[Lapg] From freeway to favas/three young permaculture activists/converted into farmland a city block

Fri Jun 4 08:10:53 PDT 2010

From freeway to favas
1,500 neighborhood volunteers help Hayes Valley Farm bloom
06.03.10 - 10:36 am | Caitlin Donohue | (0)

http://www.sfbg.com/2010/06/01/freeway-favas-0

Perhaps you've noticed a fresh mountain of fava 
beans arising along Octavia Boulevard as you 
travel toward Market Street, in the spot where a 
freeway used to touch down. Don Wiepert certainly 
has. He's a senior citizen who lives across the 
street from the rows of green sprouts, and even 
helped to raise the crop in his own living room.

Wiepert is one of 1,500 neighborhood volunteers 
who have taken part in the birth of Hayes Valley 
Farm, an exciting experiment in participatory 
urban agriculture. Started in January by three 
young permaculture activists, the project has 
converted into farmland a city block whose 
previous harvests were auto exhaust from the 
freeway on-ramp, and most recently, crime and 
vagrancy.

Farm organizer Jay Rosenberg explains the process 
as we tour the fields he helped to envision. Back 
in 1964, neighborhood activists from Hayes Valley 
Neighborhood Association and other groups 
organized to stop the progress of the Central 
Freeway that would connect Highway 101 to the 
Golden Gate Bridge. The show of community force 
was impressive, but it stranded the planned 
highway on- and off-ramps on a block of land 
between Octavia and Laguna streets. "They left 
them here standing like ruins," Rosenberg said. 
"This was a 2.2-acre forgotten space."
"It was a place for homeless living," Wiepert 
said on a recent trip to the farm's biweekly work 
party, while volunteers and a handful of paid 
staff buzzed about replanting seedlings and 
erecting a homemade greenhouse. "It was fenced 
off, ugly, inaccessible." He looks around. Not to 
resort to a cliché, but there's a discernible 
twinkle in his eyes as he says, "Now it's 
wonderful."

Although the block was in a desirable central 
location, its soil had been damaged from years of 
exposure to car emissions, which can leave behind 
lead and other heavy metals. But the team behind 
Hayes Valley Farm has a plan. The ivy that 
threatened to strangle the farm's trees has been 
stripped, piled into heaps that are covered with 
cardboard and horse manure to begin a 
turbo-fertilization process that mimics what 
happens on forest floors. Once this new soil has 
been created, it is spread and implanted with 
fava seedlings, which were selected for their 
nitrogen-producing capabilities.

Rosenberg halts his tour of the process to pluck 
a bean plant from the ground and finger the white 
nitrogen nodule its roots have produced. "Look 
how well they're doing," he says over the nascent 
crop, proud as a papa. Once these plants are 
mature, half will be harvested as food, and half 
chopped at the root to speed the release of their 
nitrogen into the rest of the soil. Already young 
lettuces peek beneath the rows of beans, signs 
that the farm is ready to experiment with other 
foods.

San Francisco is a weather system unto itself, 
rendering the city's ideal crops the subject of 
much conjecture. "This is a cool, 
Mediterranean-like, foggy desert," Rosenberg 
says. "We're doing lots of research on species 
that do well here, which will be knowledge the 
public can use." The farm, like the Alameda 
County Master Gardeners (www.mastergardeners.org) 
who run a similar program, is serving as a test 
arena to see what urban gardeners can reasonably 
expect to thrive here.
The farm is now home to 1,500 plants, including 
150 fruit trees, most sitting in pots on the old 
freeway on-ramp in what Rosenberg calls "the 
biggest patio garden in San Francisco." So far, 
all the crops have gone into the bellies of the 
volunteers who raised them, putting in more than 
4,000 person-hours during the four months the 
farm has been open.

But it's not just the free groceries that keep 
neighbors returning to Hayes Valley Farm. In 
addition to the work parties, the site has been 
home to popular screenings of 
environmentally-themed films and a locus of 
outdoor learning. One group of students from the 
Crissy Field Center painted a mural for the farm 
that will soon occupy one wall of its planned 
on-site classroom. A weekly yoga class is 
planned, as are daily tours for farm newbies 
interested in learning more about the planting 
going on down the street.

In a time of uncertainty about what we're 
supposed to eat, people are finding something to 
be sure about here. "I appreciate the opportunity 
to hang out with the younger people and their 
energy," Wiepert says, moments before flinging a 
stick for one of the farm's part-time dogs to 
chase after. "I think this place facilitates a 
feeling for a lot of people that they're doing 
something meaningful." *

HAYES VALLEY FARM
450 Laguna, SF
(415) 763-7645
www.hayesvalleyfarm.com
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