Free Farm Harvest Helps Feed at Welcome Community Dinner

This Saturday's harvest of lettuces from the Free Farm went to Welcome's 2nd and 4th Saturday community dinner. Over 150 meals were served with a side of super fresh, super local, greens.


The greens started off in covered beds here. (Thanks to Carling for this great photo taken at the Saturday workday!)











Then they were harvested and packed up.










And finally found their way onto plates to feed Welcome guests!

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!

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.

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!

Ready to Irrigate Means We Need Drip Tape!

Hi Everyone!

In the last post I told you that we have beds ready to plant food in. How exciting! All told our beds will provide us with over 1,000 square feet of planting space. As you may well imagine that much space is difficult to water with just a hose and spray nozzle. This means we need a drip irrigation system using drip tape to properly water our crops.














(Hand watering is ok for seed trays)




















(Hand watering is not ok for 7 more of these beds!)

This link has a picture of what I mean by drip tape. It also has a short rundown on how drip irrigation works. It's a good way to irrigate for large scale food production, and soon when we move beyond the two beds we have ready right now, it will be critical to the livelihood of our crops.

As always you can check out our wish list and learn a little bit more about our intern Pete, the person to contact if you can help out!

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.

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!

Work With us at the Free Farm this Saturday

The Free Farm is quickly moving from an abandoned, neglected lot, to a well-loved, full-scale farm. Come be a part of our growing community of farmers this Saturday from 10am - 2pm. We'll be getting our beds prepared with manure and compost, laying down wood chips to finish our loading ramp, continuing cleaning the lot, and watering our strawberry plants! To work at the farm you'll need to wear some work clothes, including closed-toed shoes, and be ready to sign our volunteer liability and photo release form. We'll provide the delicious vegan lunch! See you then!

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!

Introducing Pastor Megan Rohrer and WELCOME - a communal response to poverty

Pastor Megan Rohrer has been the Executive Director of WELCOME (formerly the Welcome Ministry) since June of 2002 with calls from Ebenezer Lutheran Church (HerChurch), Christ Church Lutheran, St. Francis Lutheran and Saints Mary and Martha Lutheran.

The Welcome Ministry was created in 1996 as a homeless ministry. Under Megan's leadership and with the help of the SF Homeless Outreach Team, the Welcome Ministry was able to help more than 155 chronically homeless guests, many of whom had lived outdoors for more than twenty years, move indoors. Responding to the fact that a majority of their guests were now living indoors, the Weclcome Ministry board decided to change the organizations name to WELCOME - a communal response to poverty.

WELCOME continues to work with many of the same guests to help them stay indoors, to recover from addiction and to live healither and more independent lives. Because most San Francisco residents living in poverty live in SRO's (Single Room Occupancy Hotel Rooms) without kitchens in their individual living quarters, Megan recognized the need to grow healthy food and have it prepared for guests who were unable to utilize typical food pantries.

The Urban Share Community Gardening Project exists as one part of a larger model, rooted in the notion of empowerment. By including WELCOME's guests in every stage of the food making process, guests can work to nourish their own bodies; from planting, growing and harvesting, to preparing and cooking, they now have access to actively participate in their community, feeding themselves and each other while healing from trauma and learning important life skills.

Megan has began working on the Urban Share Community Gardening Project since 2007 with the desire to act as the link between gardeners and organizations across the nation, connecting them to one another to implement them. Once the garden has been built, the community will take it under their wing, allowing for a model of self-sustainability.

Fresh produce for low income individuals

Produce for those living in poverty is handed out for our guests to take home at our community meals. Many of our guests live in buildings that do not have cooking facilities. Typical food pantries give out food that requires cooking, we cook food for guests. Today we gave out fresh tomatoes, lettuce and cooked potatoes to 120 guests.