Author: Tree

Yesterday was such a turnaround day.  To really get what is going on with the Free Farm Stand and to understand  my total excitement, you must check in at the Free Farm blog once in a while (http://www.thefreefarm.org/). Especially right now we have some fabulous bloggers taking photos and recording the workdays.  It was a turnaround day because after getting totally soaked the day before (despite working in a greenhouse a lot of the time), the sun came out in all its gloriousness and blessed us with her warming rays.

I think we should call this season the arugula season, because it seems a lot of farmers are growing this now and they seem to grow way more then they sell. I was really pleased that the Free Farm provided 23lbs of kale and 5 lbs of lettuce, all harvested in the rain by our great team of volunteers.

Last week there has been other urban agricultural news.  One thing that caught the attention of probably all of us in the food growing world is the controversy around the actions of the Dervaes family (http://urbanhomestead.org/), who patented the phrase “Urban Homesteading”. This family early on has been an inspiration to me and I am sure many others in their work of growing so much food at their small Pasadena home. I myself wouldn’t say I am part of the urban homesteading movement. It reminds me of the days when the back to the land movement happened and there seemed to be a lot of attention to individual and self-centered survival.  Not that I don’t think it is great to get off the grid and feed our own families, but I think there also needs to be a focus of creating networks of sharing with our neighbors, especially those in need. How about an Urban Sharing Homestead or Farmstead?

It did bother me though reading that the Dervaes family did approach Facebook and asked for sites to be shut down that used the phrase Urban Homestead. In particular, Ruby who is a longtime friend who I admire for her great work across the bay, the Institute of Urban Homesteading (http://www.iuhoakland.com/),  had to change the name of her Facebook page to the New Institute of Urban-Home-steading (with a hyphen).  It is funny that everyone (the Dervaes family and the urban homesteaders who sell classes or homestead products) seems to be against the corporatization and commercialism of our emerging culture. They want to protect it somehow from the capitalists, from there being corporate owned homesteading jingles on TV or in Newsweek. The only way I see that happening is for us all to go free since it is harder to make a buck off of something that is totally free and promotes sharing.  Here are two links about this silly  but deep controversy and there is even now a Take Back the Urban Homestead page on Facebook.

http://www.baycitizen.org/food/story/oakland-homesteading-school-caught/

http://blogs.laweekly.com/squidink/2011/02/urban_homestead_drama.php

The good news is that there is always something beautiful growing in our garden we call daily living. Tomorrow the San Francisco Seed Library opens at the Potrero Library (https://sites.google.com/site/sfseedlibrary/home). I went through their 31 page catalog with 374 plant varieties. One can check out seeds anytime the library is open for free! A big thank you to all the people and Transition SF that made this project a reality!

Two last things.

From reading our Free Farm blog I learned about a new website administered by our San Francisco government, SF Food–http://www.sfgov3.org/index.aspx?page=753 . Some of their links seem out of date and there is no mention of us on their site (maybe that is a good thing). I did like seeing the SF Food Security Task Force’s “Hunger and Food Insecurity On the Rise in San Francisco” report dated November 2010.  They claim that over 17,000 lbs. of fresh produce and honey was contributed by the urban agricultural community in San Francisco to needy San Franciscans in 2010. I wonder if they got those figures partly from us (we distributed almost 13,000 lbs. of hecka locally grown produce since we starting recording weights in 2009).

Here is news from the San Francisco Urban Agriculture Alliance  (http://www.sfuaa.org/ ). The Planning Commission approved the urban agriculture zoning proposal last week. However, “The Commission did not support waiving permit fees, changing fencing language or pooled produce…” So if you grow food to give away other rather than just for you and your family consuming it on site, you supposedly need to pay a fee to do that, if I understand things correctly; and the fence around your farm can’t be chain-link, and you can’t give away bowls of homemade guacamole from your avocado trees without a permit  fee. Or maybe that is only if you start a new farm. Still permit fees discourage doing things for those without much money.

This is a valentine to all you who are following the adventures of the Free Farm Stand.  These days the stand is mostly sharing good vibes more than sharing good produce.  During these skimpy times for produce and when things seem to run out faster, I feel really appreciative when, like this week, people show up with something to share. Robyn’s brother was driving up from L.A and  brought a sack of lemons with him to bring to the stand. An older Chinese woman brought  some lemons, someone else dropped by another  big bag of them (have you guessed it is citrus time?), and towards the end a another neighbor dropped off the most fragrant limes from his backyard tree. A total of about 42 lbs of fruit.  We also had a kale and collards from the Free Farm. And our favorite root to share right now, Yacón.

We can all learn a lesson from the recent non-violent revolutions in the past few weeks, that we the people have the power to transform our society. For example, we can create a world of sharing versus buying and selling, but we have to do it ourselves. We can make a shift from being merely consumers in a consumer oriented society, to caring for our neighbors and others in a family oriented world (where we look at strangers and neighbors as family). This may sound a bit too Lovey Dovey, but I believe for myself this is the way to live a good life.

My friend Antonio gave me a flier for a free event he will be talking at that sounded interesting “Underground Food Politics”: “With urban homesteading all the rage and backyard and vacant lot food production on the rise it appears we’re taking big steps toward encouraging self-sufficiency in the Bay Area.” They will be looking at how much of this food movement is focused on making sure everyone has access to local organic fresh food , what he calls food sovereignty and the idea of food security (and in my mind how much focus is there on making sure those in need get served) versus how much is thefood movement is focused on setting up small hip businesses that serve mainly those with money. He encouraged me to go to present my view, but these days I feel that the time for talk  is not as important as is the time for us to act. The event is on Wednesday  February 23 from 7:30pm-9:30pm at CounterPulse 1310 Mission Street at 9^th.

Talk about action, I am trying to get the Esperanza Garden (on Florida near 19^th St.) to really take off this year and grow more food for the stand. I think we have at least two “garden anchors” to help lead the garden crew this year and on Tuesday February 22 at noon until about  2pm there will be a garden cleanup and possible bed preparation. Please come out if you have the time or contact me to get more information how you can help.

Here is another thing you can go to:

Please join the San Francisco Urban Ag Alliance at the Planning Commission’s hearing to support the urban agriculture zoning proposal.  We need as much support as possible! Wear green to identify yourself as a supporter; we’ll have stickers on hand as well.  Here are the details:

Thursday, February 17th
City Hall, Room 400
1:00 PM – SFUAA supporters to meet up on steps of City Hall
1:30 PM – Hearing begins in Room 400
2:30 PM – Estimated time for our issue (could be a little earlier or later)

You are welcome to speak at the hearing but it’s not necessary, so please come whether you plan on speaking or not! For more information you can go here: http://www.sfuaa.org/. The zoning proposal would do two things:    1.   Allow gardens – both non-commercial and commercial gardens – in more parts of SF    2.   Allow people to sell the produce grown in their gardens.

I can’t say I am enthusiatic about people selling the produce they grow in their gardens, I think it is the wrong model, but still people should have the right to sell it if they want. This proposal also seems to affect people growing food and donating it, they have to follow the guidelines in the proposal.

The Free Farm is going strong and we have pretty much completed one greenhouse and the other one should be finished in a week. We will begin planting seeds probably this Wednesday.  Please  join us any Wednesday or Saturday from 10am-2pm (and the first Sunday of the month from 10am-noon).

Sunday we all caught some beautiful warm rays of the winter sun as they fell on our tables quite full with mostly vegetables and a small amount of fruit.  For me the highligh this week on the hecka local table were the avocados from trees a block away and 5 pounds of kiwis from a man I work with at Martin de Porres soup kitchen who comes to help once a month. I also loved having the bag full of Meyer lemons (23 pounds) that a neighbor dropped off. Also, some neighbor angel dropped off a jar of the most delicious local Meyer lemon jam. I get such a kick out of our bread table these days.  Every week there is something tasty to put on samples of bread.  And often, like this week, the bread table had some new items on it, like the lentils and rice, pasta, and tortillas that a food pantry had extra of and gave to me.   The line was part way down the sidewalk and we ran out of produce in about 45 minutes for the first round.

Someone came by the stand and asked about getting seedlings and I told him we are working on growing them. Our greenhouse has I think 45 flats now of different things, many of which will go to planting at the farm, and as the greenhouse gets closer to being finished we will start planting more seeds.

One piece of great news is that negotiations I think are finally over for the project I have been working on for over two years to expand the community garden in the park where the stand is and to plant more fruit trees. A notice is coming out soon to all the people that attended the meeting in October about the project and the next step will be to go to the Recreation and Park Commission in March. In April we should be putting up the fence, moving the compost bin, and planting trees. The only possible hitch in the matter may be that the volunteer contractor needs to have 2 million dollars in insurance to volunteer his labor to the city. I know he has insurance, but I don’t know if he has that much.

Pancho turned me onto a man who said”Serve all, Love all, Feed all”.  I am keeping that as my mantra as spring approaches. I also remember a man in India I met who said, “Be good, do good”. Also, how about my jingle, “Plant Good Grow Good”?