Get Connected

This is what's going on with Urban Share this week.

• Wednesday the 14th yoga at the Free Farm. We have 10 mats that can be used if you need one. First come, first serve. Yoga begins at 9am.
• Then, Wednesday workday at the Free Farm from 10am - 2pm with a vegan lunch provided.
• Saturday, the 17th the Free Farm is holding a blessing ceremony for the garden with Lutheran Bishop Mark Holmerud, Episcopal Bishop Marc Andrus, clergy from the Free Farm and folks not-involved with the church.
• Sunday, the 18th St. Mark's workday constructing raised beds together.

Rest assured there will be plenty of pictures of religious people in their funny clothes, early morning farm yoga, and St. Mark's progress.

Til then here are some photos of what it looks like to volunteer with Welcome at Urban Share gardening events.

Present Needs

Urban Share has a list of needs to drive the projects we're involved in forward. In order to have our needs met we have to ask. So, here's asking. Please bear in mind that you can either provide the whole in-kind donation of the item we need, or parts helpful in constructing it, or money to be put towards it.
Free Farm:

1. Plastic for a green house
2. Green house shelving (you'll see from the pictures below that we really need it)
3. A shed for our tools (new or used as long as it's waterproof)
   
4. Lumber for a composting toilet
5. Wheelbarrows
6. Knowledgeable folks able to lead others in tasks that need completing.
7. Hand tools
8. Lots of Compost/Manure/Woodchips

Check out this great greenhouse that the Farm received as a donation!

April 17th Free Farm Blessing Ceremony!

Hi Everyone! Like the board says, "4/17 - Blessing Ceremony"







I want to dedicate a special blog post today to invite you to the Free Farm on Saturday April 17th, at 10am for a special interfaith blessing and dedication. Presiding will be Pastor Dan from St. Paulus. Commissioning the area will be the Episcopal Bishop of California, Marc Andrus. Pastor Megan from Welcome, Griff from Diocal and the Free Farm, Margaret from Holy Innocents Episcopal Church, and regular volunteers will all be there offering blessings on the farm as well. We really hope to have the Farm's full spectrum of faith traditions, and non-traditions represented as possible.

Please join us. This promises to be a very special event for the farm and community.

Regular workday will take place. Either coming along for the event or not is perfectly alright!

First Free Farm Harvest!

This past Saturday at the Free Farm saw some seriously healthy looking lettuces ready for eating!



Check out the pictures of Megan and I ready to snip greens from the lettuce lawn that can be harvest three times. Our strawberries are plumping up and the lettuce heads are now big enough to eat. Everyone's hard work is finally turning into something tasty!

Free Farm Continues Growing!

This week at the workday our vegetables got some protection from the elements with Reemay row covers. Check out the photos to see the work done on the row covers and how spectacularly the food is shaping up.

Join Us for Upcoming Workdays!

Every Wednesday and Saturday from 10am - 2pm come volunteer at the Free Farm.  This Wednesday help us welcome visiting Alternative Spring Breakers from Dartmouth College!  Come be a part of the excitement of food growing in San Francisco reported on recently by the Chronicle!  You bring the elbow grease, we'll bring the vegan lunch!  Hope to see you soon.

Here's a group of Alternative Spring Break students that came to help out at the farm.  You and/or your organization are certainly welcome, too!

Current Needs

Welcome has a hand in lots of gardens in different stages.  At the Free Farm we need bike rims to cover our crop beds.  We can also really use folks coming by to take pictures of the great work being done and volunteers to bring in vegan lunches for around 20 people.  Tree has also listed some needs for the Free Farm at the end of his new blog post.  Check it out!

At St. Mark's we have a need for 8 foot lengths of 1x6 or 2x6 redwood lumber.  We also need 8 foot 2x4's for a potting table, benches for garden lounging, and raised beds!

As always you can check out our in-kind donation section of the Urban Share blog and the What We Need section of the Free Farm Stand blog.

Don't forget you can always donate your time, too!

Alternative Spring Breakers from Dartmouth at Bethlehem Lutheran

On Saturday, March 23, a group of 12 students from Dartmouth College volunteered their time to the inaugural workday at Bethlehem Lutheran Church in West Oakland as part of their Faith in Action Alternative Spring Break program. 

Above, students clear the way for the new soil in which seedlings will be planted during the next workday.

Urban Farming brought in two big truckloads of soil.  President of the church Jennifer Teer oversees the unloading.

The Dartmouth volunteers worked tirelessly shoveling and raking out over 30 cubic yards of soil and helped to finish the new mural.

By the end of the day the space was ready for planting food!

Some Items We Need.

As the gardens Urban Share works on develop we find new items we could use to help the projects along.

Right now we could use :

• 8 foot lengths of 2x6 or 1x6 lumber
  
• 2x4's of fir or pine
  
• Plywood
  
• Lots of galvanized decking screws
  
• Large amounts of compost or manure
• Use of large truck or dump truck
• An anchor person for a garden site

If you can help out with an in-kind donation please contact me at case.garver@gmail.com.

Your generous donations help turn places like this...

Into a place like this!

Gardening Volunteer Opportunities

Hi there! If you've got a desire to learn about gardening and food growing by getting your hands dirty, here are some places you can go!

Every Wednesday and Saturday from 10am until 2pm the Free Farm at Eddy and Gough Streets is open for folks to come work. There are all kinds of jobs to be done. This coming week we plan to do some shoveling to double dig our beds, planting more food, building our trellis for scarlet runner beans, raking and smoothing double dug beds, organizing tools in the shed, taking pictures, watering plants, running the wheelbarrow, or making a vegan lunch for yourself and the other volunteers! Sound like something you'd like to do? Either stop by in some clothes you don't mind getting a little dirty, or send me an email at thefreefarm.sf@gmail.com

Tree, a major coordinator of the Free Farm also has opportunities at different gardens listed on his site.

Happy Growing!

You Should Come to Our Workdays!

Hope you can join us!

Here are the opportunities to volunteer at our gardens in San Francisco this week:

Free Farm (at the corner of Eddy and Gough):
Wednesdays and Saturdays - 10am to 2pm (vegan lunch served at noon)
Closed during heavy rain.

St. Mark's Garden (1111 O'farrell at the back of the red brick church - small fenced lot):
This Sunday from 1-4pm - Closed during heavy rain.

A Place for Seedlings and Sunnyside Organic Nursery Donation

This Saturday workday we planted lots of lettuce seedlings donated by Sunnyside Organic Nursery in exchange for a few hours of volunteer work.  

If you're interested in checking out their amazing space by way of volunteering you can drop by every last Friday of the month!  We've been protecting our starts in the recently built makeshift lath house.  

This structure protects our little babies from the wind until it's time to plant!

Our third full bed of food is now planted thanks to Sunnyside, our lath house, and all of us at The Free Farm.

Rows and rows of food planted at weekly Free Farm workday!

After lots of double digging and getting beds ready our group planted rows of greens in the beds. Check out some pictures of how things are shaping up!

We've got lots of broccoli planted.

This bed is filling up with chard. It feels good to put food right into the earth where we can keep an eye on it until its ready for the dinner plate.

The beds are in varying stages of development here. On the right is a bed with a layer of compost, ready to be double dug. In the middle is a bed planted with broccoli that Tree brought, and on the left is a bed in the process of being planted!

Come out and help plant with us this coming Wednesday or Saturday from 10am - 2pm. I would love to see you there!

Fruit Trees, Compost, and a Labyrinth!

Maybe it only looks like trash bags covering heaps of who-knows-what and a black bin to you, but it's so much more! This is the beginning of the Free Farm's composting system. There is a place for our food scraps from lunch, the invasive plants found at the site, and thick, woody materials, too. Composting space on a farm. Gotta have it! Below is a picture of our composting committee. Thanks so much, you three!
















The picture below shows Tree sharing his knowledge of fruit trees. He taught us how to prune the tree so it will stay low. He also cleared up a problem lots of folks run into during tree planting. Rather than digging a hole and surrounding the tree with all nutrient rich material, the native soil should be mixed with the organic matter.















Also, Pastor Megan has been making serious headway with the meditation labyrinth. Make sure to check out the link to see how fabulously it's coming along!

Lots of Compost Needed!

Hello friends of Urban Share and the Free Farm!

This time of year in San Francisco is the right season for planting! In order to take advantage of that our farm needs lots and lots of compost to work into the soil. It's probably our number one need right now in order to get food growing to give to those who need it most. If you or anyone you know, be they from work, or from school, your family, your church, or some other organization, has access to a large truck we would Love to use it. As a non-profit we can write a letter so the expense of using the truck is tax-deductible.

The picture you're seeing above shows 4 of our 9 planting beds that total over 1,000 sq. ft. We need the beds covered in 4" of compost, which equals a lot of compost. The issue isn't where to find the compost, it's getting it to our site, which requires a large truck. Can you help us out?

If so, please email me: case.garver@gmail.com

Saturday Feb. 6th Recap

This past Saturday workday from 10am - 2pm started with the arrival of roughly three pick-up trucks worth of compost from the city dump. Farming in San Francisco on a large scale requires lots and lots of nutrient rich material to amend the sand-like soil. We'll be using a double-digging method to get our beds ready for planting.















This Saturday also saw some special friends from Tofu Town. They generously provided us with prepared lunches of vegan gyros and backyard gleaned fruit juice. All-in-all around 20 volunteers were fed. It was so good, I can't say enough. Thank you Tofu Town!















In keeping with the community building component of community gardening/farming our group comes together during important parts of the workday. We gather for a group huddle to lay out our plans for the day before we start, we come together again for a lunch break, and then we close by touring the farm and pointing out what's been accomplished during the day. The Free Farm project is about more than just growing food, it also seeks to nurture community amongst its contributors.

I hope you will come be a part of this growing community during our Saturday 10am - 2pm workdays.

A Labyrinth, Finished Steps, and More Food in the Ground!

This Saturday workday saw a lot of action and a lot of progress.  One of the big visions for the garden space is a food growing labyrinth!  Tasty walking contemplation!  It's taken lots of wheelbarrows of compost and roughly one ton of donated cardboard.

The above pictures is what we had co

mpleted on Wednesday.  By Saturday all of our cardboard was covered and ready to build a labyrinth on!

The Free Farm is in a lot sunken below ground level.  Getting down to the planting area sometimes proved tricky.  In order to make the site safe for volunteers we've created a slow ramp and now a new set of stairs!

You'll notice the steps are surrounded by terraced beds.  We've added more than what we had last time to include more strawberries, irises, and artichoke.  Yum!