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!

DIY: Learn to double dig raised beds

This Saturday workday our group got two beds ready for planting! Tree gave us a tutorial on how to prepare them by double digging.

Step 1.) Your beds should have a 4-6" layer of compost on top to start with.














Step 2.) See Tree there in the photo below with the shovel in as deep as the shovel's head? That's as far down as you want to dig. You also only need a width of one shovel's head.














Step 3.) The soil from the first trench should be placed in a wheel barrow. That soil goes to the far end of the bed where it will be used to fill in the last trench.

















Step 4.) Stick a digging fork in the trench you just dug so the tongs are fully submerged. Wiggle the fork around to loosen up the soil. This wiggling aerates the soil allowing roots more space and increasing drainage.













Step 5.) Now that the soil in the first trench has been loosened up you can begin digging the second trench right beside the first; same depth, same width. The soil from the second trench (including the 4-6" of compost on top) gets put into the first trench. You're just moving dirt from hole #2 into hole #1. Easy as that.

Just keep following this pattern of digging out a trench, working the fork into the dug-out space and then digging another trench right beside it and putting the second trench's dirt into the first. Do this all the way down the line. Mixing nutrient rich compost in with your soil helps build the soil structure, making the beds a hospitable area for food growing.















After raking the beds even our beds look like this.

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!

What's needed at the Free Farm and how you can help

Hi everyone,

This past workday saw some exciting progress at the Free Farm. We set up a valve and now have running water. Now our crops won't die!















This is a huge step for the farm, and the next step that comes from it is hooking up a manifold which allows us to run water multiple places. In order to water the whole farm we need to install a drip irrigation system which means we need a drip timer. Timers run about $60. We'll also need plenty of PVC piping to get the water to the plants.

We're also at the ridiculously exciting phase where we are preparing the beds for planting. This means we need to work lots of compost and manure into the sandy San Franciscan soil. Do you have a truck we can use to load up with compost?














We also have plenty of other items that can be donated, check out the last blog with our comprehensive list.

If you can help us feed hungry people with fresh, locally grown produce by donating any of these items please contact me at case.garver@gmail.com. I'll get you the specifics.

Plants in the Ground at Free Farm!

This past Saturday marked the first planted bed of food at the Free Farm!  We have three adorable terraced beds of strawberries on a slope overlooking the farm.  

We started with some compost from the dump

then dug out the side 

of the hill to create a plane, or terrace, mixing in the compost.

We used rocks from the original St. Paulus Lutheran church structure to shore up the bed

Planting seedlings in 

the new beds 

And this is what you

 end up with.  Strawberries in the ground!

First Urban Share Garden Publication Underway

Do It Yourself Vertical Garden

by Megan Rohrer

This week I began working on the first issue of Urban Share's garden publication; a quarterly series inspired by the zine [a self-published "magazine" usually made on a Xerox machine with original art for small distribution]. The first issue will be one in a series of an ongoing quarterly publication, always free in accordance with our mission. The publication will be a limited edition and distributed to the donors and friends of WELCOME. Each issue will focus on projects that are underway at the Urban Share garden sites with original art by local San Francisco artists inspired by gardens and contributions from the seasoned gardener to the amateur gardener. Contributions will include gardening tips, DIY (do it yourself) projects, seasonal food recommendations, recipes, nutritional information and musings on urban gardening and current food movements.

[click to enlarge]

This publication has been inspired in large part by the work of the Diggers (who took their name from the original English Diggers) and emerged in San Francisco's Haight-Ashbury in the midst of the Sixties Counterculture movement. The Diggers resisted private property and an economy of currency, and chose instead a model that was based on distributing goods and services for free and an economy of barter using street theatre and art happenings to present their message. Out this movement the Sutter Street Commune began to publish an intercommunal newspaper, Kaliflower in 1969 out of the Free Print Shop. Kaliflower lasted just over three years and by the ends of its run was distributed every Thursday to nearly 300 communes in San Francisco. Below are some images of the covers of Kaliflower:

The first issue of Urban Share's publication will include a hand-made, recycled paper cover made by yours truly in my San Francisco home kitchen with original art on the cover by Megan. Inside you will find instructions on DIY (do it yourself) projects with illustrations by Megan (as seen above). They are all projects that Megan and our wonderful volunteers have worked on at the St. Paulus garden site, which you can see yourself when you come out for a visit! Original art by other local artists on sprouting, and other such fun things plus much more!

[ Stay tuned, the first issue will be released in the end of February 2010! ]

In the meantime, come on out and play with us at one of our workdays, every Saturday (except on rainy days) from 10am-2pm. Bring a sack lunch, water, closed toed shoes and clothes you don't mind getting dirty.

We hope to see you there!

~your friends at urban share

Our Saturday the 16th Workday!

Hello Friends of the Garden!

This last Saturday workday was quite a day. Not getting rained out was a big plus! We started early with two volunteers coming in before the official 10 o'clock start time. That's a serious go-getter attitude.

A lot of our gathered materials had been left near the front of the site making our space look haphazard. We hauled the lumber, pallets, and odds n' ends down to be sorted, stacked, and organized. It wasn't long before our helter skelter piles of materials started looking like they were supposed to be there. This lot has been left unattended for years so getting it in shape can be a big job; trash has collected, weeds have sprung up all over, but we're starting to show the space the love it deserves. This is the part in the movie where the nerdy abandoned lot with box frame glasses, using a pencil to hold its hair in a bun gets a make over. "Oh my God, St. Paulus, you're simply breathtaking!" The lot really is beautiful. We've run a gas-powered weed eater through the area which not only makes the grounds look better kempt but those small clippings can also be layer with manure to mature it, leading to food for plants! Even manure's gotta grow up some time.

A lot of sweat and time was spent in creating a foot-path ramp to allow easier access into the large farm space. We loaded down wheelbarrows with dirt from the site and slowly built up our ramp. There's more work to be done there, but in one day we got so far! We have a two-fold plan for the ramp. First, we take dirt from a large hill and use that dirt to create the ramp. Second, while removing the dirt we level off the hill in order to make a clean area for a demonstration garden near the front. In the future we'll show folks in the demo garden what can be grown at certain times of the year and use it as an opportunity for gardening education. I think everyone in the project is excited to share our knowledge, experience, failures, and successes with others interested in growing their own food in the city.

Pastor Megan spent a lot of time finishing a beautiful tool shed to house our tools in! Hooray for not having to carry things from an overcrowded Pastor's office to garden and back! That was seriously cramping my style. After this Saturday workday the shed is sporting a sassy new coat of light blue paint. We're trying to teach this gray San Francisco sky what it should be doing. Doesn't seem to be listening.

Throughout the day there were lots of folks walking past stopping in to talk. You wouldn't believe how many gardeners there are in one block of the city. There are plenty of helping hands to be found. Four volunteers on Saturday (including yours truly) were Lutheran Volunteer Corps members (Thanks Margaret, Troy and Katie!), two volunteers were from just down the street, two more volunteers heard about the workday through Tree, and two more volunteers heard about the workday through Pastor Megan. Word gets around!

That's the news from the farm this week. I hope to see you out there Saturday from 10am -
2pm! Don't forget to bring a friend!

The Local Foods Wheel

Are you interested in learning more about seasonal foods? Want to know what's in season in your area?

The Local Foods Wheel was created by three San Francisco women, Jessica Prentice (professional chef), Sarah Klein (artist) and Maggie Gosselin (designer). Two wheels exist, one for the San Francisco Bay Area and the other for the New York Metro Area.

Please check out their website to see a detailed list of seasonal foods:

http://www.localfoodswheel.com/local_foods.html

If you're interested in purchasing their food wheel, you can do so on their website.

And, stay tuned for more information, tips, recipes, and DIY (Do It Yourself) ideas for starting your own garden!