Little City Gardens

Wow. We’ve been busy.

With the farmers market now in full swing, the second month of our CSA almost completed, and an additional restaurant added to the mix, we’re finding ourselves chugging along hurriedly through the week with a strict amount of routine. Aside from bed turning, seeding, watering, and harvesting — the essential tasks necessary to keep up with steady orders — there is little time right now for much else! Things like diligent weeding, new building ideas, irrigation expansion and creative projects have all but fallen by the wayside and will likely stay there until we have a little more time to catch our breath. The weeds will have to remain a little more unruly than is comfortable, and the barely functioning irrigation will just have to do for now.

It’s easy to get a little lost in this momentum and overwhelmed by the demands and cycles of this kind of work. Sow, water, cover, weed, thin, water, harvest, turn. And again and again. We’re kept on our toes by constant variables: birds eating our freshly laid seed, heavy winds drying out our soil and stunting our greens, heat spells causing our kale to bolt early. But regardless, the cycles persist and we do our best to keep up.

Recently though, in the midst of all of this taxing routine, I had a satisfying, encouraging realization: we’re running a farm in San Francisco. Two years ago, while campaigning for new zoning legislation, weedwacking massive amounts of fennel (we’re still doing that, by the way), and watering our six sunflower plants with our water bottles, this reality felt far, far away.

Here’s a breakdown of a typical week:

• Monday – Start the day off early with a farm walk, decide priorities for the week, assess crops. Evaluate what is ready to harvest, finalize what will go in CSA boxes and what will be available for restaurants. Then, seeding, transplanting, turning beds, weeding as time allows. Volunteer/visitor day in the afternoon.
• Tuesday – Salad harvest in the morning, continue farm work in the afternoon.
• Wednesday – Early start! Harvest all day. Set up CSA boxes. CSA pickups at the farm in the evening.
• Thursday – Finish up the harvest. Load up truck, deliver to restaurants, head to Farmer’s Market, set up stand, sell from 4-8pm, breakdown stand, head back to farm to unload.
• Friday – Miscellaneous farm work, recordkeeping, visitors, etc.

So the last few months have gone. While this routine is productive in certain ways, it also leaves little room for reflection and assessment of our goals — something we’re both craving right now — let alone troubleshooting time for crops and systems that aren’t really doing that well. We’re working on figuring out some balance for ourselves and determining what our capacities are, both physically and emotionally. More thoughts on this soon.

In between all of this routine, however, we’ve had some great visitors to the farm lately. Although we get more requests for this than we are able to accommodate, we have hosted dozens of groups over the past year. We recently had a group of high school students out from June Jordan School of Equity for a morning tour. We explained the ideas behind this project and outlined the kind of work that goes into operating a farm at this scale. After the tour, they helped us weed the mound at the back of the lot where all of our winter squash is now planted. These types of visits feel really important and are always fun, even though we struggle with how to fit them into the schedule on a regular basis while keeping this small business afloat.