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I just love these long sunny days and as we enter into summer, it seems so right. I wasn’t at the farm stand yesterday, but got reports that it was a beautiful and bountiful day. I knew that because I loaded the van with many boxes of produce left over from the farmer’s market and also with a small amount of produce from our free farm. We have been harvesting our summer squash.  Here are a couple of pictures from the Free Farm Stand yesterday.

As I may have reported in previous blogs, I am trying to find others to keep the Free Farm Stand running every week.  I love the project and I think what we are doing is unique among programs that try to fight hunger and food insecurity in our city. If we all believe in creating a world that is sustainable, we also have to look at our own lives and figure out how to make things workable. That includes maintaining relationships with friends and family  as well as self. Making room and time to breathe deep in all ways. So I realized that I am over extended and that I have to find people to help run some of the projects that I have sort of fallen into. I want to shore up other projects that need more attention, like growing more food for the stand and especially growing more seedlings. I also have new projects that I want to help launch. One is growing flowers to give away (reccently a friend typed up a beautifully detailed 7 page plan called  “A Free Flower Stand…How to Make it Happen). The other crazy dream I have is to figure out how to get a building to start a commune that can help run some of these projects. I have always believed that the most efficient way to do service work is by living together with a bunch of people and sharing income.  In the old days we called it intentional communities.

I have talked in a past blog of the Urban Kibbutz and I am also inspired by the Catholic Worker model of houses of hospitality. Recently I got a newsletter from the Catholic Worker Farm in Sheep Ranch. It mentioned a gathering of Catholic Worker Farmers and Urban Gardeners that happened in January at their farm. They were celebrating the spirit of Peter Maurin who co-founded the Catholic Worker movement with Dorothy Day in 1933. One of Peter Maurin’s ideas was to form rural farming communities to teach city dwellers farming and back to the land ideas. I think now more than ever we need to not only to form rural farm communities, but  urban farm communities. So the idea of combining urban farming communities with service to the poor  and down and out would be my ideal way of living.

So as a step in this direction I am trying to take off at least two days a month from the Free Farm Stand until we can get more people to do other days. This week while I was gone from the stand I actually went on a field trip to the Stonestown Mall Farmer’s Market to see where our second shift of left over produce came from (I like to  know where the food comes from that we give out). It is a pretty big market with about 26 farmers present. Like I knew already not all the farmers are organic. If you go to this link you can see the list of the farmers who go to this market : http://www.agriculturalinstitute.org/index/getMarketDetails?type=Markets&id=20090528140518.active. Here is the biographies of some of these farmers: http://www.agriculturalinstitute.org/index/biographies.  I noticed a sign up saying that they no longer will allow farmers to put up signs saying no sprays because they are too confusing to shoppers. So the best way to find out what is likely to be on your food that you get is to ask what methods the farmers use to control bugs or how do they fertilize their crops. Of course if you grow your own food or get it from the Free Farm or other gardeners that bring produce to the stand  you don’t need to worry about how it is grown it is all organic.

Right n

This week the harvest at the farm was pretty minimal and it was all given away at the farm.  I felt sort of bad that there was so little our Hecka Local  brand produce this week on our table. I felt it not worth putting out the signs labeling the two kinds of produce we had.  There was a lot of produce from the farmers market, a huge amount, and it’s now a fact that we are now getting  tons of summer produce left over from local farmers. I am still overwhelmed what an abundant society we live and there is so much waste everywhere. Just the other day a local market was throwing a lot of non-organic slightly damaged or ripe produce into a green bin. At least San Francisco has green bins and composts some of the waste. It seems that if one wants to live sustainably in the city, besides growing one’s own food and harvesting fruit trees that need picking, we need to live off the waste. Fortunately the Free Farm Stand for now has a great free resource for locally grown, mostly organic and all fresh produce. It is hard at times to think that this produce is really a waste product, but it is.

I did have some lemons that my friend Erik brought on his way back here from Southern California and as lemons go these were particularly beautiful and big. I also brought the first of the loquats from my huge backyard tree. Fruit is coming into season. The Secret Garden has lots of cherry plums starting to redden up and we are looking for someone with no fear of heights to climb a large ladder and pick them some morning. I was super happy that Pam showed up with a lot of bounty from the City College garden  including a large amount of beautiful lettuce and a handful of boquets from flowers she picked (sorry no one photographed her treasures). Mike amazed us again with homemade pickles from cucumbers from last weeks table. This was his first try making pickles, using a recipe from youtube. They were simple and delicious.

Mikes pickles

As you can see in the photographs, I did manage to bring seedlings to give away and they were pretty popular. I met a woman named Lilian who took some seedlings and told me she made a Foosball Planter and planted the seedlings she gathered before from the stand. She sent me an email today with photos of her planter and wrote this informative and sweet email: “With the Free Farm Stand’s donation, we were able to get things going in our container garden and eventually transfer them over to the foosball table: Chard, Kale, Cherry tree, Tomato plant, red lettuce, garlic, and potato… thank you for contributing to this wonderful community-based agriculture educational experience. This is what makes San Francisco truly a wonderful place to call home” I agree and this to me is some of what the core philosophy of the Free Farm Stand is about: A neighborhood of people helping each other grow food and sharing their surplus if they have it with those in need.  Here are some photos:

I am always saying this but I think one of the best things about the stand is that I meet so many wonderful people every week.

The other excitement going on these days is at the Free Farm. Thanks to Carmen, we have a lively blog these days at http://thefreefarm.org/ and she documents the amazing work going on there every week. At the farm there often seems to be new challenges coming up from rats eating all our seedlings to night visitors taking things that are not locked up. What really amazes me is that despite our setbacks and at times what seems like lack of organization, we get so much done at the farm. I love it. Right now we are in need of a driver with or without a big truck to drive to Oakland probably to pick up a load of manure. That’s what make our farm grow and brings food to our table.

There is an article in today’s Chronicle about Urban Homesteading http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/c/a/2011/06/12/HOO91JL14L.DTL.  A friend Ruby is organizing a tour of urban farms in the eastbay this Sunday June 19th and no one turned away for lack of funds. I personally love garden tours and that is where I often learn a lot. I must admit though as much as I love animals and gardens together, I don’t like the idea of popularizing the butchering of animals  as a cool thing to do.  Most of these gardens/farms have animals it looks like and I wonder how many kill the male offspring or off the old chickens. Some raise rabbits for meat. In the article there is some mention of the controversy around changing the zoning code in cities to let people raise animals. Ruby makes the argument that “Look at the number of people who take really poor care of their cats and dogs, and yet it’s completely legal to have six cats,”.  If we were to change the law to let people raise dogs and cats to butcher and eat, I wonder if urban homesteaders would be ok with that? Would they complain if their neighbor was barbequing a home grown cat?  I know these are all personal choices whether to eat meat or not and it is probably better that people who eat meat grow and kill it themselves, but I am one of those NIMBY people I guess. You can learn more about the tour and register here: www.iuhoakland.com/farmtour.html.

I am not sure what it was about yesterday’s Farm Stand, but I came home completely in another mental world. It was like my head was in some haze and I couldn’t remember things or concentrate on much at all. Every once in a while a fragment of reality would pop up, like remembering a part of a conversation or an important piece of paper or a card someone had given me, but not knowing where I put it. I am sure I got in that state because there were so many people I was happily chatting with the whole day and it was an overload of stimulation. It was also an intense day at the end, me having to don the role of police person because of one person in line who didn’t speak English, and did not understand the kind of scene we are trying to create at the Free Farm Stand.

I love rescuing and distributing free produce from local organic farmer’s markets, it to me is a form of urban gleaning. I also like doing what I can do to address the issue of hunger and food insecurity in our neighborhood, issues I think we can’t ignore. I also like staying small and personal. A friend whom I work with at the Free Farm on a regular basis came to the Free farm Stand for the first time and I really appreciated her perspective.  She told me she likes the farm stand we run on Saturdays at the Free Farm a lot better. It is small in terms of the number of people who come and we mostly just give out produce that we grow there, not the tons of produce saved from the fancy farmer’s markets. So we don’t get the long line and the intense craziness that some people bring, causing an unpleasant scene to say the least. Also, the people who come automatically see the connection between the farm and the produce they take home.  We need a farm in the Mission I have known that for a while. It is such a challenge to distribute large amounts of produce in a respectful and dignified way and I know that the language barrier is one big part of that challenge.

spring bounty

Earlier in the morning  I learned about a Hebrew word Kavanah and was thinking about it it during the day. As I get it the meaning is  “concentration” or”intention” or as a friend wrote me in an email “direction of the heart”. At the service I was attending it was pointed out that one needs a cetain amount of Kavanah while saying prayers. I guess we at the least  have to be aware of and keep in mind whom we are praying or speaking to. I have been thinking how this applies to the work I am most familiar with, that of service or karma yoga. Another form of prayer or meditation as I see it. Yesterday perhaps I needed more Kavanah.

There are so many beautiful people I meet every day when I am at the stand or the farm and I  always feel so happy to meet and talk with them all. Yesterday I met a couple of sisters, one who was visiting the other from New York. Nicolette, the sister who lives in the bay area, dropped by the stand with a 7lbs of lettuce and 2lbs of kale from a non-profit farm she is starting in Petaluma.  The vegetables were so neatly bunched and tied together like boquets. She comes to the city often and wants to bring more vegetables to share with us.

On Friday I picked lemons from a neighbors tree and brought 34lbs to the stand. I also had another 31lbs of lemons my friend Erik picked and someone else brought 5lbs to the stand. I also had a lot of tomato seedlings and some rocoto hot pepper plants I had gotten from Pam from City College. The plants go very fast and hopefully I will get some feedback from people how they grew (I am curious because most of the plants were growing too big for the pots and were stressed out).

Whenever I hear of a friend driving to parts south of San Francisco, like Southern California in particular, I see if they can pick me up a hard to get plant or tree for me to bring back because the nurseries are so much better there. So I am excited that to hear that Erik not only got me a Reed avocado to plant here, he also picked more lemons  on the way back. Bless it up!

Check out the most recent workday at the Free Farm blog at thefreefarm.org. This week there is a great selection of photos and a little text going with each one.