16 March 2010

For the last couple Sundays, I have spent some time volunteering at Hayes Valley Farm, a new community farm project at the corner of Laguna and Oak. This was the site of the Central Freeway ramp before the 1989 Loma Prieta earthquake. The city zoned it for residential development, but it has remained a vacant, derelict, fenced-off block of ivy, trees, and pavement for the last twenty years. The site was recently activated for community use as a urban gardening education center, sponsored by the San Francisco Parks Trust. Hayes Valley Farm is an interim project lasting two to five years, maybe longer, until the economy picks up and the city’s development plans are back on the table.

This week I was put on site beautification, which involved weeding and cleaning up the chain-link perimeter of the farm. As Hayes Valley Farm Project Director Chris Burley put it, we just want to keep the site clean and green, so that people will respect it. Cleanup involved tearing up ivy, thistle (ouch!), and other undesirables that had spilled over onto the sidewalk. It also meant picking up paper coffee cups, soda cans, beer bottles, syringes, bags of dog poop, and other signs of city life. A cigarette lighter. A dye packet from a hair coloring kit. The cut corner of a cereal bag. There’s something eerily post-apocalyptic about seeing these discarded pieces our lives incorporated into nature, tangled up in ivy, packed into mats of soil that have collected in gutters.

Currently, I'm living in the San Francisco Zen Center, just a block up the street, and as I picked up trash, I thought of American Zen icon Issan Dorsey. I recently read Street Zen: The Life and Work of Issan Dorsey, a wonderful book about someone who could, by all accounts, be considered a modern bodhissatva. Issan was a drag queen and junkie who became one of the original students of Shunryu Suzuki and, later, the founding teacher of the Hartford Street Zen Center. He also founded the Maitri hospice for AIDS patients. Throughout his life, he stayed close to the edges of mainstream society, and his caring presence touched everyone he met. His story is an inspiration, particularly for people seeking meaning in urban life. Biographer and student David Schneider writes:

Moving through his world, I don’t feel that order has been imposed rigidly, or in a clumsy attempt to make sense of things. He seems perfectly willing to go with your arrangement if you have one, or to let things shift as they do. Issan seems instead to be in love with the things around him, and to arrange them out of affection. He told me one about cleaning. ‘You don’t clean to make things clean, so much. You clean even if it’s not a mess. You just go around and make things look like somebody paid attention to them.’

Issan’s philosophy on cleaning has stuck with me, and it came to mind as I walked around the farm site, picking up cigarette butts, bits of glass, shreds of plastic bags. Waste management is an endless, and often thankless, task. There is always more trash, but it does us no good to dwell on that. And maybe it doesn’t help us to think of it as trash at all–such as the pile of torn cardboard that may have been used to pad someone’s sleeping bag, someone’s home. This debris could be incorporated into the sheet mulching project some other farm volunteers were working on just a few feet away. The scraps simply needed to find their place in the new site.

It is therapeutic to interact with an urban space in this way, especially when you have help. Some things I appreciate about farm work are the economy and creative engagement with resources, and the cooperative nature of the work. Bringing that sense of care to this abandoned lot feels like a way of reclaiming it from the city’s neglect, and clearing and blessing it for the life, groundwork, and joy that us soil-starved city folks will bring to it.

Written by Booka | 22 February 2010

Symbiotic relationships exist between many organisms. The teeth-cleaning shrimp come to mind. A little underwater spa treatment would make anyone feel like a new animal. One lifeform needs the other to do its job or survive. Our beautiful bald berms needed a healthy dose of nitrogen, to complement our thick layer of carbon cardboard. Our job, as farmers, was to breathe new life into soil that had been robbed of a lot of its nutrients, by walls of thick ivy.  Our best solution for implementing the nitrogen cure: a healthy dose of water-resilient volunteers!

After the last few weeks of spreading cardboard and organic matter on the farm many people were wondering, what's next? What will be our first "crop" this Spring?

18 February 2010

"#1 Helper" by Hayes Valley Farm

This week we had both little ones and big ones come to the site to enjoy the new community playground. The first little one, pictured above, put on his gloves quickly and got to work moving cardboard, filling wheelbarrows and pushing tonka trucks. The big ones, pictured below, spanned the gamut from creating amazing artwork to filling wheelbarrows of mulch like there was no tomorrow. One volunteer taught me the "quick method" to filling a wheelbarrow by tipping it on its side for the "first 2/3rds" then to "tip it up and fill it up" for the last bit. I love how each person can come to the site and interact in their own way, both claiming and reinventing age-old work in our modern surroundings. 

08 February 2010

What's a work party without a few trenches being dug (above) and a few thousand pounds of cardboard to be layed down like fall leaves in the forest? Many came, many had fun but most importantly people showed up to rock out the new Hayes Valley Farm!

The majority of the efforts involved mulch wrestling, the cardboard shuffle, and the trench trance. The volunteers came in record numbers to see the site, get involved and get dirty. It was great to see so many smiles and so many people involved in work they enjoyed. I heard a few comments about deskwork that I won't repeat, but let's just say we might have a few more farmers on our hands at the end of the year. That's good news as Fast Company Magazine rates farmer as the #1 top green job for the next decade.

Written by Booka | 01 February 2010

What's a work party without shovels? Oh and dirt. Lots and lots of dirt. Not just any dirt, though. We had steaming mounds of dirt, as I walked up the south side of the farm (Formerly the On Ramp) I could not see bodies, just heads and grinding shovel action. The steam was resulting from the heat generated by microorganisms and bacteria, having their own party inside of 100 cubic yards of beautiful brown mulch. Somewhat apocalyptic and a little surreal with the hundreds of cars driving by just yards away and the acoustic harmonies of Jugtown Pirates (pictured above).

All the volunteers did not know each other, but shared a common goal on Sunday. They came out to work hard, contribute to a great project and get dirty! David Cody (who was celebrating his birthday that day! Happy Birthday Cody!) asked us to lay down massive amounts of fresh organic matter on top of the cardboard boxes we procured as a donation from Whole Foods. We also collected hypodermic needles from the site as part of the clearing process from the land being neglected for so long.

One of the most uplifting parts of the day was the presence of neighbors, some of whom had just happened to stroll by the open gates. Others had been viewing the site for the last 10 or 15 years, hoping for something to be erected. Anything better than 2 asphalt roads, both leading nowhere. Dirt is an improvement over asphalt to everyone, because we all know the dirt is living and breathing. That dirt is a critical foundation step to our Farm. Thank you to all the volunteers and visitors who came by yesterday!