Civil Eats

All across the nation people are converting their front and backyards, vacant lots, and other spaces into thriving and productive food gardens. To help encourage new gardeners along this verdant path, The 350 Garden Challenge will bring thousands together over a a single weekend, May 15-16, to transform 350+ Sonoma County landscapes into bountiful gardens. The goal is to save water, link local food production and carbon savings, grow food and habitat, promote greywater, and encourage lawn to food transformations. The project is inspired in part by the 350.org international campaign to find and implement solutions to climate change. Read More

Thanks to Michelle Obama, there is finally going to be a bona fide – and fairly expansive – organic fruit and vegetable garden at the White House! Read More

For those of you who’ve spent the last year living in a cave, environmentalists and food fighters have been talking incessantly about pushing our next president to plant a garden on the White House lawn. But this is not just so that Obama has an endless supply of arugula. Read More

This Saturday, November 22 at noon, San Francisco Bay Area residents will gather for an Eat-In at the Slow Food Nation Victory Garden in front of San Francisco City Hall. An Eat-In is a group of people gathering in a public space in order to share a meal. This Eat-In serves to bring local residents together to discuss how we ensure that everyone has access to good, clean and fair food. It is free of cost and open to the first 200 who register at http://slowfoodnation.org/get-involved/community-days-in-the-victory-garden/ Read More

The election is over, and it’s time to think about the future. Glass ceilings have been shattered, and all sorts of barriers we thought existed have disappeared. I’ve got gardening on my mind…it seems even more important now. Read More

In fifteen days, Americans will make an important decision: who will take the reigns and get us out of this mess.  One topic the candidates have mostly left out of their speeches on the campaign trail thus far is food.  Whether they realize it or not, when either John McCain or Barack Obama sit down next January to begin the task of fixing our economy, to promote green energy in order to produce the jobs they’ve both promised, and to deal with the climate crisis and health care, food will be the unavoidable issue that keeps cropping up. Read More

This Saturday, October 18, from 11am to 3pm, Slow Food Nation is hosting activities and workshops for kids and adults on how to grow food in San Francisco. The morning features hands-on educational garden activities for kids, including a puppet show on nutrition; the afternoon features short workshops on urban farming and a performance by the Brass Liberation Orchestra. Parents, bring your kids! Read More

As the sun sets on the fourth and final day of Slow Food Nation, we’re thrilled to announce that the Slow Food Nation Victory Garden will remain in place on the lawn of San Francisco City Hall until November. The garden, which has been producing substantial amounts of fresh produce and supplied some of the food for this weekend’s events, has received tremendous support from Mayor Gavin Newsom and the city. Most everyone who has come down to witness the beauty and bounty of the garden has voiced their desires to see this project become a permanent symbol of San Francisco’s progressive position on food, farming, and social justice. Read More

This coming Saturday, August 16, in the Slow Food Nation Victory Garden, the city of San Francisco is organizing a Community Day for residents of the Bay Area to come together around food, gardening, and the power of local communities working together to improve the city.

Daniel Homsey, program manager for the Neighborhood Empowerment Network (NEN), has his finger on the pulse of neighborhood organizations and community events around the city. “We are hoping community members from the all corners of the City, from the Outer Richmond avenues to the Bayview, will come out and participate in this exciting day full of puppet shows, carnival games, and tours of the Slow Food Nation Victory Garden,” says Homsey.

Residents will have the opportunity to tour the gardens and hear the garden managers explain why they chose certain vegetables for the SF Victory Garden and how the growth of the gardens is progressing. The Sustainability Road Show will be there with their Sustainability Resource Fair, complete with puppets and a carnival show. The fun-filled day will offer San Franciscans a chance to learn more about the city’s edible demonstration garden and to take part in this project that promotes healthy local food and shows the community some different ways to live a more environmentally sustainable life.

The Community Day is being put on in partnership with the SF Victory Garden Project, Slow Food Nation, the Sustainable Living Roadshow, and the Neighborhood Empowerment Network; along with the city of San Francisco and its partners, Garden for the Environment, Department for the Environment, Department of Health, Mayor’s Office of Neighborhood Services, Norcal, San Francisco Department of Recreation and Park, and the Public Utilities Commission.

Photo by Daniel Homsey

Amy Franceschini is the founder of Victory Gardens 2008+ as well as the web-based collectives Futurefarmers and Free-Soil, where she contributes her talents as a multi-media artist to conceptual projects designed to raise awareness on sustainable living and inspire inquiry and innovation. Amy seeks to engage people of diverse disciplines in a spirited dialogue about lessening our impact on the earth through encouraging us to focus on nurturing our creative energies and thus allowing for the cross-pollination of ideas. She is also currently a professor of art at Stanford University and the San Francisco Institute of Art. Her work has been shown in exhibitions at the SFMOMA, the MOMA and Whitney museums of New York, as well as internationally in the ZKM Center for Art and Media in Karlsruhe, Germany. Read More

After 10 days of incredible action—sod removal, bed and ground preparation, installation of irrigation lines and fencing, the building of a fantastic soap box—the lawn in front of San Francisco’s City Hall was transformed into the Slow Food Nation Victory Garden. It was a perfect planting day as 150 volunteers helped moved nearly 4,000 plants into their new homes. Teams divided into zones with their leaders and peacefully planted lettuce, tomatoes, beans, herbs, flowers and so much more. Good thoughts and prayers (including those from the next-door religious meeting) were had by all. Together, we built a “garden of communities,” as Victory Garden Manager John Bela calls it. Bela and Willow Rosenthal, founder of City Slicker Farms, in West Oakland, where the seedlings were started, joined Slow Food Nation Executive Director Anya Fernald and Founder Alice Waters to welcome Mayor Gavin Newsom to the garden. Read More

As the founder of City Slicker Farms, a non-profit urban agriculture organization in West Oakland, my mission in life has been to bring “slow food” to the least served. Ten years ago as an aspiring farmer it didn’t seem exciting to me to grow more beautiful specialty vegetables for rich people. I didn’t think it was fair that good food was limited to those who could pay farmer’s market prices. At City Slicker Farms we have developed ways to subsidize the price of the organic foods we grow so that we can offer sliding-scale prices and free organic backyard gardens to those who lack funds. Read More

Another tremendous group of volunteers came out today to continue to make final installations for the Slow Food Nation Victory Garden. A huge thanks goes out to Carol Brewer, Linda Trunzo, Carter McRee, Monica Scott, Maximiliian Godino, Ashley Miller, Claire Kellerman (Maui Permaculture Network), Shilpa Kumar, Bill Mohler, Christine Choi, Crystal Choi, Crystal Garcia and Lyn Spataro. Read More

The bright orange sun poked up enough to reflect off the Civic Center as Victory Garden Manager John Bela walked into the emerging landscape to think about work for the day. The large and small circular beds give a hint of how people will walk among the plants, seeing up close how air, water and seeds collaborate to make food. John said that the transformation of this prime bit of real estate from grassy meeting area to vegetable garden has transformed him as well. “I can’t believe how much these wonderful, energetic volunteers have done in such a short time,” he said, as briefcase-carrying office employees strode purposefully past the garden, avoiding energetic exercising folks and others down on their luck. Read More

With four days left until the July 12 Community Planting Day, nearly 20 young adults from Friends of the Urban Forest’s (FUF) Youth Tree Care Program joined John Bela and 10 other volunteers to continue work on the garden. According to its web site, the Friends of the Urban Forest’s Youth Tree Care Program “trains economically disadvantaged youth in planting and tree care, encourages young people to engage with their communities and introduces them to careers in urban forestry.” Read More

Progress continued yesterday at the Slow Food Nation Victory Garden , as volunteers built raised beds, creating concentric circles in the soil to prepare the beds for planting. The crew also started raking out the stone ground covering, donated by Lynsgo Garden Materials. Read More

Sunday brought beautiful weather to Civic Center Plaza for the 13 amazing volunteers who spent their days off moving piles of chocolate-cake soil into the circular raised beds that make up the design of the Slow Food Nation Victory Garden. Read More

After a foggy, windy 4th of July, the sun came back out in time for the Victory Garden crew to resume preparations in front of City Hall. I walked down mid-day and found manager, John Bela, and his colleague Blaine Merker reviewing the drawings for the circular garden plots that will soon be laid out in the 10,000 square foot rectangular space.
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It was a glorious day in San Francisco today—perfect weather for garden manager John Bela and his dedicated team of volunteers to charge full steam into the next phase of Victory Garden installation in front of City Hall. Today’s team of voluntary green thumbs included a large group from the Presidio Native Plant Nursery, as well as many passionate community members who chose to dedicate their free time to food and gardening. Read More

Day 2 of the Slow Food Nation Victory Garden installation brought some amazing volunteers down to the Civic Center to dig up the rest of the sod. We were blessed today by the brawn and dedication of Rachel Alschuler, Molly Copans, Eric Danch, Luke Hass, Nikki Lennart, Blaine Merker, Karen Nemsick, Matthew Roth, Jeny Smith, Monica Via Rengo and Kathy Ziccardi. Read More

With the freezing summer fog whirling around us, Slow Food Nation Victory Garden Manager John Bela and his team began the installation of the city’s first edible garden in front of City Hall in 65 years. Read More

This morning in San Francisco, the Slow Food Nation Victory Garden broke ground, marking an important milestone in the city’s progress towards becoming a model for government-supported community projects and civic engagement. Read More