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Crop Sharing

I am wondering if newspaper editors come up with a homey working class theme for their newspapers around Labor Day.  Yesterday at the Free Farm Stand a volunteer said we were mentioned in the Sunday Chronicle.  So I looked the article up online and while searching the paper I came up with these articles:

We were mentioned in the article “Popularity of crop swaps is growing”.  I don’t think the reporter contacted anyone in our group about this article and though I thought what she wrote was sort of accurate, she  mistakenly lumped us in as another crop swap where you have to bring something from your garden to trade to get something. I actually just wrote this reporter to tell her my two cents about crop swapping and how that is not us:
“… In fact, although what we do support some of the same goals as crop swaps, we have fundamental differences with the bartering movement, which we see as just another form of capitalism, the “ism” that we have now that is broken and doesn’t work. While we support the idea of building strong neighborhood networks of people growing food, where we differ is that we believe neighbors should get together and share their surplus produce not barter or swap it which is just like selling.  This kind of seemingly friendly activity only encourages more business as usual, as in promoting business behavior among humans who are really all family. As a community we need to cultivate trust and sharing and that is what our program is really about. We are not charity workers, but beautiful share croppers.  Where love is the crop we are growing and we are sharing our crop with all. Yes it is about serving the needs of low income individuals and families, but it is more. We strive to educate people about  the connection between what we eat and their health (we promote a non-animal based or vegan diet) and we encourage and teach people how to grow their own food, even if they don’t have a backyard (we distribute seedlings and recently sprout kits to make it easier for people to try growing something). Most importantly we are all about free and the idea of doing things to encourage the growth of generosity in our hearts. For us having the opportunity to serve and be kind and compassionate to others in need is the most beautiful gift and experience.”
I was thinking that maybe the media attention on local food growing fad might have calmed down a bit (I mean I was thinking what else is there to say about the subject?), but it still seems like things are off the hook with interest in food, farming,  homesteading,  etc.  To me it’s a bit of a vegan hippie’s nightmare out there.  The article about the restaurant Locavore tops the cake of where sort of good intentions go wrong (good intentions like wanting to have a restaurant that serves local organic food and creating a space “that has the right vibe”   by “artfully surrounding the bulbs hanging from the ceiling with chicken wire…a recycler’s dream”.)  I am so out of it I didn’t even know we had this restaurant in my hood (though I do know the owner of another restaurant around the corner from me called the Local Mission Eatery).
We also got written up in Mission Loc@l again without being contacted by the reporter ( What? Free produce!), though I remember him coming out and talking to some of our volunteers and taking pictures. He actually didn’t say much, but it did make us sound like another trendy food trip in the Mission, which I guess we are in many ways.
Not surprisingly, we have, at least during these abundant summer months,  become way more popular with the lines this week and last now going around the block onto 23rd  St., despite it being Burning Man week. Maybe it’s the economic times we are in, because a lot of the folks coming are families and seniors from the neighborhood.  Someone suggested we hand out numbers so people can wait sitting on the grass and not having to stand in a line on the sidewwalk  and I am thinking we may have to go to that system to make things better.
The quality of the food we have been giving out is pretty amazing  too. We had a lot of beautiful lettuce from the Free Farm this week and I brought 22 pounds of potatoes from my backyard.  We set an all time record of gleaned fruit with 1000 pounds of plums from the same orchard we picked last week and believe it or not there are more plums there that can be harvested.  Also, we managed to give them all away. Several mothers collected plums for their schools where there kids attended, because the schools have no money to provide healthy snacks for the children (or is it they don’t also have the will to provide healthy food?). Here is a slideshow from the trip:
a sample of the 22 lbs of potatoes I grew in my backyard
Cuban Oregano (Plectranthus amboinicus) from the Free Farm. It is fun to give out odd food plants and everyone learns something new.  This plant also known as Indian Borage is used in cooking  and has medicinal properties (used for tea for coughs and  sore throats).Two new wonderful volunteers.
It’s funny how you can start a project and if you nuture and love it, the project will grow and become its own self and what it wants to be. The bread table is an example of that, how it started off as just a bread table at the Free Farm Stand. At some point it has involved into a beautiful free food cart, sort of like the food carts or trucks that have become really popular everywhere now,  that sell hip street food from pies to soups. Our table varies from week to week and serves all different kinds of spreads from hummus to jam, kim chee, or pickles. The ingredients are often selected from produce on the table that week or jams or sauces from previous overloads of over-ripe produce. It is what makes our scene hip as the article in Mission Loc@l picked up on. But our food table is free for the masses and people without money can get something delicious and hang out in the park with new friends and nosh. This week our illustrious Mike was absent, drumming away at Burning Man, so I tried to fill in his role and made my version of hummus. I also brought a jar of marmalade that someone gave me and I brought sprouts and sprout kits complete with a cartoon how to book. The idea is to turn people onto growing sprouts so anyone can grow food at home or on the street. Another thing that is fabulous about our food table is that others can bring their creations to share.  One volunteer brought fig jam this week and spicy marinated carrots and Cristina, one of the gleaning gals, brought a delicous plum salad and a sample of plum jam, of course made with the bounty of plums from last week.
Plum salad with olive oil and basil
sprout jar with red clover seeds

When I got home from the stand a friend showed up with a pick up truck loaded with pears he had picked from an abandoned orchard in Moraga in the east bay. Fortunately the pears were hard and they won’t ripen until next week…I should have two boxes for next week. I would love to help organize others to go pick more (the word is there are a lot more to pick).

Last week I got a beautiful letter in the mail written by our friend Richard who died last month of ALS. He wrote the letter for his newsletter “Seasons” for the Auroa Dawn Foundation  & Marty’s Place,  his house for homeless men with HIV. He wrote it several months before his liberation.  He ended his writing with this:
“I’ve always felt that despite all the dogma, morals, control, power and bad example that organized religion has shown the world over the centuries, the real messages Jesus, Buddha, Mohammed, and other prophets brought us are these two thoughts: first do not be afraid and second, always live in Love.”

Waste Watching

This week we broke new records with over a thousand pounds of hecka local produce harvested and gleaned and distributed for free. What made up most of that weight were prune plums or sugar plums. On Thursday me and three friends drove to Vacaville (about an hour and 20 minutes away) where we “picked” 780 pounds of plums. I say picked when what we really did is shake trees and the plums fell into a tarp we held.

My friend Lauren with Produce to the People got an email from a woman who bought a 5 acre property up there that came with an old prune orchard. The trees were rather old and in poor shape, but  still producing a lot of fruit. The woman said she called around and couldn’t find anyone to pick the trees and she couldn’t even  get someone who would pick them and sell the fruit (apparently there weren’t enough trees to make it profitable). We picked for about four hours and filled all the 37 boxes we brought. I was told by our new friend Cathy with the orchard that there are a lot of fruit trees in the area that don’t get picked, that  many people buy property with orchards on them and people don’t know what to do with all the fruit. It is a lot of work to deal with the fruit and the trees. We only picked maybe 10—15 trees at the most and there were maybe 50 or more trees there that could be picked. A number of people have told me that they want to help glean if other opportunities come up. I would be happy to keep a list of possible gleaners with their contact information and what times they are available or not, if they drive or not or have a vehicle. There might even be another trip being planned to these trees, though I probably won’t go up again.

It starts getting hot early in Vacaville

our friend the French Prune Tree

It turned out that others brought more gleaned fruit to the stand. Bilkis brought apples and pears from trees in Marin and a neighbor dropped off two shopping bags of apples. Plus there were apples that I got from Produce to the People and Alen brought apples that she gleaned from Bernal Heights (word is out there that the Free Farm Stand is a place that is always looking for local fruit to give away because I got two emails about a craigslist ad for free pears and I was able to connect Alen, one of our faithful and eager gleaners, with the pear tree.)

I was just reminded again this week how abundant California is with fruit and vegetables and how much of it goes to waste. I feel grateful that I can help channel some of this abundant waste to people who are on tight budgets and could use it. It is a real dilemma in our world how to not only deal with the all the waste that is out there, but how we can all cut down on our own waste. Like in our backyard there are walnuts falling as I speak that I should be picking up and taking off the green husk.

This week besides the record amount of produce we had, both hecka local and farmer’s market local, we also had a record amount of people, with the line now going down Treat Ave and around the corner on 23rd Street. It was quite the scene. At the end of the day there was nothing left except some compost.

I think because of the large crowd there was unfortunately some tension that built up. Perhaps we have grown too large I don’t know. Despite the fact  that a few weeks ago I passed out fliers in English, Spanish, and Chinese trying to explain that we are all about loving our neighbors and we were not just your usual food give-away, there was still up tightness and people fighting with each other. When the second shift  of food came around some people that didn’t get food yet were rightly upset that some people who already gotten food had somehow gotten in front of them. I tried to explain that people in the end had to monitor themselves and not what the others were doing, but I get the feeling that the peace was disturbed. At least one woman who was asked to get in line when she came up to the table to get food got upset and said she was never coming back. While I was thinking about waste  yesterday also I thought what a waste it is for us to be harvesting negative thoughts and emotions, anger, and upsetness, especially over something like food, when there is so much. Though I realized, perhaps in our eagerness to get rid of all the food we collected, we might have given each person a bit too much, so at the end I noticed some people came up short. Or will that always be the case? Anyway, I need to think more about our program and to see if there is a way to make it less crazy. One beautiful thing I noticed that being such a nice sunny day, a lot of people were sitting on the grass chatting and eating the snacks from the bread table. On the whole the Stand had a real festive feeling.

handing out plums to people in line

Cristina handed out fall seedlings and flowers…everything except a few mustard seedling were given away

At the beginning we had a lot of soft fruit and tomatoes that we separated and many people picked through it to make sauce for themselves. The night before I canned a lot of fruit that was too soft to even transport to the stand and made more tomato sauce (thanks for the people who read last week’s blog and brought me some quart mason jars,  I put them to good use!).

I also discovered a fast way to deal with soft fruit by making a crisp by just putting the sliced or mushed fruit in a baking pan or dish and add a small amount of cornstarch and sweetener if you want. You can then make a quick topping made with oil or non-hydrogenated vegan margarine and flour or oil and quick cooking oats and sweetener, vanilla, some cinnamon if you want. I was thinking you don’t even need to make a topping, as Mike and Brittany were serving the crisp on bread (instead of creating more waste by using a paper cup and plastic spoon).  Kind of like a baked jam.

here is the Free Farm Special this week bread with humus, tomato, basil, and fruit crisp

Alen picked some berries from Bernal Hill  (I was up there today and it looks like many are ripe) and I had all this soft fruit so I made a crisp that was served at the stand.

beautiful lettuce from the Free Farm

our table was beautiful with squash

trombone squash a five pounder

My friend Varsha sent me this fascinating read, an article called “Toward the new garden of Eden:…” http://findarticles.com/p/articles/mi_m1134/is_7_119/ai_n58009359/. It is about this university professor who started a career as a scientist who became an expert in parasites. Due to funding cuts he wound up teaching Ecology 101 and Medical Ecology, “walking his class through the ways in which the world is collapsing.”  Long story short is he became an expert in rooftop gardens and vertical farming when he challenged his students to come up with solutions for the mess we are in. He and his student came up with statistics that the only way cities can really feed all it’s people is to build massive vertical farms on and in sky scrappers and buildings. Here is a quote I that thought was really interesting:

“We are the only animals that farm far from where we live (I didn’t know that other animals farm, but apparently there are leaf -cutter ants and fungus-farming termites). In doing so, we have divided our world into the places that produce and, separately (in our cities), the places where we consume food and make waste. No other animals have ever chosen to live beside their waste rather than beside their food. If there were ever any ants, beetles, or termites that ran their cities in the way we do, they became extinct.”

 

 

Saucy Summer

I am sitting here typing as 2 more gallons of tomato sauce that I canned are boiling away on our stove, plus 6 more quarts of fruit compote. On Saturday night I canned 3 gallons of tomato sauce all with organic tomatoes that were soft and had been squished, all left-overs from the farmer’s market. There is so much fruit and vegetables here in the bay area during the summer it can be overwhelming just thinking about it. I took the day off yesterday from the stand and instead went to the Free Farm where SFCare was holding a sock drive for the homeless and a picnic with vegan hotdogs. When I came back to the stand to help clean up the second delivery of produce came a bit late and there was still a line of people getting food. I wound up bringing home a box of soft peaches and nectarines and a lot of ripe tomatoes. There are orchards of fruit I hear about that need picking and gardens I haven’t had time to harvest from, including more potatoes in my backyard. (I harvested 16 pounds of  beautiful spuds from a somewhat shady 28 sq ft spot or about 1 3/4lb potato per square foot). I would say we could definitely use some help with canning. We need a phone tree that has people on it to call who  can glean or can on short notice. Having a vehicle or way to pick up surplus produce would be helpful and having the equipment on hand and jars would be useful too. If anyone has extra canning jars around that they would want to part with that would be helpful as I see more soft fruit and tomatoes in our future. While I am at it we can also use wide mouth jars for sprout kits.Mike ran the stand plus our regular crews of fabulous volunteers made it all happen. Brittany and I collaborated on making a sprout making kit and she assembled, attaching a small cartoon booklet  how to grow sprouts to jars with screen rubber banded on top and red clover seed inside. I also made 4 pounds of sprouts and they were handed out at the bread table (the sprouts I think were put on the hummus, tomato, and bread Mike was handing out). The kits we given out to people that like eating the sprouts and wanted to grow some themselves. I love growing sprouts and giving them away, but I also feel like anyone can grow sprouts and I wanted to encourage people to try growing some of their own food even if they don’t have a backyard.

5 gallon bucket sprouting method

booklet

Brittany assembling kits

hummus creation

baby eats hummus creation


2nd loadDid I mention we had a record amount of tomatoes and eggplant that we got left over from the farmer’s market?

When I got to the stand Mike gave me a taste of a delicious Armenian cucumber and he said some people from a farm in David came by with a lot of them to share (apparently they were pretty big). Also, I noticed a friend of mine named Wendy came by with a giant overgrown zucchini. It probably could feed quite a few people.

The Free Farm Stand now has a face painter. It has become a real children’s event!