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It is the time to think about purchasing fruit trees and other fruiting plants because now is when they are available more cheaply. You get them without any soil around their roots instead of coming in a container (bare root) and put them right into the ground. The last few days I have been refining my list of fruit trees for two sites that we are planning to plant within a month or so. One is maybe a bit of a long shot, which is to expand the small urban orchard that is in Treat Commons out into the park (Parque Niños Unidos). We need to get permission from Recreation and Park and I am not sure how long it will take or what kind of bureaucracy we will face. At the permaculture farm on 18^th and Rhode Island I think it is a little more straight forward. A few of us have been trying to figure out what trees we want to grow there and where we want to put them, then we have to get the trees. It has been fun to spend almost a whole day thinking about varieties of fruit trees and trying to design a high density plan for fruit trees in a public park.

One thought that has come up in my mind is that we as consumers are so controlled by the corporations and even the farmers who grow food for us to eat. They decide what kinds of apples we can chose to buy or avocados or potatoes. A lot of times it is based on how easy it is to ship (you don’t see a lot of mulberries for sale) or what foods people are used to (maybe based on marketing). People now want Haas avocados even if they have to come from Chile because they don’t make fruit year round here. We are really limited in choice when we buy food and the only way we will be able to have more choice in what flavors we taste will be if we grow food and share it among ourselves. Some fruits we may have to go to other neighbor’s trees to graze because they are hard to transport even to a free farm stand. Just running the farm stand I am learning more about local varieties of fruit. For example, I have learned l lot about figs this year from people bringing me samples of figs from their trees and also by picking them. This week we had two varieties of figs that two different people brought from their trees. Brown Turkey figs grown on Capp St. and Black Mission figs grown in Visitacion Valley.

I dream of finally learning to graft avocado seedlings and other fruit trees and giving them away at the Free Farm Stand. We need to establish some mother trees of different cultivars that we can collect scion wood and use to graft the seedlings.

Talking about fruit trees. Jo picked some wonderful fruit that she called Asian pears somewhere in Pacifica that looked delicious. I only tasted one that was slightly under ripe, but the fruit was in perfect shape and I can’t believe they are so late in the season. I want to get grafting wood from that tree for sure, and it would help if we knew positively that it was an Asian pear. From my tasting one it seemed like an Asian pear. Besides the figs that both Marcus and Sarah brought, Christy came up with a couple of pumpkins from Corona Heights Community Garden and more Cape Gooseberries. Rory pointed out that these berries when dried are what they sell as Inca berries. I got more feijoas (pineapple guavas) from my friend in Noe Valley and Stephanie brought some from Southern California (she actually drove down here with two plants and a banana tree and found some fruit at the nursery that she brought for us to taste). The small rounder ones from the nursery were somewhat sweeter which would make sense). A woman brought some rosemary from her garden and some Haichiya persimmons from her grandmother’s tree in Millbrae. I really wanted some food at the stand that I grew (while our garden sits in shade and things grow so slowly). So I ordered more sprouting seed and grew sunflower greens and clover/brassica mix sprouts. Do people know that San Francisco is home to the ultimate sprout seed selling business, Sprout People, a family run internet business (http://www.sproutpeople.com/). How local can we get, though they have to get their seeds shipped to them. I am not so much pro business, but they really help people a lot with free sprout growing advice on their web site. Growing sprouts is so empowering! People love the sprouts and I need to put out a how to flyer to encourage people to try growing sprouts themselves. I just don’t have time to do all the wonderful things I can think of doing!

We also had carrots, salad mix, lettuce, bok choy, and turnips from the ferry building.

We had a lot of great volunteers helping set up and run the stand. And we had at least two Spanish speakers that really make a lot of people more familiar with the scene. Recently while collecting horse manure I was talking with two new friends that go to San Francisco State about another component of the Free Farm Stand that I would like to get off the ground eventually. They have a lot of students who want to volunteer to do some work related to gardening and improving our environment.

I want to have one day a week, maybe Saturdays, that the Free Farm Stand helps Mission neighbors put in gardens in their backyard (or plant a fruit tree or some berries). And if they have some surplus they can bring some to the Free Farm Stand or share it with friends. I was talking to Blair at the fabulous end of the year open house party for Garden for the Environment and The San Francisco Green Schoolyard Alliance. This was a night for networking with other garden folks and I started talking to Blair who is involved with the Victory Garden Project. With some grant money they are putting in 15 backyard Victory Gardens in the city. He said there were 1000 people that applied. I thought that if we had a core group of volunteers we could possibly contact some of those people who applied for a garden in the Mission and offer to help them put in a garden of some sort. There seems to be a lot of people that want to help out and this would be the perfect way.

I also learned some news about the Project Homeless Connect Garden. The site is that was donated to project is where the old Glidden paint factory was and has verified levels of contaminants that exceed hazardous waste levels for human health exposure. It is actually the road between the two buildings of the old factory and is one of the original streets now classified as a “unaccepted roadway”. It is big (.8 acres). I also heard that it may belong to the Port Authority. So it sounds like the garden will have to be built in containers. Blair thought that if the city were to remove 8 inches of soil on the whole lot, using permaculture techniques and bio remediation it could possibly be cleaned up within a year. I think more research could be done also about planting fruit trees in the soil and whether the contaminants would wind up in the fruit.
Well I guess after thinking about that site, the 18^th and Rhode Island land sounds like paradise. Last week I think we finished planting all the fava beans (I was only there on Friday without a camera) and we sprinkled granite rock dust everywhere for minerals. I am not sure what is next to do there, deal with the ivy for sure and I am trying to move forward with getting trees planted soon. The seedlings are growing larger every day!

It is hard for me to believe I am able to grow anything in the gardens where I am working that are in so much shade right now. For this week’s farm stand I harvested some lettuce and mixed greens from my backyard to make a lettuce mix. And the Secret Garden had some kale, broccoli, and chard that I picked. The Cole family rules! Over in Treat Commons where there is a lot of sun, the baby greens and the lettuce grew much bigger and I was able to harvest enough to make my salad mixed look great. In total I had one big bowl full of salad mix all from the three gardens. I also harvested a number of yellow wax peppers and some Rocoto peppers, a few snap peas (I am not impressed with the dwarf snap peas I grew, Sugar Ann variety, that grew well but the peas were pretty small compared with the standard tall variety Sugar Snap and not so productive). Sheryl from church gave me the last cherry tomatoes from her garden in Berkeley, yellow, red, and dark reddish black kinds with different shapes too. I had some left over tomatillos from last week from Marcus’s children’s garden at the botanical garden in the Golden Gate Park. The ferry Building Farmer’s Market supplied us again with most of our produce: broccoli, Brussel sprouts, many kinds of greens including mustard, collards, kale, bok choy, and chard. We also had some winter squash, turnips, and various herbs like cilantro and parsley. And there was a lot of bread too. Ellen came by with a few bunches of grapes from the farmers market where she works.

Update on the Food Forest Garden on Potrero Hill

The weather has been crazy warm as we enter the month of December and I am excited that I have the opportunity to work with the San Francisco Permaculture Guild in creating an experimental garden to grow food for projects like the Free Farm Stand. The guild is having its 1^st Wednesday of the month meeting at the Red Victorian Peace Café (1665 Haight St. near Cole) this Wednesday the Dec. 3). It starts it starts 6:30-7pm. That is where a lot of talk about that project goes on and other projects as well and if you like the meeting aspect of permaculture, I would encourage you to attend. On Fridays and Saturdays we are having a workday at the 18^th and Rhode Island site. The work day on Friday starts at 10am and goes until about 3pm or longer and Saturdays it starts at 10:30-11am. http://18thandrhodeisland.org/ is a website dedicated to the project and the last update was nice in that it included what is going on astrologically which I rarely cover here. Not that I don’t believe in it. After ready David’s explanations of the heavenly influences on us now, I think it is all true. It is a glorious time right now and getting connected with the earth underneath our feet and the activity above our heads is such a great thing for us to all to do. Especially during this season when the days are shorter and it seems more dark, cold and dreary.

The garden got its first write up in the Potrero View newspaper in the December issue that can be picked up in Potrero Hill stores and coffee shops. The article is online and you can read it here at http://www.potreroview.net/news10102.html . Newspapers often don’t do a great job covering something, but I thought they did a good job with this. There is an interesting interview with the doctor who has offered his empty lot for this project and an explanation of the plan for the space. By the way, we were thinking up some new names for the 18^th and Rhode Island garden (it is little cumbersome writing that all the time). One night I had a stream of names come to me in a sort of dream, including (do) No Harm Farm or No Til Hill, Bermed Out Farm, and Potrero Urban Food Farm (PUFF), but some more serious permaculturists among us thought those names wouldn’t do. Maybe it will be the Potrero Urban Farm Project (PUFP) so we won’t be associated with pot or dragons. I guess we are still searching for good names if any permaculture poets are out there.

We had our first planting on Saturday and we got a lot planted. I brought seedlings for chard, lettuce, and some kale, and seeds to plant a mostly lettuce lawn. Then a lot of fava beans and red clover was planted everywhere. It is a major first step and we will see how things grow in compost and wood chips. I have been gardening for about 28 years, but have never grown a garden exactly like this. It is also exciting because the site gets so much sun and a lot of space! I have just sent off a letter asking a wholesale nursery for a donation of trees, but soon we might order some as well. Flash! Stephanie just emailed me and said she on the way back from San Diego she picked up some 2 Pineapple guava plants and a Dwarf Banana from Exotica Nursery! How she got them in her small car is a miracle.

I love this time of year, not just because I am a Scorpio. But because this is really the last big harvest time and it really is a season of thankfulness culminating in Thanksgiving Day. I get annoyed when people call it Turkey Day, because that is so much what it is not about. I was talking to a fellow gardener in the morning yesterday and I was telling her that I am always feeling grateful and that it must come from being a gardener for so long. We talked about the Free Farm Stand and she likes it because it brings people closer to the source of their food and thus closer to the people who grew it, and closer to the land and earth where it grew, and ultimately closer to the power of creation. That being in touch with that source of everything can’t help us all feel a little bit thankful. That is why we celebrate the harvest. The farm stand is a spiritual celebration perhaps in disguise and a weekly chance to feel thankful (thankful for the food that grows, thankful for the farmers who share their leftover produce with us, thankful for all angels that pop into my life like the volunteers who help run the stand or pot up seedlings to give away, thankful for all the neighbors that come and get food and feed their families healthy food, thankful for those gardeners who share their extra garden bounty with us, thankful for people who bring their stories to share, thankful for friends new and old, thankful for the ability to be kind). And gardening and growing food and flowers gives us gardeners the excuse for being a bit crazy, talking to our plants, praying for rain or a good crop, keeping in touch with the plant fairies, and knowing that we are all blessed. A woman brought some herbs to the stand yesterday and I was admiring her t-shirt. It said ” Radical Transformation”, and it showed graphically the stages of a seed sprouting. That miracle of a seed coming alive is what it all about. I am Mister Thankful!

So yesterday I guess I was feeling kind of heady. I also enjoyed meeting a woman named Grace who had two children Generosity and Clarity. And another appropriate thing happened yesterday. I met Autumn who came by later in the day and played her violin while people picked up produce and bread.

I am getting very little from the gardens right now. I forgot to pick some wax peppers that were in Treat Commons and my backyard will have some mixed greens soon. But the farmers market saved the day again with loads of greens of all kinds (kale, mustard and turnip greens, bok choy, and stir fry mix). I also had a lot of organic celery. A woman who works at Marin Roots came by with a box of the most beautiful organic chard. She said her boyfriend who I met (he was an angel too and had the Om symbol sewed on his funky cool designer shirt) carried the box on his bike that he amazingly rode to the stand .

The chard was nice because Sara had written and printed out out a nice leaflet in Spanish explaining how to grow swiss chard on one side and how to cook it on the other side.

Marcus showed up with a two containers of tomatillos from a garden in a children’s playground in Golden Gate Park (I need to ask him more about the location). He said the kids husked a lot of them and they looked pretty shiny in the sun. I also met his mother and his grandmother, and the mother is a gardener too.

Christy gave me some beautiful garlic that her sister in law grew in Marin and I got some pineapple guavas from a woman who grows them in Noe Valley that works with me at Martin de Porres on Tuesdays. I also got a bag of them from a man named Luke who sells them at the Alemany and Civic Center markets. He came to help at the 18^th and Rhode Island garden and I enjoyed working with him a lot. Corrine came by with the only lettuce we had that I think she grew at her plot in White Crane Springs Community Garden. I also had a small amount of the yellow currant tomatoes. I met a woman named Winter who called me who was moving to New York and was looking for someone to take her plants that were on her South of Market roof. I took all the plants and a couple of tomato plants had fruit on them which I harvested.

I picked olives from a neighbors tree with a new helper named Samantha and was lucky they didn’t have the larvae from a olive fly in them. I met another man who went around to a lot of olive tres in the city and they all had larvae in them he said. I gave some away at the stand to people who said they would process them and eventually we will have some cured olives to give away. Our Mediterranean climate is so unique and it was pointed out to me there are only a handful of places in the world where we get this weather. And with the weather comes this season of figs, persimmons, olives, pineapple guava, and pomegranates (I haven’t seen pomegranates growing here though I have rooted one and had another one growing in a pot that hasn’t fruited yet).

We also had a huge amount of bread and at the end of the day I just had some tomatillos left (all the other produce was completely gone and the bread too). On the way home I gave some tomatillos to a woman with two kids who I recognized who was going to put the fruit in her smoothies that she makes. Ok.

Sheryl from church took home the funky apples and made delicious apple sauce which we gave away. I especially love sharing it with the kids.

18^th and Rhode Island report

Friday we had the best workday ever! We had fifteen people come by to help us move about thirty yards of chips and a thousand pounds of cardboard. And it is nice we take a break to eat lunch together and we get to know each other. The whole site is now almost finished being sheet mulched and the berms done (we had another workday on Saturday and a lot more of the mulch was moved off of the street where it was dropped…though we didn’t finish). We have canceled the next Friday workday though Saturday starting around 11 we hopefully will be doing something there, maybe planting.