Blog

There is talk about sucking it in and tightening our belt buckles. I have been thinking how ironic it is that this country is so dependent right now on people over consuming and buying lots of crap. Now we are in trouble partly because consumer spending is down and people are losing their jobs. And what traditionally really keeps us artificially alive is government spending on the military and building prisons.

This land North America is fat and we can live off of it. One thing for sure is that we are fat with waste. Land wasted in our cities that could be growing food and unbelievably food going to waste everyday (including fruit trees that don’t get picked and dumpsters being filled with good food). I must say San Francisco does a pretty good job of trying to reclaim food that would otherwise would be thrown out, with the existence of the San Francisco Food Bank and Food Runners and all the food programs here feeding the hungry.

Now we have the opportunity to learn how to live off the fat of the land and I feel so lucky to get to try my hands at it. Currently I am excited about growing potatoes in towers or trash cans with their bottoms cut out, and plopping these towers wherever there is unused sunny space. Yesterday I was in Treat Commons and my friend was harvesting potatoes that she had planted for the first time. It was wonderful seeing her excitement at the magic of pulling up the spuds out of the soil, I mean she was so happy!

Also, almost every day I walk by a recently created sidewalk garden and I would love to try planting a potato tower right there on the sidewalk. And an artichoke plant to boot! Where are the crazy people like me?

The Free Farm Stand came off without a hitch yesterday. It didn’t rain, though it was rather cool and it kept Thy jumping up and down at the end to get warm. Though we did have brief visits by the sun. Besides our regular crew of helpers, there was a new volunteer Dana visiting from Vermont. I always want to say how much I appreciate the help and it was also great that Jeff came by with his Spanish speaking skills. We still need help in that department.

We loaded the table mostly with excess organic produce from the Ferry Building Farmer’s Market, lots of broccoli raab, and other greens, beets, daikon radish, a little broccoli and cauliflower, various herbs, and leeks. I harvested from two gardens 3 ½ lbs of greens (kale and perpetual chard) and 1 ½ lbs of baby lettuce. I also picked some cilantro and arugula, and some more broccoli side shoots. We are still finding a handful of Cape Gooseberries (imagine if we had a long hedgerow of them growing in some sunny spot). Page came by with a small basket full of lemons from the Holy Innocents Church in Noe Valley and brought by some big cauliflower plants to give away and some other seedlings. We also had a good amount of bread and no non-vegan pastries.

Using a counter we counted at least 66 people shopping at the stand this week.

Other news

I went to the neighborhood meeting about the trees being cut down in front of General Hospital (so trucks can get into the site where they are building the new hospital). Immediately we learned that the number of trees on the sidewalk to be cut are going to be two not seven. The architect who is supervising the project seems like he is trying really hard not to cut trees unless he has to and one of the trees is apparently injured and not growing well. I also learned that where they are building the new hospital there will be over 100 trees removed. I got the impression there isn’t much that can be done about it at this point. There was also talk about the plans to cut a lot of trees at St. Luke’s hospital, but apparently there is no final plan yet, so people can still have an influence in what happens. I have a soft spot for trees and so that is why this gets mentioned here in my space for talking about the Free Farm Stand and growing food locally.

I don’t know if this is true but I heard that the Victory Gardens project lost it’s funding to put in 15 gardens this year. The idea of helping people put in gardens in their backyards is one that I am particularly fond of and perhaps this year the Free Farm Stand can start doing this. Already last week I visited a beautiful preschool here in the Mission, Las Americas, that has gardens and more space that needs a lot of help. They serve low income families and the staff seems open to any ideas we come up with for their gardens. I saw a lot of potential there including planting fruit trees. What is needed is someone to help start a garden group that would once a week help someone with putting in a garden and then over the season provide mentorship. The idea being the more gardens the more people growing their own food and any surplus could be shared at the Free Farm Stand with neighbors without garden space or other neighborhood gardeners.

I also heard the Homeless Connect Garden ran into problems putting a “homeless garden” in at 16^th and 7^th Street and is looking for another space to put a garden. What about the idea of closing parts of Market St. and putting in a garden there?

I enjoyed going to the Permaculture Guild meeting on Wednesday night. Though I don’t see myself as a permaculturist exactly, I haven’t taken any courses and don’t have a degree, I like going to the meetings because right now I always learn something when I attend. There was an interesting presentation from some students of RDI (Regenerative Design Institute) in Bolinas. They have made a plan of putting in a food forest in Golden Gate Park next to Kezar Statium that is 2 acres of land. They are facing a similar situation I am with putting in fruit trees on Park and Recreation land.

Talking about that, things are still moving forward with putting fruit trees in our park where we do the farm stand. The head director of parks in our area wants to expand the space for the community garden so that any fruit trees we plant would go in the community garden and not be under the park’s jurisdiction. Meaning he wants to pass the problem of growing fruit trees to the community garden, giving him less for him and his staff to deal with. How hard it will be to change the land use we will see, it has to go to the Park Commission.

This week I hope to start planting lots of seeds that I just got through the mail and perhaps installing a potato tower here and there. I’ve got spring fever already.

“The sun has peaked, my shadow I see, six more weeks of winter it will be. According to folklore, if a groundhog sees his shadow on Groundhog Day — Feb. 2, he’ll go back to his burrow, predicting six more weeks of winter. If he doesn’t, there will be an early spring” (from http://network.nationalpost.com/np/blogs/posted/archive/2009/02/02/235720.aspx).

I was telling people at the Free Farm Stand that today is an important holiday, especially for urban farmers and lovers. Are we going to have more winter or not or romance and spring fever? Of course here in San Francisco the weather has been sunny and it already seems like spring.

The good weather seems to bring out the crowds and from the get go we had a lot of people. We ran out of food about an hour or so later and by 2:30pm we were ready to close up shop. I want to say that I have really appreciated all the help I have been getting. I love the students that come and help out like Caleb and Thy. It was especially nice that Thy is back with us. She was away during her school break. I feel so lucky to have helpers like the both of them with such beautiful spirits and tremendous energy.

The Free Farm Stand table this week was filled with cool weather growing salad mix, greens (mostly bok choy and broccoli raab) and leeks from the Noe Valley Farmers market. Last Tuesday the Jamestown kids and I harvested the last of the salad mix from the Secret Garden and gave it to them to use for their cooking program, so there wasn’t much to harvest there. I did harvest a lot of arugula and lettuce mix from my backyard and some from Treat Commons. Also, I picked some broccoli side shoots and lettuce mix and some small volunteer potatoes from Treat Commons. We also had a bucket of lemons from the Santa Rosa area that a friend picked and brought down here while visiting the city. Later in the day some people from Potrero Hill brought some lemons from their garden to share.

We got more loaves of bread than we have been from Acme, but we are still getting a lot of sweets and rolls with cheese. I don’t know if anyone that comes to the stand at this point understands that I am trying to run a vegan farm stand (or beegan because I do give away honey from our backyard hive). I have been a vegan for over 20 years and all the food programs I have run have been vegan with an emphasis on serving or distributing healthy and organic as much as possible, non-animal based food. I still believe in the ideas in books like “Diet for a Small Planet” or “Diet for a New America”. One of the points of the Free Farm Stand is to promote eating healthy with an emphasis on fresh local organic produce that we can grow ourselves. The free organic bread just showed up one day My point is that I feel like I have been too laid back recently in giving away these buttery sweets and rolls with cheese that are neither vegan nor necessarily healthy, so I am going to try to not to get them in the future.

February is the month to plant seeds indoors and I have been reading seed catalogs and ordering seed. I am especially interested in planting potatoes in towers and have been planning out how to do it. I hope to start planting seed this week, maybe this Thursday. And as soon as we have potatoes ready to plant I want to plant potatoes with the kids from Jamestown Center.

Friday work days are still happening at 18^th and Rhode Island. I took photos of the green berms last week and the site looks good with all the fava beans growing. The lettuce and chard is barely growing, maybe it is because we need the berms to break down into soil before things will grow well. The fruit trees have buds that are swelling. Not many people showed up to help this past week and I think it is because it seems like there isn’t much to do right now or we are not communicating what the plans are each week. One thing I am planning to do Friday is build some potato towers and maybe plant some of them. We may also have other planting we can do and there is grunt work to do with what I call the ivy hill.

The long planned visit of the Daisy Girl Scout troop to the Free Farm Stand finally happened yesterday and it was a real blast. Eight giggly, enthusiastic 5-6 year olds girls made the Free Farm Stand a lot of fun and I think everyone enjoyed their help and presence. The day started out as a big question mark in terms of weather, they postponed an earlier visit because of rain, and the clouds had disappeared just before I got to the park and it seemed like it was going to warm up. But then when the girls started arriving it clouded up and got chilly. Later at some point soon after, the sun burst out and it warmed up the rest of the day. It was truly fabulous outside which brought out the crowds. Because the garden was a bit muddy we set up the stand in the park which turned out to give people more room to hang out.

The girls had a lot to do because we had gotten so much produce from the farmers market that needed sorting out. Someday I hope that we grow more food in our neighborhood (especially this time of the year), but now the free local organic produce from the bigger farmers outside the city overshadows everything. Before we started I talked to the kids about farmers and where our food comes from, and how we are trying to make good healthy locally grown food without sprays available to everyone, whether they have enough money to buy that kind of produce or not. I also talked about seasons and what grows this time of year. So our table was loaded with cool season vegetables, lots of greens, broccoli, broccoli raab or rapini, Brussel sprouts, celery, cabbage, and salad mix. I actually harvested some of the same things. The Secret Garden gave me 2 pounds of baby lettuce and arugula, and a pound of kale and broccoli side shoots. I also harvested a handful of snap peas and a handful of Cape Gooseberries that are so popular. I also had some grapes from the farmers market. Where are those grown this time of year?

Zoey came by with some beautiful salad mix she had grown in her garden. I met Zoey at a seed exchange event last year at the Pocket Seed Library (http://www.pocketseedlibrary.blogspot.com/) that she helped start. I took a photo of her salad and she knows the names of all the colorful salad greens in her mix. It is so much fun to meet up with another avid gardener in a garden and talk plants. And her being a true artist with a great eye made it even more exciting to see what attracted her attention (like the tree collards with their beautiful purple and green leaves right now).
And Fred came by with a bag of miner’s lettuce from his garden. I love introducing local wild foods to the neighbors who come to the stand and miners lettuce is really good in salads and you don’t even have to plant it in most gardens that have been cultivated for a while.
This week we actually counted how many people came to the stand with a counter and we had over fifty people. Most of the food was given away and we had no bread left over either.
There are so many garden and local food things happening right now in the city. And the Mission is becoming more of a hipster place. Some of the projects have their feet in the smiling social justice capitalist waters. At the same time they seem to be pushing good causes. Mission Pie is an example and now there is Mission Street Food (donating all proceeds to charity like Newman’s Own and with the goal “to employ charity as a viable marketing strategy”). A friend Leif sent me the menu he is cooking for it this week (they have guest chefs). It says it all:

chickweed, chicory, cress, chioggas, pecorino ginepro, blood orange, rosemary-filbert vinaigrette
Tartine walnut levain with chevre, apple, meyer lemon, wild arugala, pine nut, honey, olio nuovo, Murray River salt
deep fried yuba package with maitake, matsutake, mustard greens, leek, miso, yuzu, matcha salt
roasted cauliflower with tahini, Recchiuti chocolate 85%, piment d’Espelette
bucatini e cavolo nero: caramelized alliums, fried sage, dried cherries, toasted almonds, capers, olives, chiles and brown butter
Humphrey Slocombe maple walnut ice cream [the newest hip business in our neighborhood] with rosemary shortbread and olio nuovo .

A new friend Craig has a vegan taco wagon (http://sunnyvibrations.com/ though the site right now just has a picture of his truck on it) and he wants to serve good healthy vegan food like Café Gratitude but with more reasonable prices and he wants to include a social justice component to it too. He was interested in me getting involved. I have actually always been attracted to serving free meals and before I started the Free Farm Stand I thought about opening a free vegan soup kitchen that served locally grown food. Another dream in my pocket.

The question I always ask is how do you not become a hipster project that only serves a small circle of cool people? The Free Farm Stand itself has this problem and I hope we continue to serve a lot of our neighbors that are poor and without a lot of money to buy organic food. But because what we are doing is so exciting I guess we pull in people that want to be part of the happening scene. I hope we can just get more people that can make some time to garden somewhere. I even appreciate people that just bring bags to give away produce in.

The 18th and Rhode Island work day was rained out last week. I hope this week we can get back in the garden and work on the place more. I can’t wait for the rest of the trees to arrive.
Talking about trees I just got this email sent to me while typing:

Due to the San Francisco General Hospital rebuild seven mature Magnolia trees are to be removed from in front of San Francisco General to create temporary road ways for the rebuild. These trees will be replaced by 48″ box trees (?). To protest the removal you could write a letter to DPW-Bureau of Forestry 2323 Cesar Chavez SF CA 94124 or fax to 695-2147. The dead line to protest is February 12, 2009.
During the construction of City College on Valencia St. the neighborhood was able to stop the city from removing the trees in front of the site. The construction was able to continue without any delays and the trees were saved a win- win situation for everyone.
Magnolia trees are slow growing and took years for them to reach maturity. They provide a uniformed look on Potrero Ave with beautiful large white flowers during the summer. Please help save these trees.

This is so pathetic and I plan on writing DPW for sure. I was recently reading the web site of Tree People in Los Angeles and was so inspired by the work they are doing in L.A. my hometown. They have a program where they give fruit trees to people to plant and also another program where they give fruit trees in containers to people who don’t have dirt to plant them in. Why is our city so clueless about the importance of planting trees and instead of always thinking of reasons they need to be cut down, why don’t they incorporate the planting of more trees (especially fruit trees) in any new construction they undertake?

On a happier note, we started rooting the tree branches I got last week (a couple of friends responded to my last post and showed up to help). We also grafted some white sapotes. This Wednesday I am going to try grafting some avocado seedlings. We will see in a number of months of how well we did. We don’t have to wait around for the city or until some big group starts distributing and planting fruit trees everywhere. Once we learn the propagation skills for trees we can do it ourselves.

And to end on another positive wave length, there is a new gleaning project forming in the city (we had our first meeting). Anyone interested can go to http://sfglean.org/ and join the Google email discussion group there and get updated on the project. All the food that is harvested from local trees will go to food pantries and programs like the Free Farm Stand.