Author: Tree

If I could sum up my feelings right at the moment into one word it would be gratefulness. If a person doesn’t get a chance to feel grateful I would guess that would be a sad situation, because it is a great way of feeling high. A sense of being connected to that love energy out there. Maybe this weekly writing should just be a prayer blog, counting my blessings out loud.

This week again I got to work with some new people in my life and that was fun. And the Free Farm Stand this week was particularly energetic. I just reported last week that some of my dearest helpers were gone because of summer (or school graduation) and yesterday a new batch of volunteers came by to help. It was really fabulous and I was especially pleased that we got the plant table up to give away the seedlings that were in need of a home. Also, Page and Jay showed up for their first time and were helpful to the max; I especially appreciated not having to take photos to document the scene. I think Page took over 100 pictures!

For the first time I truly harvested only the surplus lettuce in my backyard garden, leaving some for Angie and I to eat later in the week. I knew I had gotten a lot of lettuce from the farmer’s market so I decided not to pick all of ours. It turned out at the end of the day I still had a little lettuce left that I didn’t give away that I will take to the soup kitchen if it holds up. On the very local table besides the lettuce, we had some mint that I had picked (I really like this variety of wintergreen mint that I am growing in two gardens), more fava beans from Rhode Island garden (25lbs), some misc. greens from there too, chamomile and flowers from Treat Commons, and loquats from my tree. Loquats are a great fruit to grow though getting a known variety that makes the sweetest fruit would be ideal (I now have a lot of seedlings that I want to try grafting sometime when I can find another tree that makes tasty fruit) The loquat trees I know of around here are crazy tall, needing a crane to harvest them. Or a good tree climber with a safety harness. I have a 14 foot tall orchard ladder and can only get to some of my loquats. I must admit I have a bit of fear of heights, but I do manage to get up on tall ladders to pick fruit. It is wonderful and sad to be on top of a tall ladder next to a tall tree loaded with fruit. I can pick a lot in a short time, but then when I look further up I can see fruit I can’t reach. Jo gave me a great professional fruit picking bag that makes it easier to pick fruit, but my pole picker didn’t work with the loquats. Right now it is the beginning of the fun fruit season here, apricots are in the market and there are trees in our neighborhood that are loaded with green fruit. Again I would sing a praise to fruit trees and recommend everyone plant one where they have space. I am still working with park and recreation to plant more fruit trees in the park here.

Getting back to the very local table, throughout the day people came by with garden gifts to share with everyone. Carla’s surplus kale got the prize for being the most beautiful delicious looking kale I have seen in a while. Because I wasn’t at the table I didn’t see all the things that people brought, but I noticed some beautiful chard at one point. Also, Pam Pierce’s husband brought a number of bags of produce, including some lettuce, herbs, and cilantro (I am not sure I saw it all). Nancy came by with some oregano and thyme from her container garden. Two people brought lemons. The plant/garden table was loaded with seedlings. This week I potted up plants with the Jamestown kids (our last workday for now). I also got a donation of seedlings from a gardener who visited the stand for the first time last week and on Tuesday his daughter dropped off a couple of flats of tomatoes, eggplant, and hot pepper starts. Tori and Davin with eco-sf showed up with several trays of seedlings too which was really great.

Again we had a lot of left-overs from the local farmers including zucchini which is starting to come in now. I actually picked up the bread this week because our regular driver was out of town. The man at Acme bakery was so nice and generous and gave me enough bread to fill a small station wagon. If I had really tried I probably could have stuffed more in and he had more to give away. At some point towards the very end I think we ran out of bread.

I have been giving out reusable cloth bags that Christy got somewhere and also I have a big stash of clear plastic produce bags I got from a closed bakery (and people have been bringing their used bags too). I have been thinking about the problem of plastic grocery bags and how to teach people to get less dependent on them. I know the Ferry Building Farmers market now no longer carries plastic bags. They sell for a quarter bio-bags that are made with cornstarch or something and they completely break down in the compost.

Another fun thing that happened at the stand on Sunday was that Bay Area Source had their zine release party on the grass and brought their ice cream making equipment with them (check out the slide show…the can is is the ice cream maker). The ice cream (both vegan and non-vegan) was very popular with everyone, especially the kids. I love the concept of having other free almost vegan educational or cultural events going on in the park next to the Free Farm Stand and it goes back to my idea of having a free farmers market in the park instead of just a lonely farm stand.

On Friday Ian came out to our regular workday at Rhode Island and we picked more fava beans. We also planted more potato towers and did some watering. I didn’t realize how much work there is to do there so if anyone wants to garden, right now that is a great place to go if you have time available on Friday mornings. There is more planting to do and watering and harvesting.

On Saturday a bunch of people came over and helped extract honey from our bee hive. We got over ninety pounds of honey or eight plus gallons. If I can get some in jars by next week we will give some out at the stand. My new friend Andrew who is a member of the SF Bee Association like me and has a hive on a roof south of Market came and helped the whole day. I got excited because he reads Latin and Greek (something I wish they taught in schools). He was telling me about the Greeks who wrote about bees and he is now reading the Georgics published in 29BCE by the Roman poet Virgil, a book about rural life and farming. In the Georgics IV Vigil writes: “Of air-born honey, gift of heaven, I now take up the tale. Upon this theme no less”. This kind of history thrills me, knowing that there is nothing new under the sun.

The title for this blog is also from Virgil. Dryads I just learned are tree nymphs.

Someone suggested I use Twitter so people could follow me and learn where I am gardening at the moment and other up to the minute updates. I guess I am going to try it. It is on the sidebar…

O yee of little faith. That is me at times. A worrywart. When I went over to the park with a van full of food at noon nobody was around. The Carnival parade was going down 24th Street and the park was pretty much empty. I started thinking of contingency plans in case I was stuck with a lot of vegetables and bread. All my regular volunteers were away , some having graduated from school and have taken off for the summer. I set up the stand by myself, the first time in a year I would guess. I even put our sign on the sidewalk thinking I needed to catch the attention of people walking by the park. My friend Greg showed up with a nine month old baby strapped around his waist and was unable to do much except provide a cheering section for me which I appreciated. Greg was probably the first person to help me when I first started the farm stand and I hadn’t seen him for a while. He soon had to take off to put the baby who was getting cranky to bed (an aside note, have you noticed the baby boom happening right now?). Finally, one of our regular shoppers came by and realizing that things wouldn’t get set up soon without me getting some help, so she started helping. Soon some other shoppers pitched in and I sort of had a crew. I wasn’t really free to set up the plant stand nor snap a lot of photos, but everything worked out fine. And by the time we were set up we had the usual crowd of early birds who were nervous about getting some produce and it was a bit hectic from the start. Getting near 2pm, after the parade had finished, more people showed up and really people kept trickling in up until I actually pulled the cart out the gate. Two kids in the park asked me for some food as I was about to pull away and I had a few bunches of greens left…they seemed happy to get a bunch of red mustard. I can’ believe that I gave everything away except a few onions and some greens. Towards the very end, a Chinese woman who lived in Vietnam was excited to get the last bunch of Malabar spinach. I have never known what to do with that vegetable (I keep forgetting to look it up). She explained how it is good in soup and she gave me her complicated recipe for soup involving using egg. I just looked it up and somewhere it said “The mucilaginous texture is especially useful as a thickener in soups and stews.”

I had a pretty good harvest for the hyper local table i.e. the home grown stuff from the flavor zone. Besides another forty pounds of fava beans from 18^th and Rhode Island, I harvested a few pounds of mustard greens and chard too, plus I got the last of the lettuce lawn at the Secret Garden. I also harvested some oregano and African Blue basil (mostly flowers), and a basket of strawberries from Treat Commons. Ruben told me to harvest his lettuce lawn too and also I picked some arugula and mustard from his bed. Also I picked a lot of sweet pea flowers and daisies. The less local left over table was really packed too, including some strawberries that I tried to save for the kids. Page came by with a boxes of oranges and loquats he picked near Stanford where he teaches (that is my guess… he was parked illegally and had to run in and out). My loquats are about ready, but I didn’t get around to picking them. Needless to say fresh fruit is one of the more popular things we give away and I wish we could find more to pick and distribute. Zoe came by with a beautiful lettuce mix from her garden in the Sunset. Another friend came by with a handful of salad burnett. The leaves taste like cucumber and is pretty good tasting. Later in the day Pancho showed up and was able to talk to all the Spanish speaking people who came by. He is such a warm person and it makes me really happy to have someone like him that can carry on a conversation with people who speak little English. At one point there was an older woman that came with a cane and he helped her fill her bag and they were both chatting and laughing, it was a really beautiful scene. He learned that she came from Mexico like him and had the same name as his mother, Mary. And she new all about the vegetables and how to cook them.

The work day at 18^th and Rhode Island was also sparsely attended, but Alvin did manage to pick those forty pounds of beans by himself. I hopped the small fence of the original squatted garden on the site and planted hot weather things in real dirt which was so exciting (as opposed to planting things in the mostly wood chip berms permaculture style). This is the spot where I harvested orange cherry tomatoes late into January of this year. I planted more tomatoes, including the cherry tomato from there that I saved seed for, eggplant, and hot peppers. This will be a good test to see if we can grow eggplant in San Francisco. Of course now I am waiting for our global warming to return to replace this cool fog. Kelvin is busy planning more lovely things for this garden including a special lentil that supposedly will grow here. Jay and David have been working on planting the “cool weather” bananas, pepino dulce (melon pear or melon shrub), and the babaco (mountain papaya) plants we have been growing for the garden.

Every week I seem to connect with some new beautiful person or hear of a project that is totally inspiring. I went to Mission High School last week to talk to some kids that were involved with an environmental service learning project there. One surprising thing is that I learned that the principle of the school, Eric, who visited the farm stand there once, is the father of Asher, the energetic and enthusiastic 13 year boy who has been helping me every week at the stand. His father seems like a revolutionary guy who gave the ok to turn a parking lot at the school into a garden. After the talk I visited the garden and saw Lauren who has been volunteering there and also helped at the stand. I also learned that the fabulous Mission Science workshop is now located in the space there that used to be the auto mechanics department at the school. Dan, who is the amazingly inspiring man who started the project, was showing off these planter boxes he is going to build with his students (he is going to build sixty!). I also met the biology teacher named Susan who is teaching biology through the medium of compost. She was looking at the worm bin Lauren helped build and the idea is to incorporate worm study into the biology curriculum.

I have been a bit restless lately and feeling the tug to explore other possible things to do. Not giving up the Free Farm Stand, but perhaps putting out the desire to find more consistent help to run it…I do not want it to be a one person show. I am still day dreaming of starting a communal household in the Mission based around service (remember the Urban Kibbutz idea?). I really believe that projects like the Free Farm Stand would ideally be run by a commune. Communal living is so much more an efficient and a sustainable way of living. We should be sharing our lives more, including income sharing and living like family. The challenge is to find a building and find people with like minded ideas to come up with the money needed to get a place.

There are companion projects to the Free Farm Stand too that may be fun to start, like a Free Neighborhood Garden Center. And there are more gardens/urban mini-urban farms to start. I have also been inspired recently by my friend who has started a free advertising zine called Baitline. I so much appreciate beautiful artwork and sweet words and ideas printed on paper. So I have been thinking about a Free Farm Stand newsletter. I need a lead balloon to tie around my feet before I float away.

By the way check out the Current News and Event s column. At the next Farm Stand two friends at Bay Area Source are going to have an ice cream party in the park neighboring the stand. They will be giving away their newest zine and have equipment available for people to make their own ice cream (both vegan and non-vegan). I am still in favor of the vegan diet, but I wanted to support these wonderful women who have being doing great things for a while. Maybe they will at least have dairy from non-factory farmed animals.

It has always been my hope that the Free Farm Stand will attract others to come to the park on Sunday and share for free something they are interested in…especially along the lines of art and music and education.

I love opening the Free Farm Stand on a hot sunny day, though keeping the produce from wilting is a challenge. We tried the new method of having two tables set up one loaded with left over produce from the farmer’s market and the other with produce grown more locally.

The idea being that the home grown garden produce that neighbors and the community have brought to share doesn’t get lost among the commercially grown produce. I actually don’t know if people really noticed the separation. Maybe with the price of organic vegetables being pretty high people just concentrate on getting the fresh produce and the fact that their neighbor might have grown it gets lost with some people. Or maybe you have to be a gardener to really appreciate and understand the effort that goes into bringing food to our tables. And it is more than that, it is almost a religious experience to be involved in growing some of your own food, it connects us to that life force and to the divine and Holy Spirit. It reminds us of the everyday miracles that occur in our gardens. I know that a lot of people coming to the Free Farm Stand understand this already, because people immediately feel some joy just being around the food that radiates good vibes. Maybe I am getting too far off the deep end here and I should go back to the practical.

Here is what was on the home grown table: fava beans (we harvested another 35 lbs. from 18^th and Rhode Island), a small basket of berries picked from Treat Commons (three or four blueberries, raspberries, and strawberries), a small amount of wintergreen mint from Treat Commons, and some delicious baby lettuce from the salad lawn at the Secret garden. Later two people came by with more fava bean and one woman brought a small amount of chervil which is a delightful herb that we all should be growing more of, and a friend came by with surplus parsley that she had grown.
I was telling someone that the home grown table is the hope section because we hope we will have more produce on the table some day. It is like the story “The little Engine that Could”. We think we can, we think we can (grow more food for all). I also printed up flyers in Spanish and English that explained in detail the goals of the Free Farm Stand. I saw very few people taking them, though I did hand out some. Later in the day I got around to adding seedlings to the table. There was a lot of interest in seedlings and I managed to give quite a few away.

The crowd of people was not as large as last week, maybe because of the heat or the Bay to Breakers. I was quite busy though because we were a little short on people to be at the table.

So this is where things are at right now with the Free Farm Stand. As we move into summer some of our regular volunteers that were students are going to be away, some temporarily. One of my favorite helpers Thy has graduated and is moving to the L.A. area. So the stand is going to need more help. And I am still trying to get the garden booth up and running, where we not only give out plants and seedlings, but we are available to answer garden related questions. We are also short on Spanish speaking volunteers at the stand which is really important. Here is something I am putting out to the universe: I would love to find someone I can train that could learn the process of running the stand from start to finish, so that if I couldn’t be around some week the stand could remain open.

Ending on an up note, the gardens are looking pretty good. The tater towers are green and the upside down tomatoes are looking good too. This Tuesday I want to put in more work at the secret garden which needs lots of weeding and more planting. I also get want to get my backyard garden in better shape (it is getting there after a lot of effort last week) and I plan to get a lot of seed planted for starts too. There is a lot of gardening to do and I am anxious to get away from this computer and get back into the garden. Oh and our bees have three supers of honey ready to extract and if we can get the extractor we will be extracting honey next Saturday!