Mary Davis started feeling the squeeze of city life about a year ago. She had grown up gardening and spent a stint working on an organic farm while attending grad school in Missouri. Now an architect living in San Francisco’s Mission District, she longed to reconnect with her gardening roots, but her small apartment was lacking in the dirt department. “There was no garden, no outdoors,” she says. “I really wanted a place with some soil.”

She started looking around her neighborhood and fell in love with the historic Dearborn Community Garden. But when she inquired about getting a plot, she was told there was a 22-year waiting list.

She signed up nonetheless and continued her search, adding her name to the Potrero Hill Community Garden’s list as well, which had a comparatively modest seven-year wait. Since then, Davis has moved into a house with a shared backyard garden, but she still longs for a plot of her own.

Davis’s experience is not uncommon among would-be gardeners in San Francisco. Most of the city’s community gardens have waiting lists of two years or more, according to Public Harvest, a new report by San Francisco Urban Planning + Urban Research Association (SPUR). The most comprehensive report of its kind in recent years, it paints a sweeping portrait of the current urban agriculture landscape and presents a bold agenda to help San Francisco meet the demands of a burgeoning movement.

Since the dissolution of the San Francisco League of Urban Gardeners (SLUG) in 2004, there have been no centralized city-funded efforts to maintain or expand urban agriculture. Residents hoping to start new projects face many bureaucratic hurdles, since public land and urban agricultural activities are managed by multiple agencies, with little coordination. From commercial urban farms to rooftop plots and shared gardens, more than two dozen private and public urban agriculture projects have sprouted up in the City over the last four years as a result of the resurgence of interest in gardening. “We need to start looking to our public land to meet this demand,” said SPUR program manager Eli Zigas at a recent press event at Michelangelo Playground Community Garden in Nob Hill (pictured below).

While San Francisco Recreation & Parks oversees 35 community gardens on public land, those gardens are generally operated by volunteers, not staff. “The gardens are run by gardeners,” says Andrea Jadwin, a founding and active member of San Francisco Gardening Resource Organization (SFGRO), which offers support and training for community gardeners throughout the city. “That’s good and that’s bad because some gardens aren’t very well run.” Garden managers are often inadequately prepared to deal with issues like vandalism or garden members who neglect their plots while waiting lists grow. “If there were an agency helping people run the gardens better, it’d be easy to keep them going with minimal budget,” she adds.

According to SPUR’s findings, San Francisco’s urban agriculture program is middling compared to other large cities. With an annual operating budget of $800,000, or about $6,615 per site, San Francisco spends more than New York but far less than Seattle, which invests $11,940 per site.

Taking SPUR’s findings and recommendations to heart, District 3 Supervisor David Chiu has proposed new legislation that would create a strategic plan and a centralized program to streamline the management of urban agricultural projects, either through the city or a city-funded nonprofit.

The proposed ordinance includes a six-month audit of city-owned building rooftops that could be used for urban agriculture, the creation of a “one-stop shop” for individuals and organizations looking to engage in agricultural activities, and the establishment of garden resource centers that would provide residents with compost, seeds, and tools. By 2014, Chiu aims to develop at least 10 new urban agricultural projects on public land and reduce waiting lists for plot-based gardens to one year.

Zigas emphasizes the minimal cost of such a program for the returns it offers to the city of San Francisco, such as greening the urban landscape and reducing stormwater runoff, which in turn reduce public spending on landscaping and sewage treatment.

He also notes the benefits of urban agriculture for San Francisco residents and the food system at large, connecting city dwellers with the miracles and challenges of growing food. “I think a many gardeners in San Francisco have a great appreciation for a fresh tomato because they know how hard it is to grow a tomato,” says Zigas. “There are a lot of people in the city who learn about food and how it’s produced through that process.”

Having been a member of White Crane Springs Community Garden in the Sunset for nine years, Jadwin has witnessed the benefits that such spaces offer by bringing neighbors together.

“People garden for the same reasons they go to the farmers market,” she observes. “You see your friends and neighbors. You talk about the weather and what’s in season. It not only allows people to have a broader connection to food, but it also builds community.”

Originally published in CUESA‘s newsletter

It started with a phone call. I had just finished A Language Older Than Words by Derrick Jensen and it had a powerful affect on me. Like most of Jensen’s books, it detailed the toll industrial civilization was taking on the planet and it had me wondering what I could do about it.

I’d been writing about food for more than a decade, spotting trends, finding new restaurants and telling stories about people passionate about cooking and eating. But the more I learned about our food system’s impact on the earth, writing about where to find a great burger or a hot new restaurant started to feel pretty trivial. How could I bring a greater environmental perspective to my role as a food writer? Most food journalists steer clear of unappetizing subjects like agriculture’s impact on global warming, CAFOs, the farm bill, and hunger. I wanted to do something different.

That’s when the phone rang. It was Greg Roden, an old college friend who had connected with television producer Brian Greene. They wanted to know if I was interested in creating a TV show about food and did I have any ideas. Yes and yes.

I’d never been a fan of the Food Network. I’ve never seen a single episode of Top Chef. I knew I didn’t want to do anything like that. In fact, I don’t even own a TV. Meanwhile, Food Inc. had just been released and Michael Pollan and Eric Schlosser had done excellent jobs of detailing what was wrong with the way we eat so I didn’t want to cover that ground again either. How about a show that picked up where Food, Inc. left off, a documentary program that profiled the innovators and pioneers—food rebels creating a healthier food system? We wanted to educate and inspire people, but also entertain them with compelling characters, animated segments and cool music. I could get excited about a show like that and I hoped others would, too. We called it Food Forward.

That was three (long) years ago and this month I’m excited to say Food Forward will debut on PBS stations across the country, premiering in L.A. April 5 and then rolling out nationally from there. Click here to see air times.

Our premier episode explores the urban agriculture phenomena growing across America. The lively, 30-minute program crisscrosses the country to profile rooftop gardeners and beekeepers in New York City, urban farmers planting crops and economic opportunity in the low-income neighborhoods of West Oakland, Calif., innovative fish and plant farmers in Milwaukee, Wisc., and up-from-the-ashes city farmers in Detroit, MI. All of the characters are engaged in practical solutions to green their cities and grow fresh, healthful food right where most of us live—in cities.

The urban ag episode is the pilot for a 13-part series in development, scheduled to go into production later this year. Future episodes will focus on school lunch reform, fishing, alternative agriculture, soil preservation, grassland agriculture, the Farm Bill, and much more.

This is Food Forward and these are stories America needs to hear. Tune in and see what you think.

Watch Promo: Food Forward on PBS. See more from Food Forward.

After Novella Carpenter’s critically acclaimed memoir Farm City: The Education of an Urban Farmer came out, she and friend Willow Rosenthal, the founder of West Oakland gardening nonprofit City Slicker Farms, started talking about compiling a manual on urban gardening. “We always got these random emails like, ‘My chickens aren’t laying anymore!’” says Carpenter. So she and Rosenthal joked that they should write a book so they could reply: “Buy the book!”

Three years later, they can. Their new book, The Essential Urban Farmer, is a 500-page nuts-and-bolts guide to farming in the city–complete with sample garden designs, detailed illustrations, and photos of rabbit genitalia. Rosenthal, who is also a Waldorf School teacher and runs a small CSA in Berkeley, wrote the first two sections of the book: “Designing Your Urban Farm” and “Raising City Vegetables and Fruits.” Carpenter wrote the section called “Raising City Animals.” With advice on how to fix a chicken’s prolapsed “vent,” and a detailed how-to on eviscerating a chicken, it’s not for the squeamish. But then, neither is raising livestock.

I talked to Carpenter and Rosenthal recently about the guide, and got some tips about  how to create a thriving urban farm.

Willow Rosenthal

Why did you write this book?

Carpenter: We were both trial-and-error urban farmers. We would’ve loved to have had a guidebook that showed us best practices. So this is the book that we wished we’d had when we were starting out.

In the intro, you write that the average urban backyard can grow all the fruit and veggies for one person in 25 x 40 feet, and that it makes economic sense to garden if you have more time than money. Is this book geared, in part, towards low-income readers?  

Carpenter: Yeah, definitely. I’m low-income, Willow is probably low-income, too. People are like, “You should eat organic food,” but when you go to Whole Foods or the farmers’ market, it’s so expensive. So this was our DIY way to eat organic, healthy food. If you do it right, it can be cost effective.

Rosenthal: I wouldn’t say that it’s only geared towards low-income people, but toward people who are interested in making their own solutions. It’s not going to be as useful for people who want to purchase everything at the garden store or hire other people to do work in the garden. To make an impact on the way that the food system is structured for environmental good, it’s necessary for people of all walks of life to grow food in the city.

What mistakes did each of you make early on in your respective urban farms that you hope to prevent others from making with this book?

Carpenter: Well, I remember that Willow and I had built a chicken shed and we were raising pullets (adolescent chickens) and we didn’t realize that raccoons are really smart. They can use their little fingers to pry off staples (which we’d used to staple the chicken wire to the chicken shed). Over the course of four days, the raccoon would slowly pry off more. And then one night, it came in and killed every single pullet–I think there were 25 in there. It was massive carnage. The lesson here was don’t put the staples on the outside.

In terms of the garden, I would say my problem is not harvesting stuff. You can plant all these really beautiful vegetables and there’s a tendency to not want to harvest them because they look so beautiful. You need to have a harvest day, like Fridays or Thursdays, where you go out into the garden and harvest everything that’s ready and put it in your fridge. I can’t emphasize how genius this is.

Rosenthal: What mistakes didn’t I make?  (Laughter.) Farming is a process of trial and error. Each farm is its own unique entity. You do need to find your own way. Plants are always gonna die and you’re going to have to figure that out.

Rosenthal: Many landlords have an altruistic streak. When presented with something to do for the community that’s no skin off their back–they’re happy to do it. I think we tend to make a lot of assumptions about who people are. But it’s important to have an open mind. Maybe two out of 10 landlords don’t care at all about the community. But there are eight who do, so let’s get those people involved. You’re politicizing them in a way–you’re bringing them into this activist movement.

[Another] real perk is your thanks! I know that sounds cheesy, but you should focus on informing the landlord of what’s going on and thanking them. The mistake some people make is, “I got permission and now I can forget about it.” It’s a relationship you need to cultivate and not take for granted.

Starting an urban farm demands a lot of work–not to mention money. You need to pay for water, buy liability insurance, equipment, wood and nails for raised beds, maybe even hoop houses. Are there funds would-be gardeners can apply for if they don’t have enough of their own money?

Carpenter: If you’re doing a community garden, you can approach your city government. Pretty much every city has a community garden association. I know in Seattle it’s the P-Patch.

Rosenthal:  There are a couple of important resources. Master Gardener programs exist in every county in the United States–they are a subset of the agriculture extension services run by local universities. The USDA spends money through these agencies to support farmers. They were intended to support primarily commercial farmers. But this is changing as people in urban areas are actually using those services more. I always tell people, this is your tax dollars at work and you have every right to utilize them!

If you have a pest, you can take a sample of the plant and put them in a baggie and send them to a specialist and they will ID that for you–for free.

In some states, like California, you can now get services through the [Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP)] program to help you start a home garden. You can use food stamps for all sorts of special vouchers for gardening supplies.

Regional and citywide organizations can often provide a lot of technical assistance. Some of them may provide materials free of charge–City Slicker Farms does. The other way that home gardeners can make it affordable is by producing their own vegetable seedlings. When you go to the store to buy a cauliflower seedling and it’s $3 for a six-pack, you’re hardly saving money on your food bill. But if you’re buying a packet of seeds–100 seeds for two bucks. In our book we give an outline of a simple setup for using fluorescent lighting to start seedlings indoors.

Novella Carpenter with her goats.

The book does contain many tricks for saving money on construction: getting softwood pallets for free to use as compost bins or boxed beds, using old bathtubs as containers. What are some other tricks the two of you have used over time to save money on construction supplies?

Carpenter: One of the greatest fencing materials is really cheap: concrete reinforcement mesh.  But you can buy this mesh at any Home Depot or local lumber yard and it’s $12 for a giant sheet of it. You can use it for making quick and easy fences. It’ll even keep goats in!

Also for me, one of the great parts of living in a city is there is so much waste that you can feed to animals. You [also] never have to buy pots. You can usually find those at garden stores–they’re trying to get rid of the black plastic pots.

I found this guy who makes redwood sculptures of giant grizzly bears. And he has all these scrap pieces of redwood that he throws aside. I actually built a little chicken coop from those once. So you have to look at your resources and think how you can repurpose [them into] building materials.

Rosenthal: Get your building materials for free or cheap, but invest money in hardware. If the bolts that hold your boxes together are rated for outdoor use your boxes will last a long time.

In terms of getting free building materials: I was blessed because here in the East Bay we have a wonderful company called the ReUse People. They salvage whole houses–including a lot of the framing lumber–and they sell it for a very affordable price, already cleaned of nails and screws. So check your salvage yard.

Extremely valuable materials go into the garbage, such as hardwood pallets. Softwood pallets, unless you line them with something, can degrade pretty quickly. Hardwood pallets are an amazingly valuable resource.

My other favorite free material is old burlap sacks. They’re great containers for planting. They’ll degrade over time but they’re free and have structure to them. You can get them at coffee roasters or chocolate companies. A lot of times you can find them on Freecycle.org.

I was surprised to learn that you can farm on heavy-metal contaminated soil.  Have either of you done that? And if so, which precautions did you take?   

Rosenthal: There’s a lot of gray area when it comes to health, toxicity, and safety. Rather than saying “do this or just do that,” our hope is to educate people so they can make their own decisions.

With our backyard garden program at City Slicker Farms, the first thing we do is go into a resident’s garden and test their soil for lead and heavy metals. There were some situations where we said, “No, we don’t think you should have vegetable gardens unless we cap the soil and put in raised beds.” We follow stringent guidelines with people.

First we cover the soil with mulch–or put down layers of cardboard and mulch. Dilution has an effect. If you bring in an equal volume of compost and mix that in with your soil, you’ve already cut the level of lead in half.

You say that native soil is better than potting soil, but what if your soil has chemicals or toxins in it?  Where do you go about getting healthy native soil to amend your own?   

Rosenthal: That’s a good question. We live in such an “I can just buy whatever I need” culture. And a lot of the potting soil is actually toxic to plants.

It’s possible to get topsoil. You can sometimes go on Craigslist and find people who are doing construction projects and need to get rid of some dirt. But often they’re like, “We need to dump it today.” And you should take a sample to the lab and test it before you buy it.

You can buy topsoil, potting mix, and compost. But you want to be sure they’re testing these products. Talk to the employees at locally-owned gardening centers. They often know a lot about what different potting mix companies are doing. Not all materials are equal. Making your own compost is a great way to get a high quality product.

What about theft? A friend of mine in Portland recently had all of her (perfectly ripe) persimmons stolen from their backyard. Any tips on how to deal with this? 

Rosenthal: It does happen. My strategy has always been to try to communicate with these unknown people. It’s easy to victimize a faceless person, but if you put a sign on the front of your fence saying, “Hey, I know you might be tempted by these beautiful tomatoes, but if you want some, why don’t you just come knock on my door and I’d be happy to share.”

We are living in desperate times. It’s up to all of us to do what we can to help and not to take it personally. What we did at City Slicker Farms, we did have to lock our gardens at night so they wouldn’t get vandalized. So we just set up planter boxes outside of them and put up signs saying “Help yourself.”

Novella, you emphasize how important it is to check your city’s ordinances to see whether it’s legal to keep bees, chickens, goats, rabbits, etc. Can you say more about that?

Carpenter: Oakland has kind of lax laws and the ordinances were ambiguous. For instance, I can have goats but I can’t have a male goat. I think actually you can’t have pigs, it’s buried into some weird law. I think it’s legal in Portland to have goats. It is in Seattle as well. In the book, we’re talking about super ground-level things like, it’s illegal to keep chickens in some cities. But then it becomes a question of who is watching those laws. If you had a neighbor that doesn’t like you, who is calling the city every day to report you, that’s when you’re gonna run into a problem. In that case, you  want to cover your ass and make sure that you’re legal.

You say that bees are the “gateway urban farm animal.” Yet it sounds like it’s a fairly expensive operation. What’s the ballpark amount you spent buying hives, supplies, extractors, etc.? 

Carpenter: To get a beehive with bees and the queen and all that, you’re looking at $250. So, it is definitely a fairly nice Christmas present or birthday present. Or for some people, it’s a really nice pair of shoes. There are ways to do it more cheaply. If you’re handy, you can make your own frames. You can build your own boxes. But I’ve found that usually anything that I build is shit. I spend more money being frustrated.

To me, $250 seems expensive, but when you harvest your honey, you get six gallons, and you can sell it for $15 for half a quart or pint. And those boxes will last forever.

You write that overfeeding is one of the biggest problems with backyard chickens–people give them scraps and kitchen waste but then forget to reduce the amount of pelleted feed. And as you mention, overweight chickens not only have trouble laying eggs, they can die prematurely. What’s a general rule of thumb for how much chicken feed to give a full-grown chicken per day?

Carpenter: Some people think of their chickens as their pets. That’s fine if you can afford to—you can buy scratch and hydrated mealworms. You can really go crazy with snacks for the chickens!  But each chicken needs about a handful of feed a day. So it’s not a huge amount.  You supplement with greens, weeds, grass, and they’ll be totally healthy and fine.

You say rabbits are the new chickens. Is that really true? I’m not a vegetarian, but I just can’t get past the notion of slaughtering a bunny.

Carpenter: There is a pretty big trend of people who are new meat eaters and they want to raise their own turkeys and chickens and now rabbits. They can save money and have this great source of low-fat, hormone-free meat. Some people just use their manure, though. It’s so good and they poop so much!  It’s really balanced–not super high in nitrogen. I know a guy who grows a bucket of rabbit poop and sells it for $10 to people who grow marijuana.

Which animal was the most rewarding for you to raise/keep?

Carpenter: You love them all for different reasons. But the animals I will have forever are bees. Bees are so giving. And I bought all that expensive equipment, so I better keep at it! There’s also just something so amazing about bees. They are such hard workers and you have this connection to the seasons that is really intense.

Originally published on Grist

Luc Chamberland thinks oyster farming is often misunderstood. That’s why the aquaculturist wants to educate the public about the benefits of cultivating bivalves in Tomales Bay, a pristine estuary in West Marin, Calif.

A recent, high-profile controversy surrounding a commercial oyster farm in the area has focused on the potentially negative environmental impacts of cultivating oysters (namely disruption to native species). But Chamberland sees oyster farming as a sustainable practice that does more good than harm.

That’s why, a few years ago, he conceived of Pickleweed Point Community Oyster Farm–a kind of CSA for the briny bivalve–so that the public can, quite literally, grow their own oysters, and in the process better understand the critical role oysters play in maintaining a healthy ecosystem. 

Chamberland has about 25 participants–some as young as six and some as old as 80–who pay $100 for the privilege of hands-on oyster farming lessons. Each spends an average of eight-12 hours a year maintaining their oyster plot. “If the water is healthy then our oysters are healthy,” he says. “The health department requires frequent water quality testing with oysters, so they’re a great water quality indicator.” Members are shown how to load Pacific oyster “seeds” (young oysters about the size of a penny) into wire-like mesh bags, which are then numbered, tied to a line, and released into the intertidal region of the bay, where waves, wind, and filter feeding are routine.

This oyster farmer was inspired to launch Pickleweed after learning about a similar community farm in Washington. It is a labor of love Chamberland tends to on nights and weekends; he has a day job as a project manager for an oceanographic and wetland restoration company.

Chamberland also hosts school field trips to the farm for local middle and high school students, organized through the community farm’s fiscal sponsor, The Watershed Project. Chamberland began working with The Watershed Project as a volunteer and was impressed by their native oyster restoration work in the Bay Area. He approached the project for support, as he thought they’d make a good fit for his idea.

The feeling was mutual. “Other farms may give a tour of their facility, but Luc actually wants students to be an oyster farmer for the day,” says Christopher Lim, the Living Shoreline program manager for The Watershed Project. “So he has students take on the tasks an oyster farmer would perform,” Lim says. “He also emphasizes the connection between good water quality and healthy, delicious oysters. And he explains the different methods of oyster farming in the area.”

Originally published on Grist

Photos: Gwendolyn Meyer, Christopher Lim

The notion that politics only takes place in the voting booth or halls of state basically evaporated in the 1960s. We now know that political acts occur in a range of settings: in our neighborhoods, bedrooms, kitchens, and, yes, even in our gardens.

The use of gardens as a means of social engagement and a forum in which to articulate oppositional ideas is the subject of George McKay’s Radical Gardening: Politics, Idealism, and Rebellion in the Garden. In the work, he chronicles the history of politicized gardens and documents some of the various ways that activists have utilized them to express their views. He hopes that his book will provide “a small corrective to the parochial or suburban or landed versions of garden understanding [by tracing] the strands of idealism, rebellion, political action and social criticism in the garden historically and presently.” His book leaves no doubt that radical gardens have, as he puts it, a “rich and challenging tradition, a significance, as well as a trajectory of energy and import that makes them matter for our future.”

McKay divides his book into three sections that mirror the most common uses of the word “plot.” He looks at gardens as physical “plots” that have been invested with political meaning—places such as London’s Hyde Park, which has been the site of mass protests since the 19th century, as well as gardens in progressive urban planning schemes. He then examines gardens as “plot” elements in narratives about war and peace, rightwing nativism and leftwing liberation: he discusses commemorative, military gardens; quasi-green trends among the Nazis; the employment of particular flowers—such as the white poppy and the Peace Rose—as pacifist symbols; and gardens as places of feminist resistance. Finally, he explores the use of gardens in conspiratorial “plots” designed to challenge authorities, such as the guerrilla gardening campaigns found in cities across the globe and, more specifically, community gardeners’ mobilization against Rudolf Giuliani’s assault on public space in New York City in the 1990s.

McKay begins his survey of each of these dimensions of politicized gardening in the late 19th century, when radical doctrines really took shape and people started thinking about how gardens might (or might not) fit into the picture. He lingers a great deal in the 1960s and then follows events up to the immediate present. Geographically speaking, he focuses primarily on the UK, but makes frequent forays into the United States and continental Europe. His sources are scholarly literature, site visits, and popular media.

The result of his labors is a short, well-researched, fabulously illustrated, trans-national history of radical gardening. The first and only book on this topic, it will surely be the definitive text on it for years to come. Although he addresses rightwing exploits in the garden, his emphasis is overwhelmingly upon progressive, emancipatory gardens—what he playfully designates as the horticountercultural tradition. He manages to extract a vibrant, oppositional history from an activity often construed as the embodiment of suburban domesticity. This transformed my sense of what gardens can be and, in fact, are. His affirmation that even mundane activities can be a vehicle for utopian aspirations led me to regard the book’s publication as a noteworthy event in its own right.

Having said that, a few nuances were missing. While McKay looks at gardens used by radicals for radical purposes, he never actually defines radical gardens or introduces any criteria that would allow us to determine whether one is radical (or reformist or conservative). It is the gardeners’ definition of their own efforts that matters to him, and this is not terribly satisfying. Indeed, I wish he had focused less on gardeners’ declarations of intent and more on how their initiatives challenge or reinforce prevailing land use practices. This might have made his book feel more academic, but what people say about their deeds should be a beginning not an end of analysis.

I also thought he could have placed his subject in a more precise historical context. While it is fair to trace the story back to the late 19th century, the idea of gardens as a form of social intervention is really a product of the 1960s; given this, more information about that period, and the cultural developments that helped produce such a compelling link between gardens and politics, would have enriched the book. Furthermore, I would have welcomed a discussion of the implications of climate change on the future of radical gardens. Whereas earlier generations of activists could champion gardens in an effort to foster ecological sensibilities generally, the need to prioritize the reduction of carbon emissions changes the scenario for gardens in important ways. Some—like Edward Glasser, author of The Triumph of the City—argue against community gardens and assert that urban space should be given over to housing, which will reduce sprawl and, as a result, our carbon footprint. Though one can imagine persuasive counter-arguments, my point is that the circumstances of radical gardening have changed.

Nonetheless, these minor oversights do not diminish the value of McKay’s unusual, engrossing work. Certainly we cannot expect him to cover everything and, even if his book has some shortcomings, he still deserves high praise for authoring a readable, insightful account of politicized gardening. By showing that gardens can be an arena of contest and engagement in which egalitarian (and not-so-egalitarian) values flourish, he demonstrates that they can be much more than a private, suburban pastime and actually a vital element of our participation in the political world.

I’d like to introduce you to CC; he’s 19 years old and he’s a new friend of mine.  About a month ago, my fiancé and I opened a little coffee shop in an old gas station in Santa Cruz, California. Our friend, Fran Grayson, came to us with a vision of collaborating on the idea and now she parks her food truck on-site. Together, we are The Truck Stop and Filling Station. We strive to promote good, honest, and quality food and drink. This is where CC comes in.

In 2009, CC was attending an alternative education high school. Doron Comerchero, director of “Food, What?!”, came to the school one day offering internships. His local program empowers youth through the growing, cooking, and sharing of food. Though CC signed up in order to get out of school early on Fridays, his hooky plan became a serious commitment.

“Doron pulled my ass out of the gutter. It was a really bad year for me,” he recalled in hindsight. That initial 12-week internship led to a “Food, What?!” summer job program in which he was paid to participate. Earning actual money reinforced the value of the life skills he was learning and cooking and catering turned out to be something that CC actually really loved.

The full circle process of growing, harvesting, menu planning, cooking, and presenting “felt like a lot more than a catering job, in a good way,” he said.

Career training and food education aside, CC became a part of a growing community. At a recent benefit for “Food, What?!”, he acknowledged his empowered sense of self and offered a “thank you” to the organization that helped him to “speak [his] mind and speak [his] heart.” To his inspired listeners, he explained, “We grow organic, sustainable vegetables, friendship, trust for a team, [and] the ability to come together, join forces, help each other…”Food, What?!” showed me what a community is and how you can partake in it and contribute to it at the same time.”

CC’s community broadens day by day. After “Food, What?!”, CC went on to do an internship at the Homeless Garden Project during his senior year–an experience which also involved seed to fork education.  Meanwhile, Fran was hatching her plan to finally create a space where food and social change could collide. Working as the head gardener at Life Lab, the umbrella garden education non-profit that holds “Food, What?!”, she strategized her first move. “I never wanted just a food business, I always only wanted a food business that incorporated a social good, work training aspect…It is like I had to get to Life Lab and make the connection before it could naturally move forward.”

CC and Fran crossed paths when Fran approached CC immediately after opening The Truck Stop. Knowing that she needed help, she pitched the idea of collaboration–extra hands for her, an opportunity for career development for him.

“My friendship, and mentorship, and appreciation for CC, have come about over the past two years.  All of the thinking and planning and waiting and watching, all finally came together on this project. It is an amazing experience and I hope to expand on it with more kids, and catering with the kids and the truck, and doing nutrition education,” Fran said. “For now I am fully dedicated to my mentor role and could not have imagined a more perfect mentee. I want this business to be a success so that it can continue to be a vehicle, pun intended, for continued training and mentorship for the kids that have come such a long way, thanks in large part to the incredible work that “Food, What?!” is doing. It is something very special to be a part of.”

Today, CC is waiting to hear back from the Culinary Institute of America at Hyde Park, NY. His love of cooking and food shines through to everyone he meets, including a CIA alumni who happened to enroll in the apprenticeship program at the Center for Agroecology and Sustainable Food Systems at UCSC (where Life Lab and “Food, What?!” co-exist). With a powerful letter of recommendation, CC is keeping his fingers crossed that the full scholarship comes through. To him, culinary school is just another step towards his “ultimate grand vision” to replicate “Food, What?!” in a broader way. “I want to educate kids, adults, old people, everyone, that it’s easy to find out what’s in your food and it’s really easy to make your own food. It’s not hard, you just gotta try a little.”

Photo: Fran Grayson

The U.C. Santa Cruz Farm & Garden Apprenticeship changed my life. In the winter of 2005, I was burning the candle at both ends and burning myself out. I was working too hard, moving too fast, and my doctor had warned me that I was at risk of chronic fatigue. Then, that spring, I found myself living on an organic farm perched above the waters of Monterey Bay.  Before I moved to the farm, my to-do list as an environmental campaigner had been packed with conference calls, protest organizing, and press conferences. After arriving at the farm, my biggest priorities became keeping the onions free of weeds, thinning the young fruits on the apple trees, and waking up early to cook for 35 other aspiring farmers.

The switch blew my mind. As I worked in the fields and the orchards I could suddenly see the myriad interconnections that knit together a farming ecosystem; ecology went from an abstraction to a visceral reality. Perhaps more important, living with a few dozen other industrial society dissidents gave me a new appreciation for the ideals of solidarity and the practice of community. The time I spent at the UCSC Farm & Garden deepened my hope that farming, done right, could help heal a battered environment and perhaps even remedy some of the world’s injustices.

So I was horrified when I learned last month that, due in part to state and federal budget cutbacks, the Apprenticeship in Ecological Horticulture (as it’s formally called) may be forced to double its tuition—a move that would put this invaluable program beyond the reach of many people and set back efforts to educate a new generation of organic farmers.

Founded in 1967 by an eccentric British gardener named Alan Chadwick, the Farm & Garden Apprenticeship is the oldest organic farming education program in the United States. It is one of the few organic farming apprenticeships that combines in-the-fields, hand-on instruction with science-based classroom lectures and also one of the few that provides a certificate upon course completion. Demand for this unique curriculum far outstrips what the Apprenticeship can supply: For the 2011 season the apprenticeship received more than 150 applications for 36 openings.

The Apprenticeship is like a greenhouse for the organic farming movement, a place that (if you’ll excuse the extended metaphor) helps germinate crop after crop of passionate farmers and gardeners. Here in Northern California, the names at the farmers market stands and on the menus of farm-to-table restaurants are like a Who’s Who of Apprenticeship alumni: Dirty Girl Produce, Blue Heron Farm, Freewheelin Farm, Dinner Bell Farm, Pie Ranch, Blue House Farm, and the organic nursery Sunnyside Seedlings are all run by alums. And the ripple effect stretches far beyond California.

In New York City, alum Karen Washington is an instructor at the Farm School NYC. In Missoula, Montana, alum Josh Slotnick runs the innovative PEAS Farm, which combines a stellar CSA with agricultural education for University of Montana undergrads. Jones Valley Farm in Birmingham, Alabama is run by an Apprenticehip alum, as is Persephone Farm in Washington and Full Sun Farm outside of Ashville, North Carolina. For my part, I doubt that I would have the confidence to co-manage San Francisco’s three-acre Alemany Farm were it not for the instruction I received at the Farm & Garden.

Now, the austerity measures sweeping the country are jeopardizing the apprenticeship’s ability to continue its important work.

After a while, the budget battles and debt talks in Washington can come to seem like capital clownery. As a committed progressive, I understand that the debt crisis has been manufactured; the country isn’t “broke” so much as it’s been impoverished by a class of people who have resisted paying their fare share in taxes. Still, even a political junkie like me can start to zone out: The details dissolve into abstractions, and from there into absurdities. But with the announcement of the Farm & Garden tuition increase, I saw the government austerity measures threaten something I intimately care about. And now I’m pissed off.

What’s especially galling about the impending tuition increases is that the Farm & Garden Apprenticeship itself is fiscally solvent and has been for many years. It is suffering now because of how fiscal cutbacks have cascaded down from the federal government, the state government, and the broader University of California system to this one little (but highly effective) program.

The financial details of interlocking institutions are confusing, but here’s the story in brief: The Farm & Garden Apprenticeship is technically housed within the Center for Agroecology and Sustainable Food Systems (CASFS), a research group within UCSC that was founded in 1997. In the last year, the center has lost more than half of its state funding ($167,000), as well as a $335,000 annual U.S. Department of Agriculture grant. To make up for the shortfall, CASFS staff has had to dip into the Apprenticeship coffers. At the same time, the entire UC system is in belt-tightening mode and looking to reduce costs or increase revenues. Suddenly, the Farm & Garden Apprenticeship is being asked to pay more for some of the services it receives from the main UCSC campus.

The upshot? Tuition for the six-month program is expected to increase from $5,300 this year to $12,800 in 2013. Next summer, the tuition will technically be $8,500, though apprentices will pay $6,000 thanks to an anonymous donor who gave a special $100,000 gift to blunt the tuition increase. When I was an assistant instructor at the Farm & Garden in 2006, the tuition was $3,250. If the tuition does increase to $12,800, the admission price for this unique farming curriculum will have nearly quadrupled in just seven years.

And that, say longtime Apprenticeship staff, would be disastrous for efforts to educate a diverse group of farmers and gardeners. “Most of the people who go through this program are working adults, so typically they are not the highest wage earners out there,” said Christof Bernau, who has been an Apprenticeship instructor since 1999.

Bernau himself was an apprentice in 1994 and he worries that few people will be able to pay $12,000 for a six-month program that prepares one for a career in farming, hardly the most lucrative profession. “They come to gain more training, and go back out into a field or profession that by and large is not the highest paying,” he said. “They are giving up their jobs, and if they have a family they have to find a way to support their family while here.… It’s a leap and a commitment to come here.”

Big deal, I can hear the bean counters saying, why should the government be supporting farmer education in the first place?  Well, for starters, because the average age of the American farmer is 57-years-old, and the largest cohort of farmers are 65 and older. Within the next decade this country is going to experience a wave of farmer retirements. We desperately need new growers to fill their places, and the Farm & Garden Apprenticeship has a proven track record of giving people the skills they need to become successful organic farmers.

As Bernau points out, the impending tuition increase is yet another example of how government austerity measures fall hardest on an already struggling middle class. If tuition skyrockets to more than $12,000 a summer, the elite will probably still be able to afford the program, and some half dozen of the poorest applicants will still receive scholarships. But everyone else will be turned off by the high prices, bad news for a sustainable food movement already struggling to shed the image of being the exclusive project of the affluent. “If you keep raising tuition, we are going to be pricing people out,” Bernau told me.

I know I couldn’t have done the program at the $12,000 price. I doubt very much that my buddy Matt McCue, who now runs Shooting Star CSA , could have swung that tuition. McCue had finished a combat tour in Iraq before coming to the Apprenticeship and his Army wages wouldn’t have been enough. Same with Robyn “Rose” Hosey, a working class gal from Pennsylvania who now works at Morning Glory Farm, one of the most successful organic farms in Massachusetts. Thinking about the alternate universe in which Hosey or McCue couldn’t have afforded the Apprenticeship is like imagining the agrarian version of “It’s a Wonderful Life”—only in this case the bastard Mr. Potter triumphs and the world is the worse off for it.

The way Bernau sees it, the tuition increase isn’t just a threat to farming education, but is also an assault on the broader principle of public education. “I believe the cost of education cannot and should not be borne entirely on the students’ backs,” he said. “The cost of educating an apprentice is $13,000 per student per year. So the tuition for 2013 is supposed to be $12,800. Even at elite, private universities, the full costs of education are not borne by the students. And certainly at a public institution there is a public role and a public responsibility to bear some of those costs, because the benefits from that education are accrued by all of society.”

In the case of the Apprenticeship education, the benefit is obvious and tangible: Real food, grown by people with a commitment to environmental stewardship and social justice. For more than 40 years, Apprenticeship alumni have been at the forefront of the movement to create sustainable food systems. Surely that’s a public good, one that deserves to be supported by the public purse.

Click here to make a donation to support the farmer education at UCSC.

Photo 1: Carolyn Lagattuta, Photo 2: Courtesy of UCSC

Imagine our cities filled with fruit trees and I don’t mean fruit trees planted by the side of the road dropping fruit on your car once they’re overripe.  I mean fruit trees planted in civic spaces—schools, hospitals, parks, businesses, houses of worship, and more.

Imagine communities coming together to care for their trees, to harvest and share their fruit. These trees become a tool of environmental restoration, helping to restore the health of our soil, improve air quality, and absorb rainwater runoff. From them we learn, participate, and connect to the social and natural world around us. This is the vision of the Boston Tree Party.

At its core, the Boston Tree Party is a diverse coalition of organizations, institutions, and communities coming together in support of civic fruit. We’re calling for the planting of fruit trees in civic spaces and we’re promoting the fruits of civic engagement.

Planting the first apple tree at the East Boston Neighborhood Health Center Community Garden

Over the past three months since our launch on April 10, 2011, more than 50 communities from all over greater Boston have come together to form delegations and plant pairs of heirloom apple trees all over the city. Many of these delegations were partnerships of two or more groups, and each delegation received a tree planting kit with everything they needed to plant and grow two glorious apple trees. To support these communities we’ve created the Apple Alliance and the Apple Corps. The Apple Alliance, a partnership between several Boston based gardening education organizations, will work together with our official Pomologists, John Bunker and Michael Phillips, to offer free and low-cost holistic apple tree care workshops starting next spring. The Apple Corps, a youth corps developed in partnership with YouthBuild Boston, will operate as an extension service of sorts, offering advice and support to participating delegations.

In East Boston, the East Boston Neighborhood Health Center started a new community garden on top of an abandoned parking lot. They broke through the concrete to plant their trees. They used their tree party to inaugurate this new community effort.

In Somerville, an environmental education organization, a city public health initiative, and a community environmental group came together to do their planting at the Blessing of the Bay Boathouse Park on the banks of the Mystic River. Though the scene was quite idyllic, the Mystic River is one of the most polluted in Massachusetts. Their planting party was part of their larger effort to restore the environmental and community health of this neighborhood and the city of Somerville.

In Cambridge, a public Elementary school partnered with a gardening education organization, an after-school program, and the Cambridge Plant and Garden Club to do their planting. Their planting party featured apple games, apple treats, and a study of apple biology and ecology.

In Dorchester, a low-income housing community for grandparents raising grandchildren partnered with a youth development organization, a community development corporation, and the Boston Architectural college to restore and renovate a community garden that had become neglected and dilapidated. They used their party to mark this new beginning.

But why did we choose to plant apples in the first place?

We’ve long been taught that “an apple a day keeps the doctor away” but there’s a very interesting historical connection between the history of Boston and the history of apples, which makes the planting of these trees even more relevant to our landscape. The first apple orchard in the United States was planted on Beacon Hill by the first European settler, William Blackstone. The oldest named variety of apple in the United States — the Roxbury Russet — was developed in Roxbury in the 1630s.

When we plant heirloom varieties around our city, we re-contextualize our history by bringing diverse types of the fruit back into our marketplace. At peak apple production in the United States during the 19th century, there were over 15,000 named varieties of apples that were eaten and sold. Today, 40 percent of commercial market is dominated the Red Delicious apple (the classic cafeteria apple) and a mere 10 other varieties make it to our grocery shelves. Like the apple’s inability to bear fruit without a heterogeneous partner to cross-pollinate with, we know our project requires communal action: We can’t produce fruit alone, or with others just like ourselves. We must cross-pollinate, care for our harvest, and develop a relationship with our natural landscape over time.

In about four years, these newly planted apple trees will collectively start to produce between 10 and 15,000 free apples every year. These trees can live anywhere from 50-100 years, which means a lot of free apples for the city of Boston.

Over two hundred years ago, a small group of people dumped a whole bunch of tea into Boston Harbor and made a big splash. This performative and symbolic act helped to launch the movement for American Independence. With our symbolic planting, we hope to help launch a new movement—a movement that works across boundaries to make fresh healthy food accessible to all, a movement which greens our cities, a movement that spreads fruit trees in civic spaces all across the country, and a movement which cares for these trees and the well-being of all citizens. That’s our imagined vision and we’re well on our way.

Watch Lisa Gross talk about civic fruit at TEDxBoston:

Photos: (1) Lisa Gross and Shea Cadrin, (2) Lisa Gross

In this era when consumers want to know how many “food miles” their carrots traveled and restaurant menus list the distance from farm to fork, restaurant owners are increasingly putting in their own farms on rooftops, abandoned lots and nearby agricultural plots.

The trend has caught on with high-end, Michelin-starred restaurants in California such as The French Laundry in Napa and Manresa in Los Gatos as well as more casual places, such as Pauline’s Pizzeria in San Francisco and the Fremont Diner in Sonoma.

The growing number of restaurant farms is welcome news to new farmers like Rose Robertson, 28, who, like many new farmers, is trained but without a plot of land to call her own. After interning for a year at a farm in Santa Barbara, Robertson knew she wanted to farm but also knew she did not want to be a cog in a large-scale farming operation. She worried that at a big farm, workers like her would end up, “spending your whole day picking beans,” she said.

She found a job managing the one and a half-acre garden at Ubuntu, a high-end vegetarian restaurant in Napa. The owners and staff of Ubuntu describe the garden as the heart of the restaurant, not just a side project. In the summer months up to 90 percent of the produce served comes from its garden.

“The chef says he’s not the chef,” said Robertson. “That the gardeners are growing the food that dictates the menu.”

Ubuntu’s owner, Sandy Lawrence, set out to create that dynamic, and says the importance of hyper-fresh produce is heightened because the restaurant is vegetarian. With the increasing number of young people flocking to agricultural training programs and farming internships, Lawrence never worried about finding eager farmers to employ.

“The reason we’ve been so confident is we’ve always had loads of young people who want to work,” she said. In addition to Robertson, another full time gardener and two part time workers, the garden has an internship program that attracts a constant stream of willing volunteers.

The trend represents a different kind of job opportunity for young people trying to break into agriculture in regions like the Bay Area, where land prices are prohibitively high. The average plot of cropland in California sold for about $9,000 an acre in 2010, according to USDA data, compared to about $4,000 an acre in Iowa, or $800 an acre in Montana, the cheapest state. Prices can go much higher in the Bay Area, though–a plot currently for sale in Sebastopol, Sonoma County is priced at about $21,000 per acre.

American farmers are getting old–in 2007, the average age of a farmer was 58, compared to 39 in 1945. Between 2002 and 2007, the number of farmers under 45 decreased by 21 percent. Still, in recent years, more young people have shown interest in farming and policy makers are working to recruit and incentivize new farmers. The latest version of the Farm Bill allocated $18 million for training new farmers.

Several Bay Area farms offer apprenticeships and internships for new farmers, mostly based around organic or biodynamic methods. But it is still difficult for many of the young people who complete the programs to get a paid job farming when they finish, which makes restaurant farms an appealing option to some.

Misja Nuyttens, 30, was an intern at Green String Farm in Petaluma and recently took a job starting a farm for the restaurant Central Market, also in Petaluma.

She says the experience of starting a farm from scratch has been invaluable. It’s not uncommon for beginning farmers such as Nuyttens to hold multiple jobs or look for non-traditional ways to use their farming skills. Samantha Langevin runs the internship program at Hidden Villa farm and education center in the Los Altos hills. She says she encourages interns to think about taking a diversified approach to their careers.

“The trend we’re seeing is young farmers, in addition to farmers markets, they might be selling to restaurants, they might be offering a CSA program, they might be working with a local school, whether that’s elementary to university, to offer programming on-site, they might be working with other community organizations that are looking to purchase food,” says Langevin.

Managing a restaurant garden lets farmers try out running a farm without having to take on debt or over-commit. And for restaurants, being ultra-local and having control over access to produce gives the chef flexibility. Robertson, the manager of Ubuntu’s garden, says the chef likes being able to harvest vegetables at any stage of growth. He also sometimes uses parts of the plant which are edible but often aren’t traditionally sold, such as carrot tops and beet stems. And he has Robertson grow plants that are difficult or impossible to find in the marketplace, including an edible ice plant with a lemony taste called ficoide glaciale.

Misja Nuyttens says part of the motivation for the chef and owner at Central Market restaurant to start his own garden was to be able to serve produce at its absolute freshest. Even when he purchased from farms only a few miles away, the produce would often go through a distributer that trucked items all over the Bay Area before getting to his kitchen.

Starting a dedicated garden might not always be profitable for restaurants. Lawrence says Ubuntu’s garden is sustaining itself by providing produce to the restaurant, but it helps that most of the land is on the owner’s property. Similarly, the owners of the Farmhouse Inn in Forestville, Sonoma use their own land for their garden, and have set up a share-cropping arrangement with a farmer to make it affordable. Co-owner Catherine Bartolomei says the garden could probably be more profitable if she wanted it to be, but that the larger goal is to adhere to the business’s eating philosophy.

While more and more restaurants are finding ways to make it work, putting in a garden is not a business move that would make sense for every eatery.

Providing boutique vegetables for high-end diners also might not be the philosophical goal for many of the area’s young farmers, although Nuyttens does find connection to a greater cause in her work with the Central Market garden.

“It is a bridge to increasing awareness about the benefits of food grown this way,” said Nuyttens. Restaurant farms, she says, provide, “a springboard for this movement, allowing a new generation of natural process farmers to get established.”

Above, Oxheart carrots grown in Ubuntu’s garden. Photo: Rose Robertson. Below, Ubuntu restaurant’s chefs standing in the garden. Photo: Karen Mann.

This post is part of an ongoing partnership between Civil Eats and the UC Berkeley Graduate School of Journalism News21 course on food reporting.

I buy local and organic food as much as possible, but find that not only do I have to force myself to eat vegetables, but I lack enough ways to cook them besides the handy but boring steaming and stir frying. Many farmers’ market patrons and Community Supported Agriculture (CSA) members have a similar problem. However, Basics with a Twist (available here), by Kim Sanwald, has truly inspired me to transform my own cooking with the same zeal and enthusiasm as blogger and author Julie Powell had when she cooked her way through Julia Child’s classic, Mastering the Art of French Cooking.

As a truck farmer at Brickyard Farms in southwestern Michigan, Sanwald and her partner, Valerie Lane, grow 17 varieties of tomatoes, seven varieties of potatoes, hard garlic, three varieties of beets, seven varieties of carrots as well as different greens including collards, kale, Swiss chard, and spinach.

The five-and-a-half acre farm’s success is attributable to the production of fresh, flavorful vegetables grown in good clay soil that has “some amazing minerals” to enhance their “shocking taste.”  This is all done without chemicals or sprays, although the farm is not certified organic.

Last year Sanwald and Lane grew 4,800 tomatoes from 1,500 plants and from 650 seed potatoes, they harvested 7,000 pounds.  Their market customers couldn’t get enough!

In the book, Sanwald takes readers through the growing season by focusing on the farm’s most popular vegetables: Garlic, tomatoes, potatoes, carrots, and beets. She provides tried and true recipes for salads, soups, stews, sauces, dressings, casseroles, and side dishes that go well with various meats. They make your mouth water just reading them.

But the book is more than a cookbook. It is also a memoir of Sanwald’s complete change of life after 36 years as a manager of a dental office in the city to become a truck farmer–a farmer growing a diverse range of vegetables on a small scale, often sold from truck to consumers or to restaurants–in rural Cloverdale.

Sanwald first started working on the farm in 2007 when she and a group of friends came to Lane’s aid after her partner, Cate Burke, had died unexpectedly from a blood clot at age 46.  Lane had purchased the farm in 2001 after leaving a career as a building and remodeling contractor.

Being close to the land and close to her source of food awakened something in Sanwald despite the fact that the work is hard and dirty and the days are long.

One day as she was harvesting kale she suddenly broke down in tears realizing that she was connecting to the earth in a deeply spiritual way.

“I’m home,” she said.  “I felt like I had arrived.”

Doing what others encouraged or expected her to do had made her unhappy and depressed through most of her life. She found happiness, however, by growing food. Today, she said she rejects hair coloring, make-up and stylish clothes, things that once held great importance for her.  She has also reduced her weight by 30 pounds and two dress sizes.

“I feel better,” she said, “And the better I feel, the more I want to do this work.”

Basics with a Twist shows readers what can happen to a person through greater attention to food.  Ever the cook, Sanwald expresses her appreciation for the aesthetic pleasures of food that is flavorful, healthy, homegrown, home-cooked—and shared with others around a table.

The whole project came about because Sanwald found herself giving out hundreds of recipes to customers at the Fulton Street Farmers’ Market in Grand Rapids, where Brickyard Farms is a vendor. Lane suggested she put the recipes together in a book, however, Sanwald was anxious to write about what her new life as a truck farmer meant to her.

“The book is a validation of who we are and who I am,” she said. “I love to write and cook. It’s my creative outlet and this book stretched me and my learning process. By combining both of these things, I am able to help others as well.”

She has plans to write a second book that encourages people to grow their own gardens.

The book also includes a resource list for people looking for information about self-sustaining and organic methods of farming and gardening as well as commentaries on the local food movement and environmental issues.

A version of this piece was originally published on olgabonfiglio.blogspot.com