Little City Gardens

Soft, beautiful and fragrant, but super invasive. Over the past 8 months we have dug, pulled and wrenched out hundreds of these deep and vigorous roots.

What you can’t see in this photo is the sea of supporters squeezed into the Public Hearing room, lining the walls, sitting on the floor, overflowing into the hallway, and peering into the room from a small window. There were urban gardeners, rural farmers, business owners, families, students, teachers, chefs, neighbors young and old, all listening attentively as the Planning Commissioners eventually announced their unanimous support for the proposed legislation to amend San Francisco zoning code.

There were two great successes of the day — the first being the Commissioners’ response to the proposal. They reviewed the material presented, heard our stories and comments (and there were many), shared nostalgic anecdotes of their own farmer grandparents, recognized the importance and necessity of this kind of forward thinking in our city, and voted unanimously to pass the legislation. Triumph! There are still some important points to be discussed as the decision is now turned over to the Board of Supervisors’ Land Use Committee — namely the three amendments proposed by the SF Urban Ag Alliance, outlined here — but this decision was a significant and symbolic step forward for our city and will provide important momentum for the work that lies ahead.

The second and perhaps more moving success of the day was the incredible turnout. The wide range of people who showed up to City Hall on a rainy day to offer their presence, and the collection of earnest, impassioned speakers who braved the podium to vocalize their support was so inspiring. There were carefully prepared speeches delivered slowly and professionally, and there were spontaneous, brief comments spoken with shaky hands and undeniable heart. It is clear that paving the way for more farming in the city, and building tangible community along the way, is an important and personal goal for many of us. Thank you all for showing up, speaking your words, writing your letters, and strengthening this push! Nice nice work. We’ll keep you all posted as this legislation moves forward.

photo of Eli Zigas addressing the Commissioners. Taken by Blair Randall in Room 400 of San Francisco City Hall.

Reminder! The public hearing regarding zoning and urban agriculture is TOMORROW, Thursday February 17th at 1:30 pm at City Hall (Room 400). Please come and show your support for this important legislation! Let’s crowd the room and make it clear that San Francisco values agriculture as a very necessary component of our city!

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1:00 PM – supporters meet on the steps of City Hall (in case of rain, we’ll meet inside by the information desk)
1:30 PM – Hearing begins in Room 400
2:30 PM – Estimated time for our issue to come up on the agenda (could be a little earlier or later)

The official agenda for the hearing is posted here
More info about the proposal and the SFUAA’s position is here

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A note about public comment: We encourage anyone who wants to speak at the hearing to do so. If you’re not into speaking, please don’t let that stop you from coming. Helping us pack the room is great too! If you are going to speak, please know that each individual’s public comment may be capped at 2 minutes to accommodate many people. Below are a few talking points that you might choose from. If you have connection to an existing garden, consider applying any of these comments to your specific experience:

• If the city wants to encourage urban agriculture, as Mayor Gavin Newsom committed to in his Healthy Food Executive Directive, removing barriers to sales will go a long way in encouraging gardeners to do their work and in allowing them a source of revenue to support it.
• Urban farms have been a benefit to many city neighborhoods by activating and beautifying neglected spaces.
• Allowing the sales of produce from gardens in the city will allow urban farmers to create and contribute to a more sustainable, self-sufficient food system.
• We need to remove zoning restrictions so that innovative urban agriculture projects can begin to generate new solutions to our systematic problems of food production and distribution.
• As the city looks at how to promote and encourage urban food production, we need to allow this kind of activity to happen anywhere there is vacant land, whether it be in residential or industrial neighborhoods. Much of the open, sunny land in San Francisco is in backyards. Allowing sales form these backyards will greatly increase the city’s capacity for food production.
• The amount of noise that a garden generates (whether it be a community garden or a small business) need not be more than that of a general landscaper.
• Most existing gardens do not create any more traffic than that of an apartment building.
• Not only do we need this zoning code to pass in order to promote the increase of urban farming, we also need to look at the issue of land value and design strategies to put some of our remaining open spaces into long term easements for gardening and farming. This will truly put us on the cutting edge of the nation’s urban agriculture movement.

We’ll see you there! Also, look out for our short interview about the legislation on KQED 88.5 tomorrow morning!

In October and November we planted a cover crop or ‘green manure’ in the front field. We used a mix from Peaceful Valley that included dwarf gray peas, bell beans, vetch and oats. After two and a half months of sun and rain, the peas and bell beans are flowering and it’s about ready to cut down and till under. It is certainly a lot of work to seed a whole field and let it grow only to cut and till it under without harvesting anything. But it is absolutely worth it to increase the organic matter in the soil, fix nitrogen and sequester nutrients for the health of the crops to come. Nitrogen is an essential plant nutrient that supports new growth. It can either be supplied by petroleum-based synthetic fertilizers, by nitrogen fixation from the atmosphere, or by the release of ammonium through the decomposition of organic matter.

Nitrogen fixation is an amazing process. I don’t understand the complicated plant biology and chemistry behind the magic, but here is my basic understanding: Bell beans, peas and vetch and other plants in the Fabaceae or Legume family have developed a symbiotic association with soil dwelling bacteria called rhizobia. Together they have the capacity to ‘fix’ nitrogen—turn biologically unavailable atmospheric nitrogen (NH2) to biologically available nitrogen (NH3). A large percentage of our atmosphere is made up of nitrogen (around 70%) but it can not be utilized by plants until it goes through this process. The legumes and the rhizobia can each survive independently but they both benefit from their association. The bacteria ‘infects’ the root cells of the legume, which responds by forming inflamed nodules around the site of the infection. When you pull up a plant and see that the roots are covered in little bumps, it is evidence of the symbiotic relationship in action. The legume plant shares with the rhizobia the sugars it makes through photosynthesis, and the rhizobia in return offers the NH3 that it has fixed.

After you cut the green manure crop down and till it under, the soil is full of organic matter rich in nitrogen which it releases into the soil over time as it breaks down. We used a weedwacker to chop it down and a rototiller to turn the crop under. I love to imagine what is going on under ground now as the freshly cut favas and peas are decomposing and exuding their embodied nutrients.

UPDATE: The SF Planning Commission Public Hearing (regarding zoning code revisions) has been moved to:

THURSDAY FEBRUARY 17th (1:30 pm at City Hall)

Please mark your calendars! We’ll keep you posted if anything else changes.

If you don’t have time to write a letter or come to the February 17th Planning Commission hearing you can still support the passage of this important legislation by signing this petition. We’ve also posted addresses and a letter template here if you’d like to write a letter to the Commissioners.

Thanks to the hard work of many people, last month the City officially announced a proposal that, if passed, will update San Francisco’s zoning regulations to explicitly permit gardening in all areas of the city and also officially allow for the sale of produce grown in these gardens. This is big news for us, as we are still currently not legally allowed to sell any of the produce we grow at our farm. The passing of this legislation is essential for us (and for future projects like ours) to be able to legitimately test the viability of commercial food production within city limits. We feel strongly that in order for agriculture to be a lasting fixture in our city, made up of a diverse mix of people, skills and backgrounds, there has to be a way for farmers to make a living. This legislation is the first step toward a legal framework that supports this kind of work in our city. Way to go San Francisco! (Here is an article about the proposal that appeared on the front page of the Chronicle last month.)

Now, the next step is for the proposal to be reviewed by the Planning Commission. This is a public hearing, so be sure to mark your calendars for:

Thursday February 10th FEBRUARY 17th at 1:30pm at City Hall

Please, if you can, join us at the public hearing to voice your comments and show your support. The more people who are present at City Hall for the review of this proposal, the more apparent it is to the Planning Commission that residents of San Francisco value agriculture as a vital part of our city. Also, if you’re unable to attend the meeting (or if you’d like to help even further), you can send letters to the Commissioners by January 31st, expressing your support for the proposal. (Check back here in the next couple of days, we’ll provide links to letter templates and an online petition).

Of course, while the proposal is a huge step for San Francisco, there are still a few items in the proposal that local gardeners and supporters would like to see changed – namely, the proposed fencing requirements, inhibitive permit fees, and regulations on value-added goods. The San Francisco Urban Agriculture Alliance (a group of representatives from various gardening projects across the city, including ours) has been poring over the draft for the past couple of months and discussing how each of these items will affect various kinds of urban ag projects and their surrounding communities. We will be addressing these priority concerns with the Planning Commission in the upcoming weeks.

These are exciting times, both for our project and for San Francisco’s urban agriculture movement in general, and we are grateful to have all of your support. Please contact us if you’d like to be involved, because as always, there is much work to be done!

Our neighbor and friend Bob Short designed and built this lovely message board so that we can post notes for neighbors that pass by our gate. A few neighbors come to visit and chat each day but many more pass by and pause for a bit, probably to wonder what we are up to. Our farm life is greatly enlivened and informed by daily interactions with neighbors but we don’t have a chance to talk to everybody, especially if we are working towards the back of the lot. So we decided that we needed a tangible medium of communication. We plan to post lists of what we are harvesting, announcements of upcoming events and ideas about farming in general. If you are a neighbor feel free to email us with the kind of information you would like to see posted in the message box.

This picture was taken by a visitor named Andrew from the branches of our only tree. We have been getting some spectacular sunsets.

As you think about gifts for friends and family, do remember that Little City Gardens has some beautiful items for sale. You can purchase through our online store and we will send to you or your loved ones before Christmas. All proceeds go to this fledgeling business!

A few weeks ago we encountered some unexpected concrete – an approximately 12 x 12 ft concrete pad lying under a few inches of soil in the center of the farm where the lot begins to narrow. We had intentions to dig beds and plant herbs on this part of the farm and did not want to be thwarted by a 30 year old chunk of concrete, so we decided to rent a jack hammer to break it up. Although sore after a full day of jack hammer vibrations, it was a fulfilling feeling to free a patch of ground from the oppression of concrete! Now, a few weeks later, the area is cleared, leveled, broadforked, and almost ready to plant.

Over the past six months, excavation has been a large part of our work on this land. When we first encountered the lot, a jungle full of six foot tall weeds, we had no way to see what was lying under the surface. We have been steadily decreasing the ranks of fennel by digging out their unbelievably large taproots one at a time as well as chipping away at the wild onion population and the underground tangle of himalayan blackberry. We have uncovered literally tons of concrete chunks, the dumped left overs from many a building or remodeling project. We have found remnants of sidewalks and patios that lead to nowhere, as well as piles and piles of rubble and household archeology: half decomposed bedsprings, bottles, pipes, tools, carpets, forks, spoons, toys and tennis balls. There will be more treasures to come, I’m sure.

Many thanks to neighbor Fred and volunteer Richard for generous help and photos.