make it Happen). The other crazy dream I have is to figure out how to get a building to start a commune that can help run some of these projects. I have always believed that the most efficient way to do service work is by living together with a bunch of people and sharing income.  In the old days we called it intentional communities.

I have talked in a past blog of the Urban Kibbutz and I am also inspired by the Catholic Worker model of houses of hospitality. Recently I got a newsletter from the Catholic Worker Farm in Sheep Ranch. It mentioned a gathering of Catholic Worker Farmers and Urban Gardeners that happened in January at their farm. They were celebrating the spirit of Peter Maurin who co-founded the Catholic Worker movement with Dorothy Day in 1933. One of Peter Maurin’s ideas was to form rural farming communities to teach city dwellers farming and back to the land ideas. I think now more than ever we need to not only to form rural farm communities, but  urban farm communities. So the idea of combining urban farming communities with service to the poor  and down and out would be my ideal way of living.

So as a step in this direction I am trying to take off at least two days a month from the Free Farm Stand until we can get more people to do other days. This week while I was gone from the stand I actually went on a field trip to the Stonestown Mall Farmer’s Market to see where our second shift of left over produce came from (I like to  know where the food comes from that we give out). It is a pretty big market with about 26 farmers present. Like I knew already not all the farmers are organic. If you go to this link you can see the list of the farmers who go to this market : http://www.agriculturalinstitute.org/index/getMarketDetails?type=Markets&id=20090528140518.active. Here is the biographies of some of these farmers: http://www.agriculturalinstitute.org/index/biographies.  I noticed a sign up saying that they no longer will allow farmers to put up signs saying no sprays because they are too confusing to shoppers. So the best way to find out what is likely to be on your food that you get is to ask what methods the farmers use to control bugs or how do they fertilize their crops. Of course if you grow your own food or get it from the Free Farm or other gardeners that bring produce to the stand  you don’t need to worry about how it is grown it is all organic.

Right n