Little City Gardens

A little over a year after the passing of the celebrated zoning legislation, San Francisco has now introduced another round of legislation regarding urban agriculture. This one, recently introduced by Supervisor David Chiu and supported by the hard working folks at the SF Urban Ag Alliance, focuses on creating an official “Urban Agriculture Program” in SF. (The term “urban agriculture” is defined here as “the growing of food through intensive plant cultivation and animal husbandry in places such as home gardens, community gardens, market gardens, demonstration gardens, gardens at institutions such as schools, workplaces, and jails, urban farms, orchards, rooftops, and greenhouses.”) If passed, this legislation would call for:

• an audit of City-owned buildings with rooftops suitable for both commercial and non-commercial Urban Agriculture
• incentives for property owners to allow temporary Urban Agriculture projects, particularly on vacant and blighted property awaiting development
• a streamlined application process for Urban Agriculture projects on public land, with clear evaluation guidelines that are consistent across agencies
• the creation of a “one-stop shop” for Urban Agriculture that would provide information, programming, and technical assistance to all SF residents, businesses, and organizations wishing to engage in Urban Agriculture
• the development of new Urban Agriculture projects on public land where residents demonstrate desire for the projects
• garden resource centers in neighborhoods across the city that provide residents with resources such as compost, seeds, and tools
• the development of sufficient resources so that SF residents seeking a community garden plot have to wait no more than a year for access to a plot.

A more detailed background and description of the legislation can be found here.

The public hearing for this is scheduled for this coming Monday June 11th at 1:00pm (City Hall, Room 250), and the SFUAA is hoping to once again fill the room with supporters! This could be the beginning of some very positive and exciting steps for the city, so if you have time on your lunch break, please consider attending to show your support (wear green, if you can). We hope to see you there!

Wow. We’ve been busy.

With the farmers market now in full swing, the second month of our CSA almost completed, and an additional restaurant added to the mix, we’re finding ourselves chugging along hurriedly through the week with a strict amount of routine. Aside from bed turning, seeding, watering, and harvesting — the essential tasks necessary to keep up with steady orders — there is little time right now for much else! Things like diligent weeding, new building ideas, irrigation expansion and creative projects have all but fallen by the wayside and will likely stay there until we have a little more time to catch our breath. The weeds will have to remain a little more unruly than is comfortable, and the barely functioning irrigation will just have to do for now.

It’s easy to get a little lost in this momentum and overwhelmed by the demands and cycles of this kind of work. Sow, water, cover, weed, thin, water, harvest, turn. And again and again. We’re kept on our toes by constant variables: birds eating our freshly laid seed, heavy winds drying out our soil and stunting our greens, heat spells causing our kale to bolt early. But regardless, the cycles persist and we do our best to keep up.

Recently though, in the midst of all of this taxing routine, I had a satisfying, encouraging realization: we’re running a farm in San Francisco. Two years ago, while campaigning for new zoning legislation, weedwacking massive amounts of fennel (we’re still doing that, by the way), and watering our six sunflower plants with our water bottles, this reality felt far, far away.

Here’s a breakdown of a typical week:

• Monday - Start the day off early with a farm walk, decide priorities for the week, assess crops. Evaluate what is ready to harvest, finalize what will go in CSA boxes and what will be available for restaurants. Then, seeding, transplanting, turning beds, weeding as time allows. Volunteer/visitor day in the afternoon.
• Tuesday - Salad harvest in the morning, continue farm work in the afternoon.
• Wednesday - Early start! Harvest all day. Set up CSA boxes. CSA pickups at the farm in the evening.
• Thursday - Finish up the harvest. Load up truck, deliver to restaurants, head to Farmer’s Market, set up stand, sell from 4-8pm, breakdown stand, head back to farm to unload.
• Friday - Miscellaneous farm work, recordkeeping, visitors, etc.

So the last few months have gone. While this routine is productive in certain ways, it also leaves little room for reflection and assessment of our goals — something we’re both craving right now — let alone troubleshooting time for crops and systems that aren’t really doing that well. We’re working on figuring out some balance for ourselves and determining what our capacities are, both physically and emotionally. More thoughts on this soon.

In between all of this routine, however, we’ve had some great visitors to the farm lately. Although we get more requests for this than we are able to accommodate, we have hosted dozens of groups over the past year. We recently had a group of high school students out from June Jordan School of Equity for a morning tour. We explained the ideas behind this project and outlined the kind of work that goes into operating a farm at this scale. After the tour, they helped us weed the mound at the back of the lot where all of our winter squash is now planted. These types of visits feel really important and are always fun, even though we struggle with how to fit them into the schedule on a regular basis while keeping this small business afloat.

There is a very interesting and inspiring farm project/land occupation which has been happening in Albany for the past few weeks. A group of farmers took over a piece of farm land at San Pablo and Marin which is owned by U.C. Berkeley and has been a subject of debate between the university, faculty, students and community members for many years.  Read this article by our friend Antonio for more context and analysis. Land reclamation and occupation is a tool that is being used across the world not only to protest but to take hold of an alternative to land consolidation and the disintegrating basis for community food sovereignty. I find it compelling that even in a U.S. city where these troubling trends do not reach us with as devastating effects as they reach people in other countries, there is a critical mass of citizens/farmers/protesters who are willing to organize, stand up, and risk arrest to speak about food justice and equitable access to food and arable land. The occupation of the Gill tract has lasted successfully for at least two weeks. In that time a vast field of cover crop was tilled under, beds where dug and crops planted. The first day of the occupation, hundreds of people were out working to realize the vision. I was there helping out the first day and I heard someone say it was like “a farm on steroids” which does speak to how quickly it went from a field to a farm.  This week the UC police have made a larger presence at the farm, and yesterday efforts to shut down the farm were escalated. The farmers are currently calling for support from the general public.

This is a huge week for us! Not only is our Spring CSA now underway, but we’re also excited to announce our debut at the Mission Community Market this Thursday.  Please come visit us, all of you, we would really love to see you there:

Mission Community Market
22nd and Bartlett
Thursdays 4pm – 8pm

It’s a small and vibrant market and we’re honored to be a part of it. We’ve been working hard for the past few weeks to prepare — getting a Certified Producer’s Certificate from the County of San Francisco, buying a scale and getting it certified and sealed, painting signs for our stand, putting together informational material, setting our prices, gathering stand necessities like tables, chairs, crates, baskets and an easy-up tent, building a new toolshed to store all of this new farmers market gear, and of course attempting to time our crops just right so we have a diverse array of vegetables, salad mix, herbs and flowers to bring to the market. For the first few weeks our table should be filled with some come combination of kale, chard, our special salad mix, green garlic, wild onions, peas, artichokes, tokyo turnips, radishes, a mix of many culinary herbs, spring flower bouquets, and more. We are excited about this new addition to our business for a few reasons:

• We’re hope to foster more connections with fellow food producers: We will be spending a few hours each week surrounded by fellow small-scale food producers and artisans. Running a farm business keeps us so busy and focused on each other, our particular plot of land, our neighbors, and the people that are able to make it out to visit us. We often don’t have the opportunity to connect with other farmers and small business owners in the region. Strangely enough, farming in the city can be a lonely profession at times. There aren’t too many of us around to discuss the ins and outs and ups and downs of farming.  But the market seems like a great place to foster farmer connections that we need to nurture us professionally.
• We love to feed our friends: We are excited to make our produce more accessible to all the friends and folks who would like to support us but can’t make it out to our little corner of the Outer Mission on a regular basis. Because we pour so much of ourselves and our lives into our work, we crave a stronger sense of integration between the farm and our social community. We would love to feel that we are feeding our friends and that, by purchasing our produce, these friends are reciprocally supporting the work that we do. We want to be farmers linked into a community web.  When financial compensation falls short, it’s community that nurtures a food producer.
• We’ll have a more public presence and dialogue: This is an opportunity to publicly display the beauty of bounty. We hope our stand can evoke the sensation that urban agriculture has great potential! By stationing ourselves and our produce in a vibrant marketplace, we imagine we will get to dialogue with all kinds of folks about the potential of urban agriculture. Sharing experience and inspiration has been one of our primary aims from the initiation of this project, and the internet can’t replace real-time, face to face discussion.

With all of that said, we also must admit we’re a little nervous. Participating in a farmers market is a brand new experiment for us and we are not sure how its going to shake out in the end.  It has already meant adding a significant chunk of work to our weekly schedule — an extra long day to harvest, pack up, set up our stand, sell for four hours and then breakdown. We are getting ready for Thursdays to be a 14-hour day (7am-9:30pm).

Business-wise, we are fully aware that this may not exactly be an efficient, cost-effective produce outlet. When we fill orders for restaurants or CSA boxes, all the produce that we harvest, wash, bundle and pack is essentially already sold. But in the case of the farmer’s market its a bit more chancy. We weighed the pros and cons for almost a year before we decided to sign up. Ultimately, we must remember that our work is about experimentation and adventure. This is our chance!  We don’t know how long our tenure as farmers in San Francisco will last, so with the time that we have we want to explore all of the possible avenues of communicating and direct-marketing. For as long as we are at it, we want to have a breadth of experience as urban farmers.

So in short:  We will be so happy to see you out at the market. Please come visit us! Your ideas, company, and support will make this market a success for us and for all the other hard working food growers and makers. See you there.

The time has come to build another shed. For a few months now its been hard to maneuver in our one and only storage shed. Its so full of tools, machines, seeds, harvest bins, baskets, hardware and miscellany that there is no way to store it all and still have room to move. In addition to what we already have, we are about to acquire a few large necessities for our farmers market stand like folding tables, chairs, a tent, a commercial scale, produce boxes and display signs. We can’t go another month without more storage space. So early next week we plan to start constructing a small shed. We put together a materials list and we hope to find at least some of it secondhand because we know there is a lot of wood and other stuff out there going to waste. We will try to buy as little new lumber as possible. This is what we are looking for:

• corrugated steel or tin roofing sheets
• an old door
• any size 2×4’s
• 3/4in plywood
• shed door hardware (hinge, handle, latch)
• a gallon of primer and paint (we’d love to paint the shed dark green but we’ll take another color if its going to waste)

We know we can find a lot of what we need at Building Resources, but if you by any chance have some of these materials lying around in your garage collecting dust and you want to get rid of them, please do let us know and we will come pick up from you!

We are off to a good start for the season. We had a work party last weekend and with the help of some friends planted our onions, leeks, and potatoes. The greenhouse and cold frame are full of seedlings. Because we were gone in January we ordered our onions, leeks and kale from Pamela at Cole Canyon Nursery. Pamela is consistently generous and supportive of us and we really appreciate her!

In the ground we have seeded turnips, radishes, cilantro, parsley, carrots, beets, fennel bulb, mustard greens and spinach. The farm is bursting with the potential of all these seeds! It’s exciting and also a bit scary to be the caretakers of so many tender young things all at once, especially when we are depending on their success for our upcoming CSA. Germinating seed and recently transplanted plants are at their most vulnerable stages now and need the most attention from us as they take firm root and gain the capacity to fend for themselves. We are spending a lot of time these days keeping seedbeds watered and covering transplants with remay and shade cloth.

Late winter and early spring seems to be the season of abundant travelers. We have been getting a lot of out of town visitors — some friends and some who have just heard about us through the grapevine and want to see what we are up to. We have been especially lucky to be visited by fellow urban farmers from Providence and Reno. It’s really a warm and validating feeling to compare notes and stories with other committed, inspired urban farmers. It motivates us to keep doing this work when we feel that we are part of a network, a growing movement of people who believe that small scale agriculture in cities is possible and important.

Tommorow February 27th is a national day of action called Occupy the Food Supply. The organizers of Occupy the Food Supply are a powerful alliance of sustainable agriculture advocates and food justice networks, including over 60 Occupy Wall Street groups as well as environmental and corporate accountability organizations who are joining together with a theme of creating local solutions and resisting Big Ag and its destructive practices of placing profits over people and the planet. Organizations and individuals are hosting events across the country that either focus on protest of the corporate food system or that highlight work thats already being done to forge a new model of equitable food production and distribution. Here is an interesting article by the executive director of Food First that discusses the intersection of the Occupy and Food Justice movements. Little City gardens is participating by putting our Monday workday on the map of events. Come out and visit us from 1-5.

We’ve spent our first full year on the farm! We got a late start last Spring due to the new zoning legislation not going into effect until March, therefore postponing our ability to sell our produce, but we were still able to do quite a bit of experimenting for the rest of the year. We ran a Summer CSA and weekly farmstand, maintained restaurant and caterer sales, hosted regular volunteer workdays, and gave a handful of group farm tours. We grew a ton of beautiful, delicious produce. There were ups and downs this year; high and low moods and energy levels, crop failures and successes, moments when we felt so blessed with support and moments when we could have used more. All of it has added to our ever-evolving bank of observations and thoughts about farming in the city.

From the beginning of this project, we have promised to make our experiences as transparent as possible. Not only do we aim to create a self-sufficient model of farming in the city, but we also aim to make public the barriers and successes that we encounter along the way. During the growing season, we were often too busy to collect our thoughts and share them. So after a few weeks of break, we have synthesized our experiences. Here are some of our thoughts about farming in San Francisco so far:

Have we been able to support ourselves through our work this year?
The answer to this question is no, yes and sort of. Taking into account our late start on sales, the amount of infrastructure setup, invasive weed wrangling and soil conditioning we had to focus on this year, we feel very proud that we were able to cover all of our operating costs (we’ll share a general breakdown once we finish wrapping up all of our 2011 accounting), set aside a healthy materials budget for next year, offer small gestures of thanks to a committed farm apprentice and pay ourselves each a little under $10,000. Of course we acknowledge that we cannot sustain this type of salary for too long. This is not considered a living wage in San Francisco and if we tried to pay ourselves by the hour, our wages would be embarrassing. We also acknowledge that this salary absolutely would not be adequate for anyone responsible for supporting a child or other family members, repaying loans, or medical bills. But for this year we were able to make it work with a little help from our other part-time jobs, and with some plain and simple living. It also helped that we took home much of our own food and that our work was so exciting and consuming that we didn’t have much free time to spend extra money.

We also couldn’t have done everything we did this year without the solid and regular help of our friend Heather. Heather is a skilled and seasoned farmer who has worked on a number of small farms over the years. She came out a couple days a week to help us with farm work and harvests. We can’t tell you how helpful it was to have Heather’s consistent friendship and farm help!

Will we be able to support ourselves in the coming farm year?
The answer to this question is we think so, we hope so, and we definitely won’t be rolling in it. This year, because we have a lot of the farm setup in place and some experimentation under our belts with how to work most efficiently on this small scale, we think we can grow and sell quite a bit more food. We aim to nearly double our CSA membership, to maintain our restaurant sales, and to begin selling at a weekly farmers market. This increased production may or may not prove to be overly ambitious for the second year growing on less than an acre. But with focus, hard work, and help from friends and neighbors we think we can do it. The trick will be to take precautions not to exhaust our bodies and the soil fertility in the process. We will certainly report back at the end of next year. At that point it should be easier for us to make a more accurate prediction of the economic viability of market-gardening in our city. Stay tuned!

Benefits specific to urban farming:

1. Community Engagement – One of the most positive outcomes of our farm so far has been our engagement with neighbors through our CSA. Because the farm is nestled within a densely populated residential neighborhood, it served as a hub during our weekly CSA pickup days, allowing neighbors a closer relationship to the plants and the act of farming. In addition to CSA pickup days, many neighbors stop by throughout the week to say hello, show their friends, take their parents for a walk, play with their kids, smell and see plants growing, or to offer us support. For some the farm really does double as a park! We feel like these face-to face interactions are the key to revisioning a society that values both food and farmers and that integrates this life-supporting activity back into the commons. See some testimonials from our neighbors.
2. Experiential Learning – Because of its central location, our farm also offers very accessible volunteer opportunities for city residents interested in learning the basics of market-gardening. Volunteers come every week from all over the city, from the East Bay, and from around the country to lend a hand. They come by bus, by bike, by car, or by foot.
3. Close Proximity to Market – We’ve experienced a unique and mutually beneficial relationship with the main restaurant we sell to. Our relationship with one especially supportive, consistent and flexible chef has been instrumental for us in working towards business viability. Because the farm is so close to our markets, we are able to sell tender items like salad mix and greens, delivering them immediately after harvesting with little travel time between the field and the refrigerator (or dinner plate). We are able to host farm tours for chefs and restaurant staff so that diners get the most accurate and firsthand knowledge about what they are eating and where it has come from.

Barriers specific to urban farming:

1. Land Value - The value of land has proven to be very prohibitive for urban farming — both finding it and keeping it. In a city like San Francisco, it isn’t every day that you find a vacant lot that is close to an acre in size, and when you do, chances are it’s worth a lot of money. Not only is it financially unrealistic for an aspiring market-gardener to purchase a vacant lot in SF, but it is currently unrealistic to even rent a lot at market-rate for gardening in the city. If land is assesed at real-estate development rates as most lots are, the associated property taxes are also high. Generally the land-owner would need to pass on the cost of the property tax and mortgage to the renter which becomes an annual rent that could be anywhere from 5-15 times the cost of renting the same amount of rural land. So without some generosity from the respective landlord, or some new creative tax incentives from the city, affording rent as a market-gardening business is a very challenging proposition. We feel this challenge first hand as we run our business on the very shaky grounds of a now month-to-month lease. The owner of our property is actively trying to develop the lot so that he can recoup the significant financial investment that he made when he purchased it. If we were to cover his monthly expenses, our rent would be around $3,000/month. This is an untenable price for less than an acre of land for any farm business.

   Also, under the tenuous framework of a month-to-month lease, we have found it difficult to make the infrastructural investments that would make our farm run most efficiently. Visitors ask us all the time why we don’t set up a more extensive rainwater catchment system, dig a well, plant fruit trees and berries, raise chickens, or build another tool shed. The answer to all of these questions is: we would absolutely love to! These will be on the top of our to-do list once we have more land security and can justify the cost and energy required.

   We feel that it would be an amazing step if, as a city, we identified vacant lots that are well suited to market-gardening, and then structured a way to value them for their topsoil and assess them based on their potential fertility instead of their financial potential in the real estate market. We believe that in order to see urban market-gardening really flourish, we must first cultivate the political will to reduce taxes for some parcels of land that have agricultural potential.

2. Balancing Sociability and Efficiency – Being surrounded by the vitality of a city and the social wealth of a neighborhood means a lot of daily conversation. We love this and we wouldn’t have it any other way, but we do note that it can slow down our work and make some days more efficient than others. We strive to strike a healthy balance between focused work and fulfilling interactions.
3. Urban Water Costs – The price of municipal water is high. Chances are that an urban farm, like ours, won’t have a well or a pond to irrigate the crops and will have to tap into the municipal water supply. Because our lot doesn’t have it’s own water meter, we currently run our irrigation from a generous neighbors hose spigot, and we reimburse them monthly. In San Francisco, the bulk of one’s water bill goes towards treating the water after it washes down the drain and into the sewers. Of course all of the water we use permeates directly into the ground and never touches the sewage system, rendering our water use unlike a typical household’s but still responsible for the same fees. (We’re currently in the process of applying for SF’s Landscape Irrigation Rebate Program.) Most annual vegetables are pretty thirsty plants and because we irrigate close to 1/2 an acre of them currently — and even more this next season — we push our neighbor’s water use into the higher-usage tiers which corresponds with higher water prices per unit. So this year we have footed some very large water bills, to the tune of approximately $300/month in the height of the summer.

   Fortunately, we are on our way to a solution. This year the SFPUC unveiled a grant program that allocates funding for new water meter installations for eligible urban gardens (a service which usually costs a minimum of $8,000). We were relieved to have received the grant, and this will allow us to open our own account and request a Landscape Irrigation Rate, hopefully significantly reducing our water bills. We hope to have that installed by early spring, just in time for the beginning of the dry season. By the way where is all the rain this winter?!

4. The Price of Food The system that sets the value of food in this country is a huge beast for any sustainable farmer to be up against and we wrestle with this issue consistently. We appreciate that San Francisco has a large number of people who are broadening their awareness of the way food choices are tied to social, environmental and economic justice. We receive a great amount of encouragement, interest and moral support for our work. However, we do still find ourselves in need of more physical support in the form of committed customers. We hope that as we continue to make ourselves more accessible (via the farmers market and an expanded CSA), we can effectively communicate these needs.

Our experimentation with marketing outlets: We experimented with a few different marketing routes this year, including direct sales to restaurants, a CSA program, a weekly on-site farm stand, and sales to caterers. We discovered benefits and challenges to each of them.

• Restaurant sales – These were straightforward and relatively efficient. The main chef we work with was creative and flexible, meaning he was often willing to alter his menu based on whatever was abundant in our fields on any given week. We discovered this year that working with at least one very flexible and collaborative chef is a real support to a young farm business. Restaurant orders were often our largest orders, which allowed us to move a good amount of produce all at once. We appreciated the efficiency of this system, and, financially speaking, this was a fairly successful outlet for us.
• CSA – This was one of the more socially fulfilling components of our business and a solid financial basis for the season. The model was very important to us, as it allowed us to share our experience on the farm with an intimate group of committed subscribers, many of whom were immediate neighbors. We are really excited about having a strong CSA as the heart of our business plan again for this year.
• Farm Stand – Each week, during our CSA pickup window, we put together a small farm stand. This seemed like a great way for us to sell surplus produce as well as extra items that we didn’t grow in large enough quantities to put into the CSA boxes. We also liked the idea of neighbors being able to stop in and buy a few items for the week without having to sign on as committed CSA subscribers. Unfortunately this didn’t work out exactly as we had hoped. Farm stand sales turned out to be very low in relation to the amount of time we spent harvesting for the table each week, in part because the farm’s tucked away location isn’t ideal for drop-in customers. We were often left with large quantities of produce to donate or take home which was a challenge to deal with at the end of a very long day. We are hoping that by participating this year in an already active farmers market we will have a steady enough customer base to make our harvests worthwhile.
• Caterers – We found this to be our best outlet for specialty items like rare herbs, baby root vegetables and edible flowers (items that, because of their specialty, are able to fetch a higher price). We found the efficiency of working with caterers to be highly variable. For example a large order from a caterer that required minimal email exchange was very efficient, whereas a small order that required a lot of communication and special pickup time was less so. We would love to increase the amount of caterers we work with and special events that we provide for while also determining an efficient framework for these sales — a minimum order value and a few consistent pickup times.

  Most successful crops this year: Red and golden beets, cabbage, lacinato kale, broccolini, basil (under a hoop-house), tokyo turnips, french breakfast radishes, artichokes, strawberries, spaghetti squash, kabocha squash, salad mix!

  Least successful crops this year: Both napa cabbage, and tatsoi were attacked viciously by slugs. We had trouble with root maggot in our summer radishes and turnips, and onion root maggot in our summer scallions. Cucumbers were planted too late in the season and we didn’t get around to trellising. Under these conditions, the Lemon variety performed better than some of the Pickling varieties. Delicata squash and Butternut squash plants didn’t begin to flower and set fruit until September which didn’t leave them enough time to grow and ripen before winter.

  Goals for 2012:This past year was focused on farm setup — putting together our CSA model, and building relationships with restaurants, neighbors and City officials. This year we will focus on widening our access to customers which means both growing our CSA and being present at the Mission Community Farmers Market. We will also focus on continuing to find more efficient practices and habits. This means both exploring the best tools and inventions for facilitating our garden tasks, as well as creating even better organizational structures for managing our recordkeeping. In addition we hope to continue to facilitate or open conversations on themes of agriculture (where it fits in our society and what power it has to shape our culture), food justice (equal accessibility for everyone), and the grassroots economy (how to vision resilient co-interdependent communities). If you have any ideas about how we can best raise and engage in these conversations that are so important to us, please let us know! We will also continue to nudge the city to introduce policies that will further support the growth of urban agriculture.

  We are also excited about so many things on the farm! We’re going to be trying out new vegetable varieties and saving seed, setting up worm bins, planting a few fruit trees and perennial plants (our land tenure may be unpredictable, but we will see these tree plantings as a gesture of hope), hosting a small group of interns, getting a refrigerator, building more storage space, setting up a hoop house, attempting to increase our yields without drastically increasing our labor (tricky!), growing more flowers, and making more friends.

  

When putting together a packet on the blight-reducing benefits of urban farms a couple months ago, we asked some neighbors to say a few words about their relationship to the farm and their feelings about the lot now, as compared to before. We were touched by the responses. Below are a few excerpts, and you can read more here.

Social activities and the farmstand they have operated have provided a meeting place for neighbors I have gotten to know, for the first time. I feel much more involved and positive about my neighborhood. It is no longer just a bunch of houses and driveways- it has that vital ingredient -life…

..I am very pleased that an urban farm exists in my neighborhood. It is a blessing to have an area where food is grown locally…