Blog

The chemistry of the Free Farm Stand is actually pretty simple. Throw up a tent and set up a table in the same place and with the same hours every week. By word of mouth let neighbors know what you are doing (trying to make the world better by growing organic food to give away). Then wait to see who shows up to get produce or helps out or observes the interesting scene. There are other details, but basically it is all about consistency and generosity in spirit and in deed.

The huge pile of bread showing up in the photos now is an example of that alchemy, and personally I find it pretty exciting. It started out with someone wanting to contribute something to the stand because she liked what was going on. She just started working in a bakery that was over baking and threw out fresh organic bread at the end of the day. Workers were allowed to take it home, so she started bringing bread on Bart for the stand. Then another neighbor offered to pick up the bread for her by car. She in turn gave some to her neighbors and to another woman who gives out food to people in her reading program. Then the Farm Stand wound up with eighty loaves of bread (one of volunteers counted them)! We had some left over that I will bring to the soup kitchen that I work in on Tuesdays.

It was nice to get a lot of help this week which allowed me to talk to people and to hand out fresh picked berries for tasting.

Summer is for gleaning

I got an email from a friend that sort of sums things up about the amount of fruit we had this week, it was a bit unreal: “As of late I am especially impressed by your resourceful fruit harvesting in the area! Here we make special trips to take oj to farms outside the city to see where much of our food comes from, and of course lots of it does, but you have really opened my eyes to the continual food production from nooks and crannies all around us.” Actually my eyes are opening too.

Saturday morning I had so many apples that I brought some to the Julian Food Pantry on 15^th and Julian. Some of them were the last apples from Candlestick Point that Jo had picked and some were from the apples we picked from my friend who lives in Glen Park (we also picked some pears there). On Saturday morning I picked more apples and lemons from a neighbor on Folsom at 23^rd. I also picked about a quarter of a bucket of apples from the tree overhanging Balmy Ave. I decided to use the fruit picker I have on a pole instead of hauling a ladder there. I prefer picking the fruit by hand so they don’t fall and break. After I picked the apples a woman came out her door that is right across from the tree and she didn’t know the tree was there (it might not be so obvious unless you notice an apple on the ground). I gave her one and she agreed with my that they were sweet and delicious. I want to go back there in the winter and get grafting wood from it.

This Sunday we had four milk crates filled with apples and at the end of the day we had less than a half left. And those were mostly the apples I picked off the ground that were damaged and funky.

A woman who didn’t speak English brought a bag of lemons from her tree. And two neighbors Steve and Kelly came by with beautiful extra produce from his dad’s home garden in Sebastopol…delicious dry farmed tomatoes, several varieties of raspberries, and red Serrano peppers that were out of this world!

It looks like Fridays and some Saturday mornings work best for me gleaning fruit. I plan to go this Friday to get more peaches and apples. One thing I have started doing is picking up the rotting fruit under the trees. It is a nice thing to do for folks and with apples helps prevent the spread of the codling moth worm that gets in the apples. I have even started hauling away the rotted fruit in cases where there is no compost pile (I imagine the fruit makes good compost).

Two friends from Morro Bay dropped by and brought some homemade applesauce. They “glean” produce all year long by visiting their local dumpsters. A lot of the fruit they get is organic (it is so expensive it tends to get thrown out first because people don’t buy it as much is their theory). They get so much food they give a lot away. John even brings his blender to the gym and makes smoothies for his friends after they work out. I realized from hanging out with them that I should get a fruit strainer so I can easily make sauce with the damaged fruit. They cut off the bad parts, no peeling or coring, and cook the fruit until it is soft and then throw it into their strainer. They have an old Hobart KitchenAid that has a fruit straining attachment that works well (apparently different than the models made now).

I was talking to another friend that wants to someday set up a food processing kitchen or a food processing tool library so we can share the equipment that we don’t need all year. I’ve got apples now I need to process if anyone has an unused fruit strainer lying around.

Here are pictures related to the fruit picking that went on this week:

Fruit picking with a view

On Friday, David, Brother Max and I picked apples and pears from a backyard above Laidley St. I think in the Glen Park neighborhood. The woman whose house it is said the trees were there before they moved in (20 years ago) and we were thinking they were maybe fifty years old. She said the apple tree fell over at one point and it is still producing tons of apples. The views from here place were fantastic.

It was fun going to a neighborhood in San Francisco you haven’t been to before (like we did last week to McLaren Park). David has been exploring stairway walks in the city for a while and told us we should check out the Harry stairs while we we there. So after the fruit picking we walked down the Harry stairs to Laidley St. and were amazed at the sense of being in the woods rather than in a city. The houses on Laidley St. are prety awesome too with some quirky architecture.

On that fruit picking trip I found two backyards with lemon trees that looked very unpicked.

The Vegetable Story

Our selection of vegetables continues to be modest. I am harvesting lettuce, kale, a few zucchini squash, cucumbers (actually one), hot peppers, lots of tomatoes, and some herbs. I have more seedlings started and I am actually behind in planting. I also have been behind in growing sprouts. Wow, being a farmer is a lot of work!

Peaches

The high point of my week collecting food for the stand was going over to David’s house across from McLaren Park in the Portola neighborhood. I never heard of this neighborhood before, though I had been in McLaren Park a number of times and liked it a lot. Christy joined me and we took the monster van that was big enough to haul the 14ft’ orchard ladder and could also carry fruit and a load of manure that we planned to pick up after picking peaches. That’s right it was peach picking time and David, who is in our local permaculture guild, sent me an email telling me he had five peach trees loaded with peaches in all stages of ripeness. I love good peaches and I knew that they grow well here. A friend on Treat Ave. has a tree that he grew from a pit that he planted and one year it made so many peaches it broke a large branch on the tree. And this year I saw it and it was still producing peaches that taste delicious.

To say the least I was pretty excited with the idea of giving out peaches at the farm stand, maybe a step up from apples and plums. On our way there we got a bit lost and wound up driving past the collapsing greenhouses I had heard about from David and another friend. On Woolsey St. and Hamilton there is a whole block of these sad structures with a big fence surrounding them and a no trespassing sign (I heard from a friend who ignores those signs and hops fences easily, that there are two peach trees in there one loaded with huge peaches, mostly rotting on the ground. And David said he has seen 16′ rose bushes growing there).

By the time I got to David’s house I was all pumped up. McLaren Park was literally right across the street and I knew this was a cool neighborhood (it was actually cool in terms of foggy, but David said it is usually very warm). David’s landlord I believe is part of the family that owns the block of land with the greenhouses and actually owns all the homes on his block. His house was pretty exciting to see also, with the shell of a wooden greenhouse on the side of his house and in the backyard too. All the windows panes are missing and there are little fragments of glass everywhere in the soil. David’s downstairs neighbor from Mexico keeps chickens and grows chayote squash and David has been doing lots of great stuff, besides cleaning things up, like installing a great rain water catchment system. David said this neighborhood was a rose growing hub at one time.

Before I go on, I want to say that it is truly sad to see a neighborhood that was once farmland, gardens, and greenhouses lose it’s heritage to development. I think an effort should be made to return some of the farmland and gardens and greenhouses back to this neighborhood, and maybe we can get the city to help.

There are five peach trees on the property in need of lots of care. He has been letting neighbors pick the fruit, but there is quite a lot and like he said in different stages of ripeness. I am glad we brought the big ladder because I could get to the riper fruit at the tops of the trees. Christy and I picked over a rectangle size milk crate full of peaches. There will be more to pick in the future when they ripen.

We also saw a couple of neighbors with fruit trees in their backyard with fruit on the ground and I am not sure if the trees are getting picked or not (I would guess not). Apples (green with red stripes that taste yummy), Asian pears, figs, and lemons. When we were leaving we walked across the street to look at an apple tree growing in the park (it was mostly picked) and there was also quite a wonderful patch of wild blackberries with fruit that was ripe and tasty. We started picking them for the stand but stopped figuring they wouldn’t keep until Sunday, and I wanted to get some manure from a place nearby (that is another interesting story!).

Apples, lemons, plums, and pears

I picked more apples from my friends garden on Folsom (and lemons too). I picked up some pears from Martin de Porres , who had bags and bags of them from man who picks them from his tree and drops them off every year to that soup kitchen. On Saturday Mike who lives in the neighborhood came by the Secret Garden where 3 of us were working and picked some more plums. I think if we want more of them we should bring a tarp and get maybe four people to hold it and then shake the trees over the tarp.

Around the time I was closing up the stand Jo brought more apples from Candlestick Point and a neighbor brought more of her beautiful Eureka lemons.

Gleaning is in the news: http://www.nytimes.com/2008/09/14/us/14harvest.html?pagewanted=1&_r=1&sq=gleaning&st=cse&scp=10. The article highlights local gleaners in the Bay Area, including North Berkeley Harvest. They are “part of a small but expanding movement of backyard urban gleaners…who voluntarily harvest surplus fruit and donate it to food banks, centers for the elderly and other nonprofit organizations”. I love this, especially where food goes to people in need. This is the Free Farm Stand philosophy in a nutshell, to get fresh organic produce to Americans “who can’t afford the two cups of fruit a day recommended by the government.”

So this time of year is really special. Already just today I learned of two apple trees that can probably be harvested blocks from here. One friend told me of an apple tree hanging over Balmy alley with apples on it. I went there and sure enough I saw the tree. There were still apples on it and I was lucky to find one on the ground. It was the best and sweetest apple I have tasted so far. They should be picked right away, but a tall ladder is needed which I can loan out to someone interested in picking them. I also got an email from someone who said basically that she likes what we are doing. She said “1 apple from Safeway was $1.05 and I had to put it back”. She told me about an apple tree on Bartlett St. that I need to check out. And then there is an orange tree on 24^th St. that needs investigation. Today a friend that had a stroke a while back asked me to help her pick her apple and pear trees that are loaded with fruit. And my backyard has a large English walnut tree dropping tons of walnuts and they take a lot of work to process them, but taste great.

Any gleaners out there???

Trying to keep up with vegetable growing

I picked almost the last of the kale from the Secret Garden and this time it was very popular and I had no trouble giving it away. It is still the best bang for the buck in terms of growing lots of nutrition in a small place and it is very reliable. I also had lettuce, tomatoes, and chilies from several gardens and purple beans that came from a neighbor (who also brought tomatoes and chilies). It has been hard keeping up with planting and growing a lot of vegetables, and part of that is not having enough space to grow a lot more food and part of that is needing more help, especially if I could find someone whom I can train to take on more responsibilities.

Work days and news about the Secret Garden

Tuesday work day at Treat Commons is going well and so have the work days at the Secret garden, but I can’t always be there on Saturday. The Secret Garden is going through some changes; I just heard that Robert has been hired to care take the garden and there is a meeting being held to develop a vision and long-term plan for the garden (Good Samaritan is taking over the management of the garden and contracted with the executive director of Occidental Arts and Ecology to design and facilitate the planning process for the Garden’s future). I don’t know where this will lead.

I would like to find time to schedule a work day for my backyard too where I grow a lot of the food for the Free Farm Stand.

Honey and Bread

I brought more honey to share thanks to a gardener at Treat Commons who gave us a lot of baby food jars. I still have more hooney to put in jars. One of the sweetest things happened on Sunday. A woman with a baby stroller who has been coming regularly brought by a big brown shopping bag full of clean baby food jars. And talking about honey, I learned when that hot spell happened about a week ago or so, there was a honey flow on and our bees filled up another box with honey (that is maybe 3 gallons in a couple of weeks!). I also learned that a neighbor just extracted honey and got about 6 gallons too. Where are all the flowers for this honey? What I have learned is that one worker bee visits five million flowers to make one pint of honey.

Jamie came by with more of the wonderful organic bread from Acme and it is a big hit. I especially like their whole grain breads.

This week I had to help host a church pot luck in my back yard, so I asked Corrine to open the stand for me the first hour. She graciously accomplished the task and when I got there things were in full swing. The table was laid out beautifully and some people were already there getting food. My big reflection on the farm stand this week is that it is already growing a life of its own and becoming what it is somewhat independent of me. It is not that every week the farm stand is growing bigger and bigger, though more people are coming, nor do I think that I am growing more food to give away (the amounts of food still vary from week to week). And I haven’t attracted a core group yet of people that want to help run the Free Farm Stand.

The best thing about the farm stand though is that it is becoming an actual part of the neighborhood that is attracting a number of “regulars” every week. Neighbors are getting to meet other neighbors and something else is happening besides a food program for the poor or a tool to support local food growing.

I loved it when I got to the stand and there was a stack of flyers on the table about a peace march in the neighbor happening that evening. I was able to hand them out to people who came by and there was talk generated about the violence in our neighborhood and what people thought about it.

It is so beautiful also when neighbors come by with a small amount of something they grew themselves and bring it to share. And what was exciting was that when something was low, a neighbor would magically show up with a small amount of something to replace it with. That happened with the tomatoes. First Dave came with some more of his cherry tomatoes from Treat Ave. that resupplied the ones I had brought from several gardens. Then those ran out, but Nosrat showed up with a handful of tomatoes he grew right around the corner on Folsom St. Catilyn brought some salad mix from her garden that added to the lettuces I grew and contributed to the bounty. She also brought some nice looking tomatillos and with the different chili peppers we had someone could make a nice salsa.

We had something new on the table this week. Jamie who lives nearby got a job on Saturdays at Acme bakery at the Ferry Plaza Farmers Market. She hated to see the bread that wasn’t sold at the end of the day being thrown out, so after talking to me we decided to try giving it out at the Free Farm Stand. The company bakes very good organic bread. I gave away two big bags of it. She will bring some more next week, but she had a hard time carrying it all home from work on Bart, so she might bring less.

Justin and Brooke brought the most delicious pears they gleaned from an abandoned pear orchard in Morga in the east bay And Jo had more apples from Candlestick Point community Garden. A couple of people brought some lemons, including Dolores who came to our church potluck earlier. They were all mostly huge lemons. Dolores surprised me when she said hers were Meyer lemons, I thought that variety was small (at the least the ones in our garden are). The lemons at our stand were huge round yellow balls and pretty impressive looking. Someone else also brought a few cucumbers from a garden in Berkeley. There were a few beautiful lemon cucumbers and one Armenian cucumber. I was curious how that long unusual cucumber tasted. Maybe when there is only one of something I should slice it open on the spot so people can have a taste of it.

Peace March

In the wake of the six homicides in our neighborhood, a candlelight peace march was held Sunday night down 24^th St. I thought there were 50-75 people in attendance and I talked to a number of our neighbors, some who I have met at the farm stand. I think everyone is freaked out with the violence going down around here and no one has a clue what to do. So just walking together with your neighbors I think is a good thing and that is why I joined it. We visited the site of three murders and dropped off our prayers for peace.

On the march, I was talking to neighbor whom I have known for years. The subject of horticultural therapy came up because she was telling me since her husband has started getting into gardening recently, he has become happier and he whistles when he comes in from working in the garden. This is a man who has had to deal with horrible treatments for prostrate cancer.

I am a big believer that gardens and trees themselves can bring healing energy to the planet and for that fact alone we need more of them. One of my crazy fantasies right now is to try to talk Delano Market into letting me plant a Peace Garden in a part of their parking lot. I live right across from it and at night a lot of stuff goes down out there, and our neighborhood besides needing some good local organic food could use some good vibe energy that gardens and nature can bring.

Jam

The results are finaly in about the jam Eli made with the plums from the Secret Garden. I opened the jar that Eli brought last week and gave out samples of the plum jam in small plastic containers at the stand. It was really delicious. Eli loves to make jam and maybe we can collect more fruit and work with him making another batch. The plums in the Secret Garden are almost getting to the point where they are too ripe to pick. Though there are still a lot on

Mayor talks the talk for Local Food

I just read last week an article in the Chronicle how our dear mayor has now come out in support of local food and has gotten the Slow Food bite or something: The article is titled “S.F. is developing a policy on use of local food” ( http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/c/a/2008/09/05/BAT312OBND.DTL&hw=local+food&sn=009&sc=614). “The policy will also encourage urban gardens and call for planting fruit-bearing trees and plants in street medians and abandoned lots.” “Mayor Gavin Newsom wants to get a lot more of that local produce onto the plates of anyone served a public meal – including schoolchildren, homeless people, hospital patients and jail inmates.”

Personally I have a hard time not thinking this is hot air. I contacted Daniel Homsey in city hall who I know to see if anyone there can help me find a place to start a free farm stand farm in the city. I pointed out the article to him and he said he would try to figure out who to contact there that might help. I also asked him for leads to get free compost. We will see if anything turns up for small nobodys and projects like mine. I also wound up talking to Tom Ammiano at the Peace walk and he liked my idea of setting up an urban peace farm or garden and said to contact him about it.

I love the idea and hope something good will come out of it. In the meantime I hope to start working on moving foward the projects of planting fruit trees and bushes in Parque Niños Unidos and getting a garden planted at 18th St. and Rhode Island.