Little City Gardens

Friends, neighbors, and supporters: This Monday, September 19th, we’ll be harvesting for the last day of our Summer CSA and our last summer farmstand of this year. This is a great time to come visit the farm, say hello, see the bounty of late summer and pick up some special locally grown produce. Also if you are considering participating in next season’s CSA program (hopefully beginning early Spring 2012) this is a great opportunity to come and check out the weekly box and the pickup routine. We look forward to seeing you.

On the farmstand table we will most likely have: chard, kale, cherry tomatoes, basil, green beans, summer squash, squash blossoms, artichokes, and flowers!

Justice Begins with Seeds Conference (part of GMO Awareness Week)
September 16th and 17th at the Women’s Building (3543 18th St)

The conference will focus on hands on workshops and panels on how to build alliances, how to start a rights based campaign, and how to get involved with GMO labeling initiatives throughout California. People from different organizing contexts will have the space to discuss, share strategy and build the movement to address the corporate food regime, encouraging people to actively take on the issue politically. Register here: http://www.eventbrite.com/event/1728731683/efbevent

Mayoral Candidates Forum “Our Food, Our Schoolyards, Our Water”
Monday September 26th, 6:30-8:30pm at the LGBT Center (1800 Market St)

The SFUAA has come together with our allies from the SF Green Schoolyard Alliance and the Bay Area Water Stewards to put on this special evening. It will be a unique opportunity for you to connect with the candidates and learn about their perspective and position on issues related to urban agriculture, schoolyard greening, and the city’s management of water resources. If you are planning on coming, please register here: http://ourfoodourschoolyardsourwater.eventbrite.com

August was a long month! The farm seemed even more demanding than usual with beds of bolting kale waving their little yellow flowers around for attention, newly seeded beds needing constant hand-watering, and loads of summer squash growing faster than anyone could keep up with. But, I suppose no summer farm is complete without a couple wheelbarrow’s full of comically large zucchini! All in all, it was a productive month, thanks to our good friends Heather and Joel. I really don’t know what I would have done without their steady help.

We’ve been noticing that some of our crops are growing less vigorously lately. A combination of foggy cool days and declining soil fertility is causing our salad greens to grow more slowly than the previous round, and some of our recently planted fall brassicas are suffering from some kind of rust. The rainbow tie-dye effect on the leaves is lovely, for sure, but it’s not exactly what we’re after! As we near the end of our Summer CSA, we’re eager to start focusing some more energy on soil fertility, bringing in manure and planning our fall/winter cover-crop schedule. The beds have been generous all year and now it’s time to start giving back. (Note: the above photo is a bouquet of just the worst affected brussels sprouts leaves — one bottom leaf from every three or four plants. The plants themselves don’t look quite so colorful.)

The farm has also become completely inundated with cabbage moths, particularly because we grow so many brassicas (even some of the site’s long-established weeds are brassicas).  The little white moths flutter around looking sweet from a distance, but the moth larvae is really chewing up our kale. We’re keeping our fall brassicas (broccoli, cabbage, more kale) protected with row cover as we put them in the ground so the moths can’t lay their eggs on the leaves.

Despite all this, summer on the farm is going well with beans, turnips and beets galore. We’re planning to start digging beds for a third field so that we can potentially accommodate a larger CSA next spring. It’s exciting. We’re growing into this space, slowly but surely.

Brooke is back from her time away. I missed her!

We are entering into week eight of our 12-week Summer CSA and farm stand, and it’s going great. Our 29 subscribers have been coming to the farm each week to pick up their boxes, and many linger for a while to chat about the latest farm news, exchange beet recipes with each other or excitedly explore the “fennel forest” in the back of the lot. We also get a number of non-subscribing neighbors coming to the farm stand to say hello and buy their vegetables for the week. So far the farm stand table has been overflowing with kale, chard, summer squash, artichokes, green and purple beans, flowers, basil and other herbs, beets, turnips, radishes, and extra salad mix.

As hectic as CSA harvest/pickup days are for us (they usually end up being around 13 hour days), they feel like one of the most important aspects of what we’re doing here. Putting down the shovels for an afternoon and opening up the gates to farm supporters, neighbors and friends, with the product of all of our hard work splayed out in front of us all, reminds me of the community that farms can foster.

Note: The beautiful redwood boxes in the first photo were made for our CSA by our woodworker friend Raven Mahon!

A lot has happened in the last 6 months in regards to our tenure on this fantastic piece of urban farm land.

As many of you know, this property is privately owned. We signed a 1.5 year lease in April 2010 with the property owner at the time. He suggested that we might be able to continue renting after that time on a month-to-month basis until when he was ready and had the proper permitting to develop. However, in January of this year he was pressured by the financial burden of increased property taxes to put the lot up for sale. We immediately began to think about strategies for saving this land from being sold to a new developer, and we began investigating connections with people and organizations who might have power or interest in preserving some farmland in the city.

In February we called together a meeting of a few creative friends and colleagues to brainstorm action plans for our predicament. Even though it happened on an unexpectedly rainy day and we all had to squeeze into the greenhouse and sit on buckets around the seeding tables, that meeting was one of the most productive and exciting moments of Little City Gardens. Great ideas were generated about how to approach our specific situation and about how to push forward a political agenda of getting more urban and peri-urban land specifically devoted to small scale agriculture business. We felt support and connection from this group and emerged from the meeting with a few ‘business advisors’. A good lesson learned: never underestimate the power of explaining your predicaments out loud!

One of the business advisors that stepped forward in that meeting was Karen Heisler of Mission Pie. Her support has turned out to be instrumental in the process that ensued and the journey that we are currently on. Without her skilled guidance, intelligence with making connections, and emotional investment in seeing farmers succeed, we very well may have given up. Karen is a consistent and invaluable support to us!

The land was sold to a developer within the month (February), and shortly after we began to work with the Yggdrasil Land Foundation, an organization whose mission is to catalyze the viability of biodynamic, organic, and sustainable farming for food security and the health of communities through land access, preservation, and renewal.

Together we worked to develop ideas for how this particular piece of land could be best used to further the aim of a strong urban agriculture movement, and we have articulated a concept for an Urban Farmer Incubator Program (we will explain this idea more later). Yggdrasil has recently submitted a pre-proposal to the State through the Urban Greening Grant Program requesting the financing to purchase the property and begin the Urban Farmer Incubator Program. If this funding does come through, Yggdrasil would be able to purchase the property and lease to Little City Gardens. Yygdrasil would ensure that a conservation or agricultural easement is attached to the property title so that it will be maintained in perpetuity as an urban agricultural site, and so that the property taxes and lease fees will be more appropriate to the type of land use. We have realized through our efforts to design a sound business plan that commercial urban agriculture may only be feasible if property tax can be reduced on farmed parcels so that farmers can afford the according rent.

Although we have some exciting ideas in the works and some strong collaborative momentum, our situation is still complicated, precarious and time sensitive. Our lease is scheduled to end in October, and until we have funds and are able to make a strong purchase offer, the current property owner is actively working on development plans. If we don’t receive state funds to purchase, we will be back to square one.

We certainly took a gamble starting a our farm on a short lease, but at the time it was our only opportunity and we are certainly happy that we took it. But at this point we have put over a year’s worth of hard work into creating a neighborhood farm that is really beginning to be fruitful, and it will be very sad for us if we have to pack up and leave just as our vision has materialized.

We are in the middle of our first summer season, which in our corner of the world can often mean being in the thick of fog or being blown around by a strong southerly wind. But we still have long daylight hours and enough sun that the sunflowers have grown tall, and the strawberries are ripening. The back third of the farm, despite our initial efforts to keep it mowed and weed-wacked, has slipped back into its original state — a seven foot tall thicket of fennel with an understory of wild radish, dock and blackberry. The only exception is a mounded area that we sheet mulched heavily this spring into which we planted 60 winter squash plants early this summer. The squash plants, despite not having been watered once, are climbing healthily all over the mound and have already set an amazing amount of fruit. Dry farmed squash! Its exciting for us to find a few crops that yield relatively well without being irrigated in the summer because our water bill sure is getting high lately.

Even though we are generally tired by the end of a long harvest day, we really enjoy the Monday CSA pick ups. Members come to the farm to pick up their boxes, and neighbors and friends come to shop at our farmstand. I find it rewarding to see so many adults and kids interacting at the farm and to feel like this place has something to offer them — vegetables, flowers, conversation, a table and benches to sit down and talk for a while and green space to run around. It feels good to be able to do this legally.

At the end of this week I will be leaving town for a month. Caitlyn is my hero! She is going to be working extra hard running the business (all the harvesting, delivering, seeding, weeding, watering, bed prepping, administration) without me! Luckily our friend Heather is going to be helping her out on harvest days. I am headed down to the Arizona/Mexico border to work with a humanitarian aid organization called No More Deaths. I worked with them for a month last year and it felt like very meaningful direct action. Some of you consistent readers may remember that i posted reflections about the experience when i returned last August. I will share more when i return.

There was an article in the LA Times this morning about Bay Area Urban Agriculture Zoning changes which includes Little City Gardens. This photo was taken by the reporter, Lee Romney.

Is anyone out there an accountant who would be willing to offer us a few hours of tax support? After attempting to do our first year of partnership taxes on our own, our heads are swirling and we realize that we could use a little guidance. We are looking for somebody trained who can help orient and get us started with the process (we have filed a tax extension for 2010). If you or anyone you know has the capacity to do this and might want to become a hero in our eyes please contact us at littlecitygardens@gmail.com. We will shower you with vegetables.

Thank you for considering.

An 11×17 newsletter included in our Spring 2011 CSA boxes. To read a larger version click here.

Layout, lettering and illustration by Caitlyn Galloway.

We reached an exciting milestone yesterday! It was the first official day of our Summer CSA. This first week’s boxes included rainbow chard, salad mix, green garlic and large bunches of sweet genovese basil, as well as a broadsheet/poster hand drawn by us with thoughts about farming in the city and the importance of a CSA model. We started our day early and with the help of a couple friends we harvested, sorted, trimmed and packed steadily until the afternoon, finishing just in time for customers to start showing up. We spruced up the farm, harvested some summery flower bouquets and brewed sun tea for everyone to enjoy. It was a treat to see kids running around between rows and to be able to hand out produce yards away from where it had been harvested just hours before.
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A note: So far this blog has been a place for Brooke and me to share our put-together thoughts, major updates, and carefully composed essays, but lately we’ve been needing a space to air some occasional end-of-the-day ramblings as well. A way to communicate to the world our intense and hopeful and frustrating and tiring and beautiful and overwhelming experiences of being farmers in the city, and a way to let you in on the daily conversations we have about urban farming’s complicated politics, its inspiring potential and its disheartening barriers. Because one of the most important aspects of farming in the city is the dialogue that can accompany it. Yes, the cabbage is beautiful and the turnips are sweet and delicious, but…

And it’s our responsibility — as visible, concerned farmers — to be honest and upfront with you about why and how. So, interspersed amongst the beautiful photos and careful essays, expect some more casual diary entries from us too. It’s the middle of the season and we have a lot to talk about. We’ll gush about our sweet strawberries, rant about the value of land in San Francisco, ramble about the wind or the slugs or the beautiful mornings and also, quite possibly, complain about our achy backs and compromised free time. We’ll be honest about the work we’ve devoted ourselves to, because it is multi-faceted and deserves to be shared.

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After our brief two days of sweaty hot summertime here in SF, it was cool and windy at the farm again today. While we weeded the beans and thinned the radishes, B and I talked about Antonio’s article today — how well written it is and how nice and frank he was about the need for us (urban farmers, activists) to maintain critical thought about what exactly it is we are each trying to do here. I see plenty of room (and need) in the city for both volunteer/education-based and commercial/production-based farming (and all possible combinations of the two), and I was glad to read a thoughtful description of both ideas that pointed out benefits and contradictions but didn’t draw any divisive conclusions about either one.

Also, I peeked into our hoop house today and felt so proud. This month’s most exciting success: basil! It’s at least 20 degrees warmer under there and this warm weather crop seems to love it. While we’re buttoning up our jackets and shivering from the chilly afternoon wind, the basil stays protected and cozy, growing visibly everyday.

San Francisco residents — We are very excited to begin our formal Community Supported Agriculture (CSA) program. This is a salad box subscription; you pay up front and then receive a beautiful box of fresh produce and salad greens each week for 12 weeks beginning July 5th. By signing up for this program you will become a valuable member and supporter of the only urban farm business in San Francisco! It’s customers like you who make this farm possible.

Click here (or see the permanent link now on the sidebar) to read a basic description of the program and all the details — what will be included in the box, pricing, etc — and to download an application. Please read through the details carefully to make sure this type of veggie box is right for you and your family and that you can make it to one of the pick up locations.

If you are interested in becoming a member, please fill out an application by June 20th. You can copy it onto the body of an email and send it back to us, or if you have any trouble let us know so we can arrange to get you a printed copy.

We look forward to beginning this relationship with you, and we are excited to start sharing the fruits of our labor.

Your farmers,
Brooke and Caitlyn

UPDATE: The summer program is all full for now. Thank you to all who signed up so quickly! We hope to add a few more members mid-season, as we increase our production, so please do still send in your application if you’re interested and we’ll put you on the waiting list.