Photos from Beach Flats Garden

A couple weeks ago my friend asked me to take some photos of the Beach Flats Community Garden in Santa Cruz which they can use for their upcoming blog. Some of them turned out pretty good.

From my Santa Cruz Indymedia post:

The weather is warming and this years summer crops at the Beach Flats Community Garden are coming up. It’s been over a year since the Garden was first threatened with closure by the overburdened and resource-strapped Community Center which oversees it. Since, members of the community have banded together not only that once, but again last December, to make sure the garden stays open, the second time in the face of city budget cuts. Despite the threats, gardeners continue to plant, tend and harvest.

Is Access to Land a Human Right?

Calabasa a la jardin de la comunidad de la playa en Santa Cruz

Fantastic piece by Antonio Roman-Alcalá over at Civil Eats today. I’ve been thinking a lot lately about access to land and it’s implications on our food system. As we watch the trend of home (food) gardening grow, questions arise not only about how to do it, since recent generations have lost the tradition of passing down that art, but WHERE to do it. A record percentage (over half) of the global population lives in cities. So it follows, that for the first time in human history, more than half the human population has extremely limited options when it comes to feeding themselves. The local food movement is surely drawing attention to this issue, but as local food gains importance, supply will surely become an issue. This is where access to land becomes a key component of our food future. Finding suitable ground is one of the biggest barriers to entering the farming profession. Not only is the good stuff too expensive to purchase, leasing is risky. Maybe the ground has had chemicals sprayed on it. Maybe you’ll be able to work it for one or two years, only to lose your lease, thereby losing the precious investment you’ve made building the soil.

But why are we still in a situation where the rich get to decide the best uses for land, while hard working, intelligent, compassionate, humble workers just do what we’re told?

The “Slow Money” principles (obviously drawing it’s name from the Slow Food movement) is attempting to address this issue. It feels like it’s in infancy stage, but there could be some excited ideas here. I’m personally convinced there is something to banding people together to buy back farmland for our collective good. Maybe collective purchase of land is our next step together in taking back our food system.

Turkey Hatching Time!

My friend David and his girlfriend have been turning turkey eggs for the past several weeks in an incubator at their house. Finally, the turkeys have arrived! The turkeys will be going back to live on the farm soon after their incubation and hatching in Santa Cruz. Click on the picture to get a close up view. They are so cute!

Shoutout to Freshman Farmers

I recently came across the Freshman Farmer blog (thanks, Bridgett!) and it is awesome! A collection of young farmers blog about what’s happening on their farms. There are some great photo slideshows of life on the farm and the posts are written with great voice and funny! For example, here’s some Farmer Math:

Silence! The units are a little different, but the concept is very familiar. Observe:

P(Rain) = Q(Uncovered Wood)/Q(All Wood) U “Oh, it’s not going to rain this week.”

This formula illustrates the probability of rain as being equal to the percentage of vulnerable wood you left exposed after saying, “Oh, it’s not going to rain this week.”

But we are not done yet. Notwithstanding the above:

P(Rain)=0 if TankRefill () = False

This states that no matter what, it will not rain if you don’t refill the water tank.

Awesome.

Help Make Fresh Water More Accessible in Africa

Maybe you’ve heard what I have, that if we put wells in Africa we could end world hunger (despite what all those mono-crop, biotech agriculture companies say) because people could support themselves. Sources of fresh water are so scarce that the problem is way beyond one relating to growing food, it’s causing wars and disease. In some places, the life expectancy in Africa is 38 years! Charity water is taking the proceeds from their bottled water to building the much-needed water pumps in Africa. Check out this awesome promo video.

(Sorry this is just an image still from the video, but click on the still to get to the video. Darn wordpress.com! No embed for Kaltura videos!)

Unsafe water and lack of basic sanitation cause 80% of all sickness and disease, and kill more people every year than all forms of violence, including war. Many people in the developing world, usually women and children, walk more than three hours every day to fetch water that is likely to make them sick. Those hours are crucial, preventing many from working or attending school. Additionally, collecting water puts them at greater risk of sexual harassment and assault. Children are especially vulnerable to the consequences of unsafe water. Of the 42,000 deaths that occur every week from unsafe water and a lack of basic sanitation, 90% are children under 5 years old.

I found this video because it’s part of a contest for the NTEN conference, a gathering of techies in the non-profit sector, which I am attending in San Francisco this year. Yes, I’m a non-profit techie. Isn’t it amazing what a little nerd plus new media can do!?!

Homemade Fermenting Fun

Not only is kimchi so tasty, it’s good for you! Kimchi is a yummy Korean fermented salad usually made with cabbage and various spices, similar to sauerkraut. I love it when it’s really garlic-y! Lately, it seems like everyone is talking about probiotics and fermented foods as essentials to digestive health, so take a clue and get yourself some! Check out this homemade batch by the Urban Homesteaders made with homegrown carrots, daikon radish, green onions and cabbage.

If you’re in the Bay Area, Santa Cruz-based Happy Girl Kitchen is doing Fermenting and canning workshops which you can attend for a small fee. The day is complete with local organic lunch! Fermenting and canning your own food is a great way to use up the excess harvest from the garden and is good for the planet since there are no food miles from your plate to your backyard.

Springtime Beets!

Red and Golden Beets from Route One Farm

It’s officially springtime, I’ve done a spring cleanse for my body and now all I want to eat are fresh fruits and veggies. I had to share the photo of these organic red and golden beets I got at the downtown Santa Cruz Farmer’s Market from Route One Farm. These beets were so good roasted with a little olive oil. So pretty and so delicious!

Also introducing “Foodie” category!

Planning for Planting

Andrea's Plot Plan

There’s a great post at Heavy Petal about some simple steps to planning your garden so you’re growing and harvesting each season.

Andrea, the author, went to a permaculture course in her hometown of Vancouver, BC, and learned a simple method of charting out the plan in a grid:

I find this a great way to quickly see if I’ve got any obvious empty spots in a bed. In one bed, for example, I just had carrots and tomatoes, which left big blank spots in the “Harvest” row for spring, and in the “Plant” row for fall. By adding an overwintering vegetable such as leeks or Brussels sprouts to that bed, I could plant in fall and be harvesting the next spring – getting that much more action out of a single bed.

From, Planning for a year-round harvest (or How I went from slacker to Serious Planner). Check it out!

Family Farms Pulled Us Out of the Great Depression…

…maybe Barack Obama can shape some policy to help them do it again.

If agriculture is indeed the building blocks of modern civilization, a concept I first understood from reading Guns, Germs and Steel by Jared Diamond, then Family Farms Pulled Us Out of the Great Depression by Jay Greathouse, definitely makes sense. Greathouse discusses parities for food prices which enable farmers to price their crops at or above the actual costs of the raw materials, a concept long gone during these days of globalized agri-business.

Our recovery started in 1942, the year the Steagall Amendment to the War Stabilization Act mandated farm parity, but the war got the credit. We then had ten years of economic stability until 1952 when the Steagall Amendment was allowed to expire.

In 1952 “export-oriented pricing” replaced the New Deal policy that had put farm prices in balance, or parity, with other prices. That New Deal policy worked effectively with farmer-approved “supply management” that cost far less than today’s subsidies to Agri-business.

Farm parity laws that created a fair price floor for all raw materials was the main agent for moving the United States out of the Great Depression of the 1930s. This support of prices allowed farmers to afford to stay on the farm and rebuild the United States economy literally from the ground up.

…

State of the Garden

Strawberries. Right after taking the shot, I ate them!

I’m by no means an expert gardener. In fact, this is really only the third season I’ve been growing food. But I have to say this is my favorite batch of plants yet. I dug up a patch of the lawn outside my apartment and took care to only carve out enough space that I could manage on my own. The first round of plants included four tomatoes (two in pots), two zucchini, four butter lettuce, a row of baby spinach, a row of spring mix, three broccoli, one green bell pepper, an eggplant, several basil plants, cilantro, parsley and a couple strawberries. I was worried when the lettuce started disappearing due to a hungry gopher, but fortunately for me, the neighbor cats took care of him before he did too much damage. However, I soon discovered the cats love to sleep and dig in the garden. A tomato and a zucchini start suffered broken stems due to cat nap. They have since recovered and since the cats saved me from doing the dirty gopher removal work, I am happy to have them nearby. (Though I do think they dug around newly planted seeds where I haven’t seen one sprout in over two weeks.)

Black Crim Ripening

By now, mid-August, the first rounds of greens are long gone. I have had zucchini coming out of my ears now for almost two months and the long-awaited tomatoes are finally stating to redden. In Santa Cruz this year everyone has been waiting and waiting for the tomatoes and they are finally upon us! See more garden photos on my flickr page.

Zucchini, zucchini, zucchini

The passionflower is going off! A few fruits are appearing and the monarch butterflies can't get enough.