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What a beautiful day it turned out to be at the Free Farm Stand, and I was thinking it was going to rain. It was another day that we were loaded up with beautiful vegetables and bread. I must admit I was feeling pretty good about myself that I had grown so much lettuce mix in both gardens (Treat Commons and the Secret Garden). I didn’t weigh the mix, but it was probably over 2lbs. I also felt good that I harvested a lot of lettuces that were growing in between the fava beans planted at 18^th and Rhode island. I just discovered them by accident before I left on Friday. What happened is that I noticed one of the red chard plants started to grow bigger and it was being shaded by the fava beans so I decided to cut the fava beans growing around the chard. That is when I saw all these lettuces and other chard plants growing hidden among the fava bean plants.

I won’t write a lot about the Free Farm Stand this week. The table was filled with mostly wonderful vegetables left over from the farmers markets on Saturday. There were a few boxes of the most beautiful artichokes. I keep thinking when will people start growing artichokes in their newly created sidewalk gardens (and or potato towers). Caleb brought a beautiful basket of arugula and bouquets of herbs that his friend grew and they assembled. This to me is what the stand is all about, small class act gestures of sharing by friends and neighbors. And Caleb was there to give his gift away in person and could talk to everyone about it. These actions turn the world around and make my heart soar! Talk about class acts. A friend from church gave me a box of lemon and orange marmalade from her trees in the east bay that she made too much of (it is easy since our trees are so productive). It also was wonderful, from the wrapping of the jam box with a bright red Japanese cloth, the labeling of the jars, to the delicious taste of the marmalade. I gave people a taste on bread and people loved it (I also gave jars of it away). This is a great example of what to do with oranges that may be too sour to eat, like the tree down the street that I heard about that needs gleaning, but the owner says they don’t taste good. We should give him a taste of her marmalade. I also brought a jar of carob powder and pods from a local tree that I helped plant years ago, and gave people a taste of that. More on the carob pods below. I picked a few lemons from my neighbor’s tree and kept thinking there must be more lemons ready to pick now somewhere. Sam came later in the day just when we were running low on produce and brought some miscellaneous vegetables that a friend grew. I was busy giving out food because we were a bit short on volunteers and I wasn’t able to set up the “garden advice and plant give away table”, but later when it slowed down I was able to bring out some seedlings.

I actually started writing this blog entry early Sunday morning before the Free Farm Stand opened just to catch up on all that has happened this past week. I remember friends of mine saying something like that when the hot issue of the day gets written up in Time magazine it time to move on to new things. At that time it was communal living we were talking about. Now it is local food and going beyond eating organic which is now a weakened concept, and the focus is on sustainable local agriculture.

This week all the big papers have spread the news about the Obama family digging up some lawn at the White House and planting a vegetable garden. This is a victory for us local food activists and gardeners who have been involved in signing petitions to the Washington elites to get them to do this,, and to push Washington to adopt a more sane agriculture policy. This morning I learned from a fabulous article in the New York Times (called Is a Food Revolution in Season?
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/03/22/business/22food.html?partner=rss&emc=rss) that “In mid-February, Tom Vilsack, the new secretary of agriculture, took a jackhammer to a patch of pavement outside his headquarters to create his own organic “people’s garden.”

All this is good and exciting as local organic sustainable food because moves slowly from being the hip thing on the block to more mainstream, just like tofu can be found in supermarkets across the country. But our job as pioneers is to move on to the next revolution and to remain real. We have to get beyond the talk and move into quiet bold action. We have to continue to work for the poor and disenfranchised and make sure our heads don’t get swollen with all this attention on what we are doing. We don’t need super stars of the local food movement (I write this largely for myself: thinking about yesterday when a friend of mine was filming a documentary for a class he is taking at City College. I gave him the go ahead, hoping that he learns how to capture the real news that was happening at the stand, which wasn’t all about me). We need make to meaningful changes in the communities we live in on a fruit tree roots level. We need to create art and write poems that shake the walls of the current ways we do things, and what a better time to do it than when the system seems to be sinking.

Yesterday I swung by the 18^th and Rhode Island site where the new PDC course was taking place (Permaculture Design Course). It was real encouraging to see so many people who joined this class and have an interest in learning how to build sustainable cities. There seemed to be about 25 people there in the slight drizzle learning about sheet mulching. And it was funny to see that I knew a lot of these people and have worked with them in connection to the Free Farm Stand. People are paying $500-$600 to commit to 100 hours of time learning permaculture with an urban focus, which the teachers who started the class say is really fair and half the price of other similar classes (which it is). The teachers say are not trying to make money, but to get more permaculture designers working in San Francisco to make a better city.

My dream and I know Kevin (one of the teachers of the course) shares this vision that eventually these classes will be free. I would say why not now? I would like to see the classes being more like the sharing of skills like the Free Skool movement in Santa Cruz. I know there are costs and such that need to be met, but if we are designers of a new society can’t we come up with a different design than the current capitalist model? John Lennon said “I may be a dreamer, but I am not the only one.” I also share David and Kevin’s goal of getting more trained people with the skills to transform our neighborhoods into more sustainable places to live, which includes growing more gardens and fruit trees that feed us. The question or challenge is how to get these people that are enthusiastic that are taking these courses to continue the work after the classes are over. I am still working on trying to get fruit trees planted in my park which was a PDC project from last year.

The other day I was writing to my friend Nicole and I think I was being a bit too critical of some people I was working with. She pointed out to me a slightly different perspective to things, that people were just trying to do the best they could and saw things differently than me. I appreciated her saying that to me as I need to be reminded not to be so judgmental all the time. “It is all good” is my current mantra right now.

On Friday we had a small turnout, but everyone who came by was really helpful and we got a lot done. We planted more strawberries first. Then we finished the potato tower we started last week and worked on two more. We finished building one more tower using the lasagna layering method and started one where we will cover the potato plant as it grows. I brought some old wet straw that we used and mixed it in with a little bit of soil and a lot of composted woodchips and clippings and a smaller amount of older manure (also we added some cut up green fava bean stalks and leaves.). On Saturday apparently one of the potato towers started leaning over and Ryan pushed it back up an stabilized it. Maybe we didn’t level the ground enough or perhaps it is unstable because it is sitting on a hill of sheet mulch which is somewhat springy.

On Friday night I attended a local Forage Feast that was free (kind of like a forage pot luck). It was a sweet event and I enjoyed seeing friends and meeting some new people. I brought a camera, but I think I got a bit too tipsy on the nettle beer or was it the honey wine, and didn’t get into being the role of an investigative journalist. There were some great vegan dishes that people made, including some great bread stuffing made with local herbs, some kind of ollalaberry crisp made with some local (foraged?) ingredients, a great creamy nettle dip, and an artistic and surprisingly flavorful miner’s lettuce salad…just the handsome round miner’s lettuce leaves in a light vinaigrette. Just seeing the salad made me want to eat it and this was before I got high. The nettle beer was subtle and delicious, made with nettle teas, sugar, and bread yeast (I was told you can also use champagne yeast). There were also some nice teas and lemon aid made with local ingredients. One exception, the rosemary tea with mint that I had high hopes for because of all the rosemary around, was a bit too intense for me.

I brought carob pods from down the street and some homemade carob powder. I also made some little sweet balls out of dried chestnuts from also down the street (boiled and ground up), walnuts from my back yard, and carob powder. I told people at the Free Farm Stand that I would explain to people how I made the powder from the pods here. I got my information on how to do this from the internet with my own modifications.

First I made sure all the pods were clean and free from dirt or not rotted, I pulled some out that I had collected that looked a bit funky. The pods are pretty tough and leathery and have seeds in them that you need to remove (I read that the seeds could be ground up and used to make a vegetable gum). To make it easy to remove the seeds I used a pressure cooker and steam cooked the pods for about six minutes. Then it was not too hard to take a sharp pointed knife and cut the pods lengthwise to open them and remove the tiny black seeds. Then I partially chopped up the pods with a coffee grinder (a food processor would also work). I turned on the oven to the lowest temperature (around 200- 250 degrees) and slightly roasted the pods for about ten to fifteen minutes. I ground up the roasted pods in the coffee grinder and sifted the ground up pods with a very fine mesh strainer. It doesn’t come out quite like powder, but is pretty fine.

The pods can be eaten raw but that is sort of a chore because they are so chewy. Besides the local sustainable agriculture movement going on, foraging has become a popular thing too. I am not sure if picking a tree that I planted counts as true foraging, but it is nice to eat the things growing around us if they taste ok and especially f they are nutritional. It is a bit of work though with carob pods.

This week’s blog title comes from a bumper sticker someone gave us this Sunday. It comes from a group in the Midwest that is “Fighting to keep family farms on their land”. I was thinking that all the foreclosures happening everywhere are like the family farms disappearing. My friend Christian came by and told me he is working with Homes not Jails again and that they plan on squatting some of these foreclosed properties. Apparently it is easier than ever now finding the properties, there are lists online and you can even see the inside of the house. Maybe they describe the outside land around the house too and whether it has fruit trees or any landscaping. Some of these squatters should consider “Digger style” digging up the vacant lawns and yards around these foreclosed houses, and planting gardens and fruit trees. Bring back the family farms to our cities and suburbs.

Of all the gardening activities I have been involved with this past week, I think I have enjoyed working most in my backyard garden, propagating plants and slowly getting the garden in shape, ready for a spring planting. It feels meditative just being an urban farmer in my back forty and slowing down a bit…not that I have quite done that yet. Do other people feel like I do that there is so much going on these days around local food growing and other “green” activities? I get so sucked into it and have a hard time not wanting to get involved in it all. Then I get overwhelmed and have a hard time staying grounded.

Thy took so many beautiful photos of the great spread of vegetables on the table this week. I would prefer it if it was all food that we grew ourselves as neighbors, but it is free, fresh, pretty much local within a 100 miles, and organically, sustainably grown. It is a bit harder to capture photos of the colorful people that come every week, we don’t want to make people feel uncomfortable or feel like they are going to a camera shoot. I think the group of people that show up every week is truly what makes the event wonderful…a place where neighbors can gather and hang out with their community.

We really did have lovely produce this week…artichokes, leeks, shelling peas, so many greens, especially chard (3 cases), carrots, turnips, herbs, young garlic. From our gardens I harvested 2 1/2lbs of baby lettuce and 2 1/2lbs of greens including a big bunch of Oriental spinach. It’s wild that I can now guess what the farmer’s market will have when I harvest what we have been growing…it is the same kind of vegetables. Like right now the chard growing in our gardens is so handsome and perfect, free of all signs of leaf miner damage. I also found one Jalapeño pepper on a plant that has become perennial. Three people came by with Meyer lemons they harvested. That was a special treat. It was a busy cloudy day and as usual when we were ready to go home there was very little left but a sack of turnips and some rosemary.

During part of the Free Farm Stand I took off to go to a meeting in the park with people who are interested in SF Glean, the new fruit harvesting project we have started. Some new people came who were not at the first meeting and we talked about the project and came up with some next steps we can take to move the project forward. And on the plant table we had flyers on the table to alert us of any fruit trees in the neighborhood that may need picking. We also gave away strawberries and cilantro and edible chrysanthemum starts.

Like I said there are so may many garden related activities happening now and I keep meeting new people that inspire me in different ways. Zeus is a young boy about 10 I am guessing who started coming to the farm stand last week who loves to garden. I have met a number of kids recently who love gardening too, but Zeus is super enthusiastic and now I have met his whole family, his dad, sister, and mom. He has been really helpful, last week planting strawberries and this week potting up seedlings and putting them on the plant give-away table. I love sharing with him little things about plants and he just soaks it all up.

On Tuesday the kids from the Jamestown Center came by Treat Commons and they learned about transplanting seedlings. We made paper pots and transplanted tomato seedlings into them. We now have over 200 tomato seedlings that need to grow a few weeks before we can give them away. And we still have a lot more seedlings that need potting up. We need more six packs, small 2″ or cup size pots, or trays to put seedlings in.

The Friday workday at 18^th and Rhode Island was very productive. We put in more strawberries, some comfrey was planted and other seedlings, and we got a real good lesson in building potato towers from Kevin. We built the tower using the all at once or lasagna layering method. Kevin taught us some things about growing potatoes in towers that resonated with what I already knew about growing potatoes in the ground or from my observation of them volunteering in my garden. In particular they like to grow in soil that has a lot of not completely finished compost in it, made of partially composted leaves or straw. He thinks that for towers you need a fluffier material with more air spaces to make the layers less dense and to prevent compacting do to the weight of the piles. I have been using just composted wood chips which are black and rich, but perhaps too dense. On Friday we didn’t have all the ideal materials to fill the tower we started, so this week I am going to bring some rotted straw and mix it in with the composted chips and plant material. We used all the fava bean plants that we cut down when we planted the strawberries and some rotted manure because that is what we had. Here is how we made the layers: Sprinkle a couple of inches of fine potting soil on the ground (lay down cardboard if doing it on concrete). Put nine potatoes on top of the soil (we cut the big sprouting ones and usually we would let them heal first before planting them).The small whole sprouting ones we just laid down on the soil. On top of that we put some chopped up fava bean leaves and plants (ideally they would be partially composted). A minimum of 5″-6″ of mulch goes on top of that (we used some composted mulch and manure and soil that we used for planting the strawberries…on one layer we used just manure that was lightweight with a lot of composted sawdust and straw bedding material in it instead of mulch). Then we repeated those layers.

Kevin and I share the same crazy dream of seeing these towers of potatoes planted on sidewalks that have had their concrete pulled up (maybe his vision is to see them just sitting on the concrete sidewalks, but I like the water going into the soil). Anyone out there who wants to try this on their sidewalk?

I also met Robyn at the site when I first got there in the morning. She is a student at the California College of the Arts at Eighth St.and 16^th St. She is part of a group of students that have formed a group called FARM (The Future Action Reclamation Mob) who are planning on dealing with the toxic strip of land outside their school. It is a long 66ft by about 8ft long strip of mostly shady land they want to tackle.

They plan to detoxify the soil which is high in lead and build raised beds and plant food for the hungry. They are going to use permaculture techniques and they are not getting permission from the city to do this, using non-violent direct actions instead. Their web site is http://www.thinkdiscussact.org/farm/index.html. Depending on how much sun they actually get maybe they should be planting potato towers. Anyway I was tickled to meet her and I just love these people that want to make our world a little more just and beautiful. I think they are having an action Saturday March 28 if you want to join them in their fun.

I just got an email from my friend Joanna with whom I gardened with over a year ago at the All in Common Community Garden. She has been farming last year in Nevada City and wrote a beautiful article in Poor Magazine (http://www.poormagazine.org/index.cfm?L1=news&story=2184&pg=1) about her experience there as an intern. But it is also a rallying call for us all to take up farming and to grow food in our backyards . Here are a couple of snippets that I love “Every person, child, mother, father, sister should have the opportunity to experience life on a farm. The daily routine; getting up with the sun, feeding the chickens, watering the plants, playing in the dirt, weeding, and weeding, the repetition, and meditation. Shoveling compost, preparing beds, transplanting and fertilizing. Watching as seeds germinate and take root…In the Bay Area, with so much talk about local foods and green products we have to actually start living in a radically different way. As Frank Cook says, it’s not about food miles, but food feet. We have to eat from our backyards. Let’s celebrate the seasons, the harvests and moon cycles. Demand that all communities have farmer’s markets- farm stands, and gardens. What’s the point in elitist style clubs that only talk about organics for the people who can afford it. Every home needs a space to grow herbs and roots, tomatoes, and lettuce. The sidewalks could be turned into a farm.” I can see that not everyone may want to live on a farm; some of us may be called to beautify the planet in other ways, like with art and music. We need that nourishment just as much. But I agree with Joanna that we can all still plant something somewhere and take care of it. That we need that connectedness to the soil.

This past Sunday was the first Free Farm Stand we have had with no rain in several weeks and the park was filled with people enjoying the sun. We had so much food (more than I could fit on my wagon), so I had to make two trips moving it to the park from my house. By 2:30pm we had given out almost all the produce and bread, and by the time we were all packed up and ready to leave there was absolutely nothing left (a couple came and took what little there was, and they seemed to really appreciate the small bag of greens and the few small pumpkins we had left).

The day was extra busy and crowded with the garden work day happening at the same time. Kids were planting strawberries and adults were weeding and distributing mulch throughout the garden.

On Friday we had a great turnout for our workday at 18^th and Rhode Island garden. I was a bit concerned that we were not going to move all the mulch we had gotten from Bay View Green Waste Management (20 cubic yards!). I was wrong to worry because it was all spread out at the end of the day. Here is how we sheet mulched the entire rocky hill: We had 9 energetic volunteers who showed up. They moved two tons of cardboard and spread it over the remaining bare earth where ivy, oxalis, and fennel grew. The cardboard was watered down. There was a pile of mushroom blocks from Far West Fungi in the garden when I arrived. The blocks were crumbled up and then spread over the cardboard and mulch. The mushrooms will help break down the mulch. We also had some aged horse manure that was spread at the same time over the cardboard. Then the mulch, ground up wood chips and brush that has been ground up really fine, was dumped on top of the cardboard.

This Friday we will be ready to build and plant potato towers and some sunchokes. We also have more strawberries to plant and carrots.

Tuesday we were rained out and I didn’t get to garden with the Jamestown kids in the Secret Garden. On Saturday there was a small cleanup day there and we got rid of a lot of garbage and took down the play structure to make room for more planting. This Tuesday we will plant a lettuce lawn and some kale and other greens, and maybe another potato tower.

My big goal this week is to pot up all the tomato seedlings we have started and hopefully plant more seeds. I love growing seedlings. We have the goal of helping our neighbors start their own gardens if they have room and seeing more food being grown everywhere there is sunny space to plant. We are promoting the idea of sharing the surplus produce and eventually having our neighborhood being a true Pasture of Plenty as Woody Guthrie wrote in a song. A neighborhood that is known for the food it grows, isn’t that a trippy idea? The famous Mission grown tomato or apricot… Propagating lots of seedlings (and other edible plants) and distributing them for free is part of the dream. Recently someone sent me a link for a interesting project in Portland http://www.eatyouryard.com/services/plant-starts/ that has a similar vision, though they charge for their services, a CSA growing starts rather than food. What we need are some people to help me grow starts to give away at the Free Farm Stand and to neighbors that are planting gardens. I can teach people the basics of planting and growing starts, and what I need are people with some sunny space to put a cold frame or shelf (or greenhouse) and some motherly care to grow the starts until they are ready to give out.

Along this same train of thought, I recently rejoined the Seed Savers Exchange (http://www.seedsavers.org) and their newest catalog arrived in the mail. I now have access to seeds of thousands of heirloom vegetables. I am excited just reading about all the different kales we can try growing or tomatoes and then we can save the seed for the ones we like. I also got a copy of a book that Kevin highly recommended called Cornucopia II: A Source Book of Edible Plants by Stephen Facciola. It says in the introduction of this book that “There are approximately fifteen thousand plants recorded in literature as having been used as food by man. One hundred and fifty or more of these have been cultivated on a commercial scale…Yet today, most of the world is fed by approximately twenty crops…” The author is making the point that we should be utilize more of the food crops available. Kevin told me the other day he is excited because he finally found a source for a perennial broccoli he has been looking for forever and he wants to share some seed with me when he gets it. This is really what makes growing our own food so much fun and valuable. And it all starts with some form of propagation, planting seeds and growing starts or grafting or rooting cuttings.