Slow Food Nation '08

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.

“By all accounts, this has been a wonderful installation for the city and has been a highly visible demonstration of our commitment to the issues embodied in how our food system operates,” said Mayor Newsom. “From protecting the environment, to supporting our local and regional economy, to ensuring we can provide access to wholesome, nutritious food for all San Franciscans, the Victory Garden has given us a powerful platform from which to make the case for more good, clean and fair food in this country.”

If you haven’t visited the garden yet, please do! The corn is high, the squash are mature, and the California native wildflowers are in full bloom.

Images: jrodmanjr and Sarah Rich

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

Lauren Mendez is working closely with Roots of Change in planning Changemakers Day, as well as developing and implementing Slow Food Nations strategy to include a diverse yet aligned representation of the non profit community, whose work addresses the current issues around food justice, sustainable agriculture, health, and education.

Chef Calvin Blake holds the huge, deep green, red-veined leaves up to his nose and breathes in their pungent, sassy aroma. “That smells so good—so fresh!” he exclaims, adding the bags of Giant Red Mustard leaves to his cart. “These are going to be great in salads.”

Calvin isn’t shopping for one of San Francisco’s renowned restaurants, but for the Salvation Army Meals Program, which operates meal sites and delivers hot lunches to people who are homebound.

He isn’t shopping at a restaurant wholesaler, either; he’s at the San Francisco Food Bank, which has just started receiving the yield from Slow Food Nation’s Victory Garden.

“It’s great that this was grown right here in San Francisco,” Calvin says when he learns of the produce’s origins.

Leafy greens are harvested on Monday mornings by Victory Garden volunteers, then picked up by a Food Bank truck as it makes its rounds collecting and delivering food. The produce travels to the Food Bank’s warehouse, where it’s made available to more than 600 agencies that rely on Food Bank supplies to serve San Francisco’s 150,000 hungry citizens.

For a city that seems to overflow with good food, hunger is actually a serious problem here—1 in 4 children, 1 in 3 seniors, and 1 in 5 adults are unsure of where their next meal will come from. Every day, the San Francisco Food Bank sources, collects, sorts, inspects and repackages thousands of pounds of food, then distributes it to soup kitchens, senior centers, school programs and nearly 200 grocery pantries throughout the city. Thanks to Chef Calvin’s keen eye for greens, his clients are the lucky ones who get this week’s Victory Garden bounty. He already has plans for the spicy leaves. “I’m going to slice it thin, like for slaw, and mix it with other salad greens,” he says, adding, “I love being able to work with fresh produce.”

He stacks six cases of fresh bell peppers on his cart. These aren’t from the Victory Garden, however (the pepper harvest is a few weeks away); they are the result of an innovative program called Farm to Family, which enabled the San Francisco Food Bank to distribute 15 million pounds of fresh produce last year to low-income families.

California food banks work with growers and packers to collect surplus crops and culls—blemished or off-sized items that don’t meet grocery store standards, but still taste just fine. That means people who couldn’t dream of affording, say, a fresh orange, might actually get to enjoy one. It also means that food which might otherwise go to waste becomes an important part of the food system.

Calvin says that many clients served by the Salvation Army program are homebound Seniors. “I send out meals to about 120 people in their homes,” he explains, “I don’t want to just feed people; I want them to enjoy what they eat. Produce like this really makes a difference.”

Thanks to the generous donations from individuals, companies and groups like Slow Food, the San Francisco Food Bank was able to distribute 31 million pounds of food to the hungry last year—enough for 66,000 meals every day. To learn more or arrange for a tour, visit www.SFFoodBank.org.

Photos by Kei Hoshino and Jeremy Toeman

Gayle Keck does media relations and marketing for the San Francisco Food Bank, which last year collected, sorted, inspected, repackaged and then delivered 31 million pounds of food to the hungry in San Francisco.

There’s an awful lot of b.s. being spread in this election year–thankfully, some of it’s actually being put to good use growing delicious, nutritious fruits and vegetables. The rising cost of food and gas is fueling a grassroots movement to uproot our grass and grow our own food instead. Once, throwing tomatoes was a form of protest. Now, growing tomatoes is the way to just say no to the status quo. Isn’t that a sad sign of the times?

If only we had a commander-in-chief who called on us to grow our own crops, instead of to shop! It sounds implausible now, but there was a time when our government actually encouraged us to get off our cans and get canning. The current administration is famously reluctant to encourage preserving of any kind, be it sweet or savory.

A couple of generations ago, our government championed home food gardening as a civic duty, a way for average Americans to help ease the food shortages we suffered during World War II. And the campaign worked; in 1943, we managed to grow 40 percent of the vegetables we ate in the U.S.

Our nation’s last energy crisis drove us into the dirt, too; in 1975, “49 percent of U.S. households were growing vegetables,” as Bruce Butterfield, the National Gardening Association’s market research director, told the Washington Post recently.

So as our current war drags on and gas prices rise, it’s no surprise that Americans are once again flocking to their local garden centers, snapping up seedlings, and supplanting Bermuda grass with Bermuda onions. But this time, we’re doing it without the inducement of any pro-produce propaganda from the White House. The folks at the helm of our sinking economy are too busy backing the lenders to rally the back-to-the-landers.

The call to tear out your turf and grow turnips comes, instead, from humble homegrown heroes like Roger Doiron, founder of Kitchen Gardeners International and the creative force–and face–of the Eat The View campaign to launch a new generation of Victory Gardens, starting with the White House lawn (see Roger’s latest YouTube opus, This Lawn is Your Lawn, at the top of this post.)

Alice Waters famously tried to persuade President Clinton to install a kitchen garden and compost pile on the White House grounds. If only she had succeeded–the Clinton legacy might be burnished with black gold instead of tarnished by dirt. But Waters, undaunted, continues to spearhead–along with Doiron and a small army of trowel-wielding terroirists –a visionary agrarian platform I call YIMBY-ism; the Yes, In My Back Yard! movement. Waters has helped created a stellar example in her own backyard by marshalling the forces that recently transformed the lawn in front of San Francisco’s City Hall into the Slow Food Nation Victory Garden. It’s a blueprint for greener grounds all around us, and a recipe for true energy independence. Calories, after all, are just another unit of energy. Grow your own, and you’re on the road to self-sufficiency. The Path to Freedom lies through the garden. So let’s get this presidential campaign out of the gutter and into the dirt!

Kerry Trueman is the co-founder of EatingLiberally.org, a netroots website & organization that advocates sustainable agriculture, progressive politics and a less-consumption driven way of life. A farmers’ market fanatic & edible landscaping enthusiast based in NYC’s West Village and the Hudson River Valley, she blogs regularly at Eating Liberally, Huffington Post, Air America, Retrovore and Open Left.

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.

Emily Callahan: Was the idea for Victory Gardens 2008 inspired by the historical Victory Gardens that American communities planted in response to food shortages during WWII or did the idea for more sustainable gardens come first and the name seem to be a great parallel in terms of communities taking charge of their destiny?

Amy Franceschini: The idea was a culmination of many concerns, but upon learning of the historical vg program a continuum of ideas were galvanized into VG 2008+–

I first became aware of the WWII Victory Garden program in Laura Lawson’s City Bountiful: A History of Community Gardening in America. This effort was initiated in 1941 by the Office of Civilian Defense in cooperation with the Department of Agriculture. Through a National Garden conference a Guide for Planning the Local Victory Garden Program was produced and distributed to cities across the country. Between 1941 and 1943 there were 20 million Victory Gardens and 41% of our total food was being produced in Victory Gardens.

This image of 20 million gardens being planted within two years gave me the fuel to imagine a new program with a focus on contemporary food issues. My intentions were set to revive not only a city-supported gardening program, but a personal revival to get politicized and radicalized about the current food crisis. I am an idealist and I believe that the government is the PEOPLE and was designed to reflect, represent and support the needs of the PEOPLE. This country has lost touch with what that means and in my mind participation is a big part of making this big list of ingredients and cooks into an amazing potluck. More and more, businesses and corporations control “public policy” and have the power and autonomy to develop sustainable systems/products. The homogenizing effect has resulted in loss of the decentralized decision-making made at a local level. Despite the conservative tendencies on a national level, San Francisco city has been successful in moving the progressive movement forward on many fronts. It inspired me to think about the city as a place where progressive ideas can take root.

EC: The kick-off to the Slow Food Nation event here in San Francisco is the planting of an edible ornamental Victory Garden at City Hall whose produce will be donated to local food banks at the end of the summer. What is your artistic vision for this? What do you hope people internalize when they see the garden?

AF: There are two crucial points that should be inherent in the project:

1. City hall/Civic Center should be a place where city politics are visualized, demonstrated, and played out. If the city is supporting urban agriculture, of course there should be a garden in front of city hall demonstrating what they support. Civic center should be an external portrait of what is going on inside and throughout the city.

2. The garden should also highlight the efforts of current garden/urban agriculture practitioners in the community. There is a long-standing movement in the bay area that needs to be honored. The garden should serve as an invitation to meet and witness the practices of these garden organizations. Further it should be a stepping-stone to the home sites of these organizations. The civic center garden should be a place to educate, inspire and trigger participation beyond this central location.

EC: In addition to the Victory Garden planted at City Hall, your organization plans to work with San Francisco residents to plant 15 unique gardens that represent what’s possible for urban dwellers in this microclimate. What makes this challenging besides space constraints?

AF: The biggest challenge is continued participation. This will require education and a systemic approach.

EC: You’ve planted three victory gardens already with the help of the Garden for the Environment. Where are they and can they be viewed by the public?

AF: All three gardens were planted in private residences. The first garden was in the inner Richmond district, the second in the Sunset and the third in Bayview Hunters Point. The gardens can be viewed by appointment only. The Sunset House can be visited by appointment and the Bayview project is a public space.

EC: Do you have any formal education in horticulture? Do you have your own garden?

AF: I have no “formal” training, although my parents were both farmers. My father farmed over 4000 acres in the San Joaquin valley and my mother had a small, organic farm in San Luis Obispo. I was very involved in food politics through their practice whether it was fighting over water rights or canvassing to neighbors to demand farmer to stop using Malathyon within city limits of Oceano, California. I only have an herb garden, figs and a lemon trees. I have a very small space for growing and have the good Fortune of having Rainbow Grocery three blocks away.

EC: What do you envision for the future of Victory Gardens in San Francisco? Will there be any effort to reclaim land in Golden Gate Park where 800 victory gardens were planted back in the 1940s?

AF: The future of Victory Gardens will be a confident and educated public of food producers! I envision a city program that will support cultivation of public lands; schools, parks, surplus lands. This will entail a larger educational/training component. Our dream is to Reclaim the land across the street from the Garden for the Environment (GFE). To use this to expand the already successful, booming programming and training at the GFE.

EC: When you look back at the history of the Victory Gardens during WWII times, do you think the same kind of support will be engendered by your effort? In your opinion, what does “victory” mean during these times?

AF: I purposefully kept this name to bring up the historical context as it relates to a not so different ethos of today. That said, I wanted to use this as an opportunity to explore the notion of reclamation and redefining of an idea / program. Conceptually, it provokes an idea that we cannot keep thinking in terms of “new” ideas. We need to look to past models and build upon them – adopt relevant concerns; conservation, education, land use, urban agriculture and nutrition etc. and apply them to our current political reality.

What do we want to be cultivating as urban farmers today? As you are well aware, “Victory,” for the WWI and WWII Victory Garden programs was “winning the war.” Winning the war by growing more food at home so that the nation could send more food overseas to support the war effort.

“Victory” for the Victory Garden 2008 program is independence from a food system whose values we do not support. “Victory” for the Victory Garden program is reducing the food miles associated with the average American meal by growing more food locally. “Victory” is building an alternative to the American industrial food system, which we view as injurious to ourselves, and to the planet. In this way we redefine Victory within the pressing context of urban sustainability, while building upon the previously successful Victory Garden model.

I had my reservations about keeping the name Victory Gardens, but it is something that people across a wide spectrum understand. If we are going to truly cultivate a large-scale food revolution it must be popular. The name gives us a chance to discuss gardening in a time of war. The problematics inherent in the title opens up space for conversation, like this one! If it were called “Happy Gardens” like one city official proposed, maybe we would be denying ourselves from looking at some of the darker realities associated with food policy.

Emily Callahan is an elementary school teacher in San Francisco whose first love is food then writing. She is very excited to be a contributor to Slow Food Nation this summer.

Photo courtesy of Victory Gardens 2007+

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.

The Mayor and Alice planted lettuce together in the garden and each spoke of the need for a sustainable food system, with the Victory Garden being just the first step to creating a national goal of making fresh, local food available to everyone. With an emphasis on good food being a universal birthright, they championed the myriad individuals, organizations and City departments involved in making the Slow Food Nation Victory Garden possible, and called for continued leadership and stewardship for such programs.

The day was glorious in its simplicity: take an urban plot of land and make it green. Meet your neighbor and do good. Grow food for people in need. These are all part of the vision and mission of Slow Food Nation to bring good, clean and fair food to all. Come join us this summer at the Victory Garden and at Slow Food Nation.

We are extremely grateful to our partners on this project:

Garden for the Environment’s Victory Gardens 2008+ Program, CMG Landscape Architecture, City Slicker Farms and Seeds of Change;

The Mayor’s Office, the Department of Public Works, the Department of the Environment, the Department of Recreation and Parks and Norcal Waste Management;

Lyngso Garden Materials, Earth Savers, Bountiful Gardens, Cole Hardware and Demeter USA;

Food & Water Watch, the Presidio Native Plant Nursery, The Presidio Trust, Alemany Farm, Friends of the Urban Forest, Ploughshares Nursery, the Urban Permaculture Guild and the San Francisco Food Bank;

S.F. Beautiful and New Resource Bank;

Katrina Heron, our Board Chair, who has shown enormous leadership – and was the first to have vision of creating the Victory Garden in Civic Center plaza;

Whole Foods Market, lead partner of the Victory Garden, which provided us with a delicious Victory Garden planting breakfast;

Bon Appetite Management Company, which prepared an outstanding and beautiful lunch for nearly 200 people on Civic Center plaza, and whose Google Café prepared lunch for hundreds of volunteers over the 10 day installation period;

Sunset Magazine, lead Media Partner of the Victory Garden;

And last, but not at all least, the countless hours spent by volunteers, including Slow Food Nation staff, on creating a vital, living and breathing garden in the center of San Francisco.

Photos by Scott Chernis

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.

We have been blessed to be a co-creator, along with Garden For the Environment’s Victory Garden Program and Slow Food Nation, of the San Francisco Victory Garden being built as we speak in front of SF City Hall. Our role has been to grow all of the seedlings for the project and lend our gardening and community building expertise, developed over seven years of building productive urban farms and backyard gardens across the bay in Oakland. Our staff will be on hand in the next few months on Sundays and Mondays to show the garden, give advice and lead community groups.

Our impetus for getting involved in this exciting project was and continues to be our mission to bring slow food to everyone, not just the wealthy. In order to lessen our ecological footprint and provide food security for ourselves we have set a goal in our community of West Oakland of growing 40% of our fruits and vegetables right in the city. Although we’ve only reached a small percentage of our goal we know this is possible. It’s just a matter of developing the infrastructure for a productive urban agriculture system. We believe in beginning to build that infrastructure in the least-served communities, such as West Oakland, first. Otherwise, as usual, working-class folks are forgotten.

Our first urban farm was built on an empty lot in 2001 and we started putting produce out on a card-table later that year. A few short years later, City Slicker Farms now has a network of five Community Market Farms that supply over 8,500 pounds of urban-grown organic produce each year to our community. In 2005 in an effort to more deeply involve community members who were busy making ends meet, we began a Backyard Garden Program. Our motivating question was, if people lack food why aren’t they already growing their own? We found that although gardening is the number one American hobby, the expense of the materials is too great for working-class families. It just doesn’t make sense to spend a dollar to buy a cabbage seedling when you can buy a cabbage for a dollar in the store. The other factor was that the Baby Boomers and Gen Xers never learned the skills that Grandma and Grandpa knew.

Our Backyard Garden Program took off, and we were soon sadly turning away families from throughout the Bay Area—even San Francisco. City Slicker Farms sets each family up with a planter-box garden with all the seeds, seedlings, soil and information they need to grow their own food. We continue to provide all the necessary supplies and seedlings as well as mentoring visits from experienced gardeners to support them to be successful growers. They are then encouraged to recruit and mentor new families. We are really just bringing out the skills and abilities that are already there in the community and the results are astounding. In three years we have built over 80 backyard gardens and in 2007 participants grew over 10,000 pounds of produce. As we work towards an equitable food system on the regional, national, and global levels, the home-gardening solution can be easily implemented and sustained right now with resources we already have in our communities. We don’t need huge bureaucratic systems or vast sums of money, all we need is funding for a few program coordinators, a greenhouse, soil, and seeds, and people.

Collectively, we have the choice to build such an infrastructure now, rather than waiting until necessity requires it. The difference will be in the amount of suffering we experience when the price of petroleum and petrochemicals begins to be factored into the price of our food. As the price of fuel increases, the price of food goes up—we’re already seeing this. People living in poverty are already suffering from food insecurity, but at what point will middle-income families be impacted to the point of relying on emergency food sources? Supporting emergency food programs requires an ongoing subsidy, while stimulating urban agriculture programs creates self-sufficiency and stimulates local economic development and small-scale entrepreneurship. It’s up to us. At least on the city-government level we can make a difference by beginning to advocate for funds for urban agriculture development. The fact that San Francisco is supporting this beautiful and productive garden right in front of City Hall is proof that we can motivate at least our local elected officials to care.

Contrary to the popular belief that California is the bread-basket of the country, our state is actually a net-importer of food. Since most people live in urban centers, urban dwellers need to take some responsibility for their own food needs. Will we wait until people are suffering even more or will we begin the process of creating the necessary infrastructure for a sustainable urban food system now?

Throughout the Third World the UN Food and Agriculture Organization is spreading a system of support for home gardening and small-scale agricultural cooperatives in both urban and rural areas. These systems are implemented through national agriculture departments. In the U.S., since the Farm Bill and Department of Agriculture almost exclusively support large-scale rural agribusiness, real hope lies in municipal and county governments to provide the supports for urban agriculture.

So what are the possibilities in San Francisco? Because of our long growing season in the Bay Area, intensive urban agriculture can provide from one to three pounds of produce per square foot per year. Each person consumes approximately 300 pounds of fruits and vegetables per year. That means a space of 10’x10’ to 20’x20’ (100-300 square feet of growing space, not counting paths) would be needed to grow ALL of the fruits and vegetables for each person.

An average San Francisco backyard (25×40), if cultivated intensively could grow all of the fruits and vegetables for one person. A goal of growing 20% - 40% of the fruits and vegetables consumed in San Francisco could be achieved through a combination of backyard gardening, community gardening, school gardens and increasing urban agriculture on currently unused municipal land (if we assume each household has five members that means the backyard could grow 20% of the household food needs; since not all households will grow food, add to that other urban farming lands)

Current City resources could easily be redirected to support such an effort and are an extremely cost effective way of improving the sustainability of our food system and eliminating food insecurity. What’s necessary is to collectivize certain aspects of food production such as materials sourcing and plant propagation. Compost can be made through municipal programs, mulch from tree care can be used for pathways. Centrally located greenhouses can also serve as pickup locations for plants, compost and mulch. Current university and non-profit resources can be developed to provide urban agriculture technical assistance advisors for home producers, urban gardens and entrepreneurial gardens.

So, what are we waiting for? I encourage everyone in San Francisco to build on the success of the Victory Garden and work with the City to ensure that community resources are allocated to this simple solution. City Slicker Farms will continue to advise the GFE Victory Garden Program so that by sharing our experiences and learning we can contribute to it’s success. We hope to spread the backyard gardening system we have developed to other communities as well and encourage you to get started in your community.

We need ongoing support to continue our work of bringing organic urban-grown produce to low income Oaklanders. If you would like to send contributions to support our work, please send them to:
City Slicker Farms
1724 Mandela Parkway, Suite 5
Oakland, CA 94607
510-763-4241
cityslickerfarms.org

Willow Rosenthal is the founder of City Slicker Farms.

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.

The drip irrigation has been installed, the raised beds have been created and the rice straw wattle fencing surrounding the perimeter of the garden is going up. Final touches are also being made to the soap box.

Tomorrow, close to 4,000 plants will be traveling from their home at City Slicker Farms to the Victory Garden, in anticipation of the community planting day on July 12.

We’re so grateful to the hundreds of people who have agree to volunteer this day: there has been an amazing outpouring of support and we’ve quickly reached capacity for planting. Thanks goes to everyone who signed up in advance. Due to the sensitivity of the planting space, we won&rsquot be able to tap any more planting volunteers, though we certainly welcome folks to come down and join the spirited day of creating a truly sustainable future!

During the summer, we will be coordinating guided tours and demonstrations of the Slow Food Nation Victory Garden. We will need stewards and docents to help us make the garden a viable demonstration and educational tool. If you would like to volunteer, please email us at victorygarden@slowfoodnation.org.

Photos by Naomi Starkman
Photo 1: The garden comes together
Photo 2: Monica Scott & Carter McRee build the fence

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.

Bela studied drawing, performance and sculpture at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago; plant biology and biochemistry at the University of Massachusetts; and landscape architecture and environmental design at U.C. Berkeley. He works with SF Victory Gardens 08+ to coordinate the backyard garden program and is designing the Victory Garden. He also works as a landscape designer with Conger Moss Guillard Landscape Architecture (CMG) and directs Rebar, an active open-source art collective. Bela’s family owns and operates a small biodynamic farm in rural Kentucky that produces a diverse abundance of fruits, vegetables, dairy, and meat for the farm’s CSA shareholders.

As John mindfully planned the activities for the day—building the Soap Box, adding seven more large circular planting beds, building the straw fence around the planting area-he brought out the tools needed for the day’s work as the first volunteers arrived to begin moving dirt under a very hot sun.

Bela was looking forward particularly to the Soap Box, designed by Scene2. Marcus Guillard and Chris Ray Collins worked with Bela on the bandshell in Golden Gate Park last year.

Russ Fernald is a Slow Food Nation volunteer.

Photos by Naomi Starkman
Photo 1: Curtis Ray and Marcus of Scene2 measuring the Soap Box
Photo 2: Russ Fernald

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.”

After consolidating more piles of soil, the FUF crew continued raking out the stone ground covering from yesterday, which was graciously donated by Lyngso Garden Materials. The FUF crew will join us on at the Community Planting Day to help plant the seedlings into the garden.

The afternoon brought on relentless heat, sunshine and humidity, but Victory Garden Manager John Bela and team were still hard at work as they laid matting and covered it with gravel to create a wheelchair accessible section of the garden. This part of the garden, closest to Larkin Street, will host the stage for the Soap Box. The Soap Box is being designed by Scene2, a full service studio specializing in three dimensional media with big clients such as Banana Republic, ESPN, KGED-TV and Old Navy. During Slow Food Nation, the Soap Box will provide a platform for farmers, food producers, young chefs and many inspired stewards of the earth to stand up on their “soapbox” and speak to a public audience for 10 or 20 minutes. This is just one of the many free events at Slow Food Nation.

After a quick peek at the weather forecast, it looks like we should have sunny, warm days to finish the preparation for the BIG planting day. So, if you just need an excuse to take a long lunch break and enjoy the weather, stop by the garden and check it out!

A special thanks to all the volunteers who came out today and worked on this unusually hot day. Thank you to the Friends of the Urban Forest’s Youth Tree Care Program and Raj Patel, author of Stuffed and Starved and speaker at Slow Food Nation’s Food for Thought Speaker Series. We appreciate all the support!

Layla Azimi is the Communications and Parallel Programs Coordinator for Slow Food Nation.

Photo by Layla Azimi