Little City Gardens

We’re testing our crops this fall and winter, getting back into the swing of our crop rotations and salad creations. Here’s what’s sprouting up right now:

arugula, mustards, mache, lettuces, cilantro, chervil, claytonia (miner’s lettuce), tatsoi, red komatsuna, nasturtium, scallions, minutina, mizuna, radishes, turnips, kale, cabbage, and more to come.

To our SF neighbors, friends, chefs, we invite your suggestions – what else would you like to see us grow? Specialty varieties? Hardy greens? Medicinal herbs? Send us your two cents!

Bob looking at our new aquisition said “So you’re starting to grow cardboard.”

We needed a very large quantity of cardboard to sheet mulch some big areas of the land, especially the back of the lot, that are inundated with invasives: himalayan blackberry, fennel, bermuda grass and dock. We had been filling the back of the pickup with cardboard from our local market about once a week, but that was hardly meeting our cardboard needs. So in an attempt to be more efficient we scheduled a cardboard delivery from a recycling center.

Although we were forewarned about the dimensions of the delivery truck, somehow we gravely miscalculated how far onto the lot the truck would be able to drive, and just how much cardboard it would contain. The drop-off happened so fast we didn’t have the time or composure to call it off. Before we knew it, we had an interminable mountain of compressed cardboard (we estimate 3 tons) squashing a section of our freshly germinated field of cover crop, and the truck’s wheels had carved one-foot trenches in the soft soil of our field. It was humorous, ridiculous, and daunting.

We knew we had to move all of that cardboard to the back of the lot before too many neighbors had the chance to observe that we were turning their street into a dump. Of course we knew that the monstrous pile of trash was temporary, but it was an eyesore and not the kind of thing that happens everyday on a quiet residential street. For the past six months we have been striving to be great neighbors, and this situation was not helping our reputation. After working seven straight hours loading the truck with cardboard and driving it to the back, hardly stopping to eat or drink, the sky threatened rain and the pile had not noticeably diminished. We got the truck stuck in the mud twice and, at best, we had moved only an eighth of the cardboard.

Around 4 oclock, taking a little perspective from our debacle, we acknowledged to ourselves that we simply had more cardboard than we could use. We needed someone to take the rest. But we didn’t know who. At 5 o’clock that day, we had our best piece of luck. We met a man named Jose, who at the time when we encountered him was neck deep in a dumpster in Glen Park. Before I even said hello, he smiled at me and made a joke “It’s hard to make a dollar these days!” He was collecting cardboard from the dumpsters to sell to a recycling center. He gets about $140 for a ton. He followed us back to farm and the three of us, with the help of our neighbor, Bob, loaded up Jose’s huge box truck in the fading daylight. When we left the farm it was dark and we were exhausted. In the next three days we filled Jose’s truck twice more to the brim. He was great to work with and promised he would come back to visit the farm.

Lessons learned: Be very cautious and clear about delivery sizes. Plan well for them. Make sure the road to the drop off spot is wide enough and firm enough for the size of the truck. Sometimes going for the big load isn’t as efficient as perservering with many small loads.

The good thing is it’s over, it’s funny, and now we have enough cardboard to carryout our big sheet mulching plans.

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And a note to SF Residents:

Although this delivery was ill-planned on our part, it was a very generous donation from the Haight Ashbury Neighborhood Council’s (HANC) Recycling Center. The Recycling Center, which doubles as a native plant nursery and is a valuable community resource, is currently facing threats of eviction from the Recreation and Parks department. Rec and Parks has plans to replace this 36 year old organization with a Garden Resource Center. As urban gardeners we think its great that the city wants to provide a Garden Resource center –we could use easier access to compost, mulch, plant starts, tools and other ammendments — but definitely not at the expense of rooting out a long-standing and important community resource that provides ten green jobs and already distributes plants and materials. The plans ignore the fact that the city’s best existing garden resource center, The Garden for the Environment, is merely ten blocks away. If the city wants to create more resources for gardeners, why not locate the depot in a location that doesn’t already have one or in a location with more space for a greenhouse? The desire to eradicate HANC’s recycling center and duplicate a garden resource center in this neighborhood seems to be a gesture on the city’s part to undermine the activity and livelihood of homeless residents of the park and low-income neighbors who depend on the reimbursements from recycling as income.

You can read more about this issue on HANC’s website. and if you’d like to help, they need letters, postcards and emails of support immediately to the Mayor!

We planted garlic under the waning gibbous moon. According to biodynamic agricultural philosophy and traditional folk wisdom, crops that develop their edible parts underground should be planted at this time when moonlight is decreasing. This includes root crops like carrots, beets, radishes, turnips, garlic and others.

We purchased seven beautiful varieties of certified disease-free garlic. Although buying seed garlic (as opposed to just using garlic from the grocery store) is expensive, it’s well worth it because sometimes store bought garlic harbors plant diseases. I had the experience last year of planting a large crop that all succumbed to a fungal disease commonly called garlic rust. It didn’t destroy the garlic, but it did greatly impede the development of large bulbs and was enough of a bummer to warrant being cautious in the future. Also once you have it in a garden, the only way to get rid of it is to use fungicides or to avoid planting anything in the allium family (including onions, leeks, shallots) for two to three years.

For experimentation sake, we chose a mix of softneck (allium sativum) and hardneck garlic (allium ophioscorodon). Most garlic sold commercially is softneck because it stores much better. But there are so many beautiful varieties of hardneck garlic available, and hardneck produces an edible stalk in the spring called a scape, so we wanted to give these varieties a try.

While we’re mostly busy setting up our new space, we’ve tucked a variety of herbs into the ground at our original garden to get established this fall and winter. Beds of thyme, sage, marjoram, mint, oregano, tarragon and garlic chives are requiring little maintenance from us as they set down their roots. After so many months of working with bare soil at the new space, it’s always nice to step foot into this old garden – it’s lushness and wisdom and quietness are refreshing.

We have a new tool and i am in love with it! It is a steel broadfork made by a small company called Meadow Creature out of Vashon Island, Wa. The tool is wide horizontal bar (approximately the width of our beds) with four sharp metal tines and tall handles.

You use the tool with your whole body, stepping on the bar and rocking back and forth so that your weight wiggles the tines deep into the soil. The leverage of the tall handles makes it easy to pull the handles back and the tines up through the soil. I work backwards along a bed so that I never step on freshly aerated ground. Broadforking for a few hours definitely feels like an aerobic and upperbody workout, but it is an ergonomically designed tool that doesn’t leave me with an achy back.

The tractor that we rented a couple months ago had a roto-tiller attachment but no plough (we weren’t able to find a company in or near SF that rented a plough) and unfortunately the tiller only managed to break through the top four inches of soil. Most vegetable plants’ roots need a deeper aerated root zone to flourish. So we needed an efficient way to dig our beds a little deeper. The all-steel broadfork is the only hand tool that we have found that breaks ground and cuts through a hardpan. We tried the broadfork sold by Johnny’s Selected Seeds but found it not to be tough enough to do the job. It has lighter wooden handles that are bolted into a metal bar piece and the tines are thinner and feel too easily bendable. We will keep it to use for root crop harvest or perhaps return it because these tools aren’t cheap! Even though our new broadfork requires more physical labor, it’s also more pleasant to use than the roto-tiller and in the end creates far less soil compaction.

Now that the fields are mowed and tilled, we’re scrambling to get our larger perennial areas and pathways sheet mulched before the weeds sprout back up. Thanks to the always-overflowing recycling bin of our nearby neighborhood market, we’ve been bringing in truckloads of flattened cardboard to lay onto the soil. It’s time intensive, but it will save us a lot of weeding (and watering) later on.

Also, as we continue to clear the fields, we’ve been digging up many concrete pieces – perfect material for the floor of our greenhouse!

In the past few weeks we’ve sown some cover crop, dug beds, hauled cardboard, spread manure, planted artichokes, cabbage and kale, mulched our main pathways, planted flowering herbs at the front gate, and more! A farm is forming.

photo credit: steve johnston

This summer I took a month off of this urban farming pursuit and went down to the Arizona/Mexico border to work with a humanitarian aid organization called No More Deaths whose mission is to end the deaths and suffering of folks migrating to the United States. The organization is completely initiated and run by dedicated local volunteers and visiting volunteers from around the country. Its work is based on the ideal of Civil Initiative, the belief that communities must organize and take power to uphold humanitarian rights when states or nations cannot or refuse to do so. Every day members of the group hike trails, drop off hundreds of gallons of water and food in remote parts of the desert, and are available on encounter with migrants to provide medical attention. No More Deaths also staffs a desert medical aid tent and Resource Centers in the border towns of Nogales and Agua Prieta. (For more info about the work and mission of NMD check out the July blog post or visit their website: www.nomoredeaths.org)

A complex political and human tragedy is unfolding on our border. It is devastating and confusing to witness even just a slice of it. Every year hundreds of thousands of Mexican and Central Americans set out on a life-threatening journey across mountainous, desert terrain in order to meet family and find work in the U.S. Every year hundreds of these migrants get lost, injured, raped or attacked along the way. They die from hyperthermia, hypothermia, other illness or acts of violence. In the desert on a summer day, temperatures can soar to 120 degrees and flash rainstorms can produce instant rivers. Ironically on the same day that one migrant might die of hyperthermia–dehydration and heat-exposure, another could die in the same terrain from hypothermia–exposure to cold and wet. I arrived in July and there had been 51 recorded deaths in the month of June alone. The statistic would double or triple if it included the bodies of people who had perished in places so remote that they were never found.

The Sonoran desert is heart-wrenchingly beautiful at times. The sky is so broad and clear, the mountains peppered with flowering cacti and craggy canyons shaded by silver oaks. Living in it for one month and hiking across its wild topography gave me a vivid sense of just how treacherous this migration is. I had to drink water constantly and if I ran out towards the end of a hike I quickly lost energy and got a headache. Medical experts have evaluated that the average adult needs to drink 17 litters of water a day in these conditions to stay healthy, making it practically impossible to carry enough water to maintain proper hydration for even one day. Depending on their route and their luck, migrants are walking between 4 and 10 days. We were counseled to assume that any migrant that we met on the trails would be either moderately or severely dehydrated.

I had so much to say about the border it was hard to stop writing. If you would like to read more click here

Two of our favorite projects have recently launched kickstarter campaigns. We were so impressed by the power of this forum so we wanted to spread the word about these two inspiring already established organizations working both locally and nationally.

Produce to the People is a food justice non-profit organization in San Francisco, working to foster a community minded, local food system that considers and supports the need for fresh produce for all people in our city. Their mission and intention is “to build food security and community health through garden and food education, the creation of green jobs for youth, and the growth, harvest, and dispersal of organic backyard and community grown produce. Produce to the People promotes systemic change by addressing the multiple layers of creating food security, which includes providing fresh, healthy food to those in need, but is also coupled with empowering people to learn how to maintain a healthy diet, as well as help to create secure and just local food systems.”

The Greenhorns is a powerful network of new and young entrants into the field of agriculture. Their mission is “to promote, recruit and support young farmers in america”, which they do through, a film, a weekly radio show, an active blog, skillshares and mixers, a mapping and census project, publishing and distributing a guidebook. They are infinitely creative in the ways that they knit, elevate, spur and enliven the growing national young farming community.

More about The Greenhorns: “Three years after its founding in a basement in Berkeley, California, The Greenhorns has matured from an idea for a recruitment film into a widespread national community. We are now happily rooted on my first commercial farm, Smithereen, on rented land in the Hudson Valley of New York. In the autumn of 2007 we officially began seeking out mentors and characters for a film, traveling the country with a confident intuitive sense of an emerging movement of young farmers and a series of borrowed cameras and generous cinematographers. On the road for these 2 years we have found that the movement has emerged–scrappy, resourceful, adaptive young Americans have brought the products and the spirit of this movement into the sun, and we are proud to be the reporters of its successes and a hub for a much-needed centralized network.

This is America, and it takes all kinds. All over the country we have met enterprising, hopeful greenhorns: descendents of family dairies, punky inner-city gardeners, homesteaders, radical Christians, anarcho-activists, ex-suburbanites, graduates with biological science degrees, ex-teachers, ex-poets, ex-cowboys. The sons of traditional farmers, the daughters of migrant farm workers, the accidental agriculturalists and the deliberate career switchers all mark our maps. In foothills, warehouses, back valleys, and vacant lots they are popping up as we reclaim human spaces in the broad lazerland of Monoculture that has engulfed rural America.”

Thanks to a trusty tractor and our handy friend Evan, the lot is cleared and our fields are tilled! The potential of the space is more exposed than ever, and if I squint my eyes I can almost see neatly planted rows of lush greens, and butterflies landing on tufts of flowering herbs. Soon.

We’ve learned some important lessons in these past few months. We’re making decisions everyday (and changing our minds just as often) about priorities, orders of operation, the most appropriate tools to use, when to invest in new materials and when to be thrifty, when to rely on our bodies and when to turn to machines. Renting a tractor for a day was something we’d been waffling over for months. We thought it would be easier and more cost efficient for us to just chip away little by little with our weedwacker and small rototiller. But after months of troubleshooting numerous problems with both of these tools, and after adding up all of the time and sore backs it took (and would still take) for us to do it that way, we’re wishing we had gone the way of the tractor a long time ago. It’s a lesson in scale. We’re learning that we can’t be afraid of big numbers — because little numbers, too, add up to big ones over time.

So, now we can focus on marking out rows, getting our perennials in, and putting some compost, manure, sheet mulch and cover crops down just before the rainy season arrives (and before the fennel, wild radish and bermuda grass sprout right back up). We’re also planning out a test plot for some initial salad plantings. I feel energized! We’ve been working toward this fun part for months.

I recently finished illustrating a new book: Holy Shit: Managing Manure to Save Mankind by Gene Logsdon, published by Chelsea Green. Hot of the press…its witty, smart and timely. Do check it out!

About 10 years ago I picked up an old Logsdon classic called ‘The Contrary Farmer’. It was a formative read that encouraged me to think about how the pursuit of farming, if approached with wisdom and communicated with courage, could be a radical and potent act. Needless to say, it was a great experience to illustrate for an agricultural hero of mine, and to work with the editor Makenna Goodman, a new friend and also a farmer .

heres a little rant originally written for and included in the first issue of Germination:

“The first and most important impact of climate change on human civilization will be an acute and permanent crisis of food supply….Eating regularly is a non-negotiable activity and countries that cannot feed their people are unlikely to be ‘reasonable’ about it” says Gwynne Dyer, a journalist of international affairs in his book Climate Wars. He points out that climate scientist predict the global temperature rising by approximately 3-4 degrees farenheit by 2050 which would reduce the world’s grain supply by 10-20%.

The Oakland Institute published a report last year called The Great Land Grab:Rush for world’s farmland threatens food security for the poor. The report discusses the widespread phenomenon of wealthy nations and private investors purchasing vast tracts of remaining arable land in developing countries, stating that between 37 and 49 million acres of farmland were purchased by foreign investors between 2006 and 2009. The report also “lays bare the insidious role played by international financial institutions like the International Finance Corporation of the World Bank and Foreign investment Advisory Service(FIAS), as well as rich nations, in promoting and facilitating this widespread land re-appropriation-all in the name of promoting food security through foreign investment in agriculture….the report exposes how the huge sell-offs of resources undermines food security and land reform efforts.” the authors ask that “we question the assumption that increased investment in agriculture is beneficial for all parties involved”

Many regions, especially in the global south, but also in the north already experience drought, desertification, erosion, water pollution etc. due to climate change and human land use patterns. An estimated sixth of humanity-1.92 billion people currently suffer from chronic hunger. Of course we can point to industrial agriculture as one significant root cause of our ecological catastrophies, but we also have to look sharply at the political institutions that devised, the concepts of life systems as a business, agriculture as an industry in the first place. Capitalism has a very bad track record.

The ravages brought upon people and place by corporate industrial agriculture are a mirror of the ideological system that engineered it. Wendell Berry argues in his essay Agricultural Solutions for Agricultural Problems that the logic of industry will never solve the problems that it has created, because , as efficient and redemptive as it claims to be, it is “characterized by exhaustion and contamination”. He believes that the dire problems that we face must instead be solved by taking cues from biological systems where waste does not occur, and by following the lead of human cultures who have designed agricultural systems around these principles.

I would also add, in dire times regarding food and water security, it is extremely important not to look to the same political ideology (corporate, “freetrade” capitalism) and the same political institutions, to ameliorate the massive and complex problem that it has conceived via more complex technologies and more massive financing schemes.

Recently i saw that Monsanto had published a full page color advertisment in the New York Times which showed a picture of seed and a water droplet on a leaf. The text read: “how can we squeeze more from a rain drop?” An article published on Grist.org analyzes: “the promise of the ad is more or less that Monsanto’s genetically modified seeds are going to save the world from environmental catastrophe and human hunger, all the while the corporation made more than 11 billion dollars in 2008 amidst a world food crisis” As well as monopolizing the ag industry and seeding the destruction of small farming economies throughout the world, the bio-engineered products of Monsanto (and other companies of their ilk) have directly led to increased pesticide and synthetic fertilizer use which is what poisons the water supply and degrades the land in the first place.

So this is just the thing–in times like these, when there really is alot to be scared about, our corporate ‘leaders’ harness this authentic and tender human emotion-fear-to their advantage, to disguise the real issues. In this case, the real issue is simple:people’s need to have control over their own food supply: their land, water, seeds, pest managment systems, their agricultural and cultural traditions . The systematic destruction of food sovereignty in thousands of communities around the world is the heart of the world hunger crisis.

So how can we re-take our food sovereignty? First we would need land reform, de-privatization of resources, then we would probably see re-localization of trade. These are certainly radical issues which have been the center of many a war and battle. We would have to put an all-out halt on ecologically destructrive industry so that we have land and water left to cultivate. This would set the stage for an all-out cooperative re-investment in restoring ecological systems.

These ideas are so basic-they would have you beleive that they are naive. Maybe they sound crazy and unlikely . But how much more crazy could it get than the way we currently treat food, resources and people. And if we are going to be crazy we might as well be crazy in a good way.