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I don’t want to be a numbers queen, but again this week our new Free Farm provided a lot of produce for the Stand, 80 pounds (including 13 pounds of baby lettuce mix). I just discovered if you click on the green number above for the amount of Hecka Local Food given away you will open up the spreadsheet that totals the amount of produce for each garden supplying food for the stand and also produce that others contribute. The fava beans are coming in from other gardens too. This not just about quantity because we are talking the freshest, most nutritious produce one can get in the city for free to boot.

Antonio led another fabulous garden workshop, this time about growing plants in the Brassica family, which included a hands-on demonstration of potting up broccoli. I relearned the importance of not handling the seedling that is being potted up by the stem which is very delicate and can be damaged. A friend of a friend of Pancho’s named Carlo came all the way up from Santa Cruz where he is finishing a Phd in agro ecology. He helped give out bread and translated the workshop into Spanish. I feel really happy that we are making the effort to reach out to all our neighbors especially the Hispanic community.  Having more people speaking Spanish to those who come by helps deepen the connection that people have with what is going on every week.

So it is funny, in some ways I feel I have achieved my goal that I set out upon when I started the Free Farm Stand two years ago: I wanted to be a real urban farmer and to see how much food that I could grow and give away in the city. I suppose before I retire (ha ha) and move unto some new fabulous project, I should figure out how to keep the production going (which involves better crop planning as farmers call it I think). And training others to carry others to carry on this work. I still dream of a community of like minded spiritual folks living together and running cool service projects together like this.  I do think it is the next step in this project of food justice and making cities sustainable.

In the meantime, the Free Farm Stand continues serving lots of people and it is really a blast being part of the group effort growing what we give away. It also seems like soon we will be distributing produce at the farm site, because already people are asking for produce over there and there is a lot of need.  In fact some produce was given away already. I think we will not have another Free Farm Stand, but at our visitor table have produce that is put out when we are there.

On Sunday I talked to a gardener friend that just returned from Illinois and she was telling me how much she missed the soil there: a deep dark fluffy loam. She got me excited just imagining what it is like and sad that mostly the majority of food grown there is feed corn and soybeans. Plus it is sad that that soil is rapidly being lost because of corporate agriculture and mono-cropping.  I can’t say I am feeling  much excitement with our soil yet. It is pure sand with some manure or compost mixed in. It doesn’t seem alive yet and it is far from black and loamy.  Things are growing well so that is encouraging. So if we can all be soil builders in our lifetime what a way to give back to mother earth.

Talking about soil on Tuesday night May 18th at 7:30pm the Hayes Valley Farm is having a fundraiser for their wheelbarrow fund and they are showing a movie called Dirt which I really want to see. It seems we all need wheelbarrows these days to move mulch and manure around, in our case we have a lot of wheelbarrows that have flat tires (we need tires or innertubes).  Unfortunately Hayes Valley doesn’t say no one turned away for lack of funds, how un-progressive, though maybe you aren’t supposed to invite people without money to a benefit to raise money. Here is the info: http://www.hayesvalleyfarm.com/activities/events-and-activities/details/52-farm-film-night-kick-off.html.

Yesterday is what I call a historic day at the Free Farm Stand. It is something I don’t think I ever imagined would happen. I had more produce that was grown hecka locally than the produce I usually get leftover from the high end farmer’s markets. By the way if I were ever to go commercial like my friends at Little City Gardens, maybe I would call our produce company Hecka Local or as someone suggested Hecka Loco.

Yes I felt like I had achieved the status as a real farmer or more like a farm manager, as the food grown and harvested was really a group effort. I had over ten boxes of produce we had grown, a total of 119 1/4lbs of produce: 57lbs of greens, lettuce, and kohlrabi from the Free Farm and 32 lbs. of produce from 18^th and Rhode Island (chard and fava beans). 16lbs of favas from Treat Commons Community Garden ( those were grown in a space about 4” x 6’ approximately). It just so happened that I didn’t get much left over from the Farmer’s Markets, so the hecka local table saved the day. Though in reality we are getting people lined up down the sidewalk and we ran out of produce quickly. I mean 13 pounds of Red Bok Choy was about 14 heads and 7 pounds of lettuce is really only about 15 heads of lettuce.

We also had a great plant give away table with lots of seedlings. Antonio led another free garden workshop that unfortunately I was too busy to attend. I think he is going to keep leading these workshops all summer at the stand which makes me happy, because he is a great teacher and I want the Free Farm Stand to have an educational component as well as helping poor folks to get fresh organic produce.

It was a Heck Local weekend in general. The Free Farm and the stand is getting so much press recently. The latest thing was we were mentioned of both the Free Farm and Farm Stand on KQED TV. Here is the link: http://www.kqed.org/tv/programs/thisweek/. Stephanie, who has helped at both the stand and the farm, did a good job explaining what both projects are about (you can slide the slider forward if you want to skip most of the TV show).  At the bottom of the page you can click on the link about Food Runners and Urban Gardens to read more.

I hope this publicity inspires others to make some news themselves. Pancho sent me a beautiful blog from a friend of his: http://dosomethingbeautifulthebook.wordpress.com/. I love the name of this blog, “Do Something Beautiful”.  I read about the author’s visit to Neem Karoli Baba’s ashram in Kainchi, India where the teacher’s only teaching was: Love All. Serve All. Feed All.  I second that and would like to adopt it as our message to the world too.

I thought about calling the blog this week Everyone’s Doing It! I went to the Arbor Day celebration at the Growing Home Garden (Project Homeless Connect Garden) on Friday and it was quite the scene. A truck load of trees being given away, some being planted by a lot of teens, and free strawberries and Dryer frozen fruit bars. There was a lot of excitement in the air and that is when it struck me that the whole town has gotten a sort of mass hysteria right now about gardening and growing things like trees and gardens. I think this is great and maybe this “farming in the city revolution” will have some lasting effect on making cities more green and sustainable.

I just uploaded Antonio’s  cartoon about Seed Saving that I like a lot…check it out on the sidebar under cartoons.

Also, the Free Farm is zooming forward. With the weather warming up we may need more help to water things…we do have some drip set up, but we have a lot of seedlings that need a lot of water  and other  areas that need special attention. This Wednesday I think a bunch of kids are coming to help out and there is so much to do.

It was another hot and beautiful day at the Free Farm Stand. I love the sexiness of warm days and a lot of people parading around in their summer/beach weather drag. And a perfect day for a garden workshop on Sexual Propagation of Vegees.  Every week brings surprises: I never know what will show up on the table nor who will show up to lend a hand or who will need some produce or  who will bring some produce or jam or salsa or homemade lemonade. I am dazzled by the positive energy given off around the Free Farm Stand and the Free Farm these days.

Right now I am harvesting less produce from 18^th and Rhode Island, but we are now getting some produce from the Free Farm, after only a few months!  It is really challenging farming year round here in the Bay Area and finding volunteers that have the sustaining power to show up over a long period of time. An example is that the Hayes Valley Farm is attracting tons of volunteers right now, but we are haven’t attracted a regular crew at the Permaculture  18^th and Rhode Island site.  So as the chard is pulled up there isn’t anything else ready to harvest there except tons of fava beans…I should be bringing more next week.

On the Hecka Local Table this week: 6lbs of collards and 1½ lbs from the Free Farm, chocolate mint,  fava beans  from 18^th and Rhode Island and from Stanford garden, 39lbs of oranges from Stanford Glean, 8lbs of lemons from a neighbor, 4lbs of surplus herbs and greens (?) from Dearborn Community Garden, and a lot of chard from 18^th and Rhode Island and Treat Commons Community Garden. I unfortunately didn’t meet the person that dropped off the Dearborn Produce, but I really appreciated it. There was also a neighbor who brought by rosemary and mint from their garden.  This is really the core of what the Free Farm Stand is all about, sharing the surplus. I must admit I harvested some unpicked lettuces in a private bed in Treat Commons, because I hate to see produce get planted and then it grows and no one harvests it. I know this is a common occurrence in community gardens. This week we also had a great garden table with a lot of seedlings and information. Susannah who works with Stanford Glean came by and stayed at the table the whole time. I think we will be seeing more of her this summer and she might be an intern with this project. Hooray! Again we had another fabulous mini-garden workshop and I was really happy with the turn out. Antonio and Pancho make a great team and Antonio is one of the best garden teachers around.  I always come away from learning something new from him.

The Free Farm is really taking off. There are weekly updates at http://thefreefarm.org/ . One of our  challenges right now is the need for funds to create the infrastructure of the farm (none of us involved really like having to raise money, we’d rather be farming and feeding the masses). We are also in need of volunteers who want to learn how to lead others in projects at the farm . We get a lot of people showing up to help, but we need help directing everyone (we might want to get funds to pay a small stipend to another coordinator. Right now all of us are volunteers).  Another big challenge is to stay small and beautiful…to stay personal not institutional. There was talk at the blessing ceremony two weeks ago of making the farm a church without walls. So that is another challenge we face. A church or temple in my mind is a place where people gather together in community to share the energy of love and compassion that flows through everything. To experience that divine force together.  To learn to work together to serve those in need.

In terms of raising funds to create the infrastructure,  I’m seeing how comfortable I am with new approaches besides writing grants (our last grant got rejected).  A new volunteer named Brian told me he is playing music Wednesday at a new space on Valencia called Viracoha. He offered to donate the money to the Free Farm and I said go for it. So his gig turned into a small benefit concert  this week. I was really impressed with the poster his friend Morgan created. I would go just to hear him play and the fact that he is one of sweetest men I have met recently. He even agreed to put no one turned away on his poster.

I still believe in the idea of manifesting things. Here is the list of this we are trying to manifest:

A big tool shed, 3 long (100’) hoses in good shape, a lot of wheelbarrow tires or inner tubes, someone with a huge truck that could pick up a lot manure for us,  outdoor plywood to build a stage, used redwood or cedar lumber to build a bulletin board and a welcoming area and other things, a big greenhouse or a carpenter to build a beautiful greenhouse out of old glass windows, someone to sew a large fabric tent to put on our canopy structure.

Both the Free Farm and the Free Farm Stand continue to get a lot of media attention. I read a biography of Raymond Chandler who shared with me a similar feeling about publicity: “I’m strictly the background type.”   Despite wanting to just quietly do our work , I think  growing food in the city has really caught on and so we are in the limelight. Besides a write up in last week’s  Bay Guardian, KQED was out filming the farm last week and a we will be mentioned in a show for Earth Day about farms in urban areas at 8pm this coming Friday.

The Secret Garden which has always held a special place in my heart is going through some big changes. Clara who has been the garden anchor there for  maybe a year is not going to continue in that role for right now. She was the perfect person for that job and brought a lot of beautiful energy into that place. I am really sad she is not going to be around and I don’t know about the others who came because of her bringing them in.. Good Samaritan who owns the land just got a large grant (I don’t know how much) and is planing on rebuilding the stage, build a new shed, and make other improvements. They also hired Robert who has been connected with that garden for a long time to be the coordinator though I am not sure how much he will be actually gardening or be there once the physical improvements are made. He told me he will be in the garden on Sundays at 11am until about 2pm and that he is looking for people that want to garden there or learn how to garden and who will help grow food for the stand.  His contact information is if you want to help.