Heads up, green thumbs struggling to offload excess edibles: Aid is out there. A growing movement, designed to help people eat well, save money, and get to know their neighbors, is planting seeds in communities around the country.

Crop swaps – meet ups where people exchange surplus backyard bounty – are thriving from the San Francisco Bay Area to Boston in city and suburban enclaves and online, too.

Of course, there’s nothing particularly new about this phenomenon; who hasn’t been the beneficiary of the guy next door’s abundant squash plot or the woman across the street’s surplus spinach bed? Informal, low-key fruit and veggie trades have gone on since humans began cultivating crops.

But these days, with the economy and the environment on many people’s minds, bartering food in a systematic manner is making a comeback.

These weekly or monthly gatherings attract edible garden growers for different reasons. Some simply want to give away excess produce and, in exchange, get a little more variety in their diet. For others, including Transition Town movement members, crop swaps are part of a survival strategy, a way to build more resilient local communities to withstand not just financial hard times, but also energy shortages, climate change, and global warming. For some, it’s simply a positive way to socialize with fellow residents.

Transition Berkeley organized the city's first Crop Swap. Photo: Christina Diaz.

“We hope this will be a place for people to connect with others in the community who grow produce and exchange ideas about growing food and recipes, too,” said Carole Bennett-Simmons, co-organizer of Transition Berkeley‘s two crop swaps that started this summer, which attract about 30 to 40 locals. A retired public school teacher, she tends a plot at a local community garden, where she grows Swiss chard, bok choy, and beets.

Each local crop swap has its own way of working, but they all tend to run on a similar philosophy: No cash changes hands. Some spell out that produce must be homegrown, organic, or pesticide-free. Some are produce only, others include honey, eggs, and flowers. Still others, like the Boston Food Swap, accept prepared foods, such as pickles and preserves, along with foraged foods and backyard bounty.

Some crop swaps run just during the prime produce season, while others exchange goods all year. Since it’s high season for harvesting around the country, crop swaps are currently doing a booming cash-free business. During the winter and early spring, when crops are less abundant, some of these groups exchange seeds or starters.

At a recent Berkeley crop swap, people perused two folding tables and a couple of blankets loaded with freshly harvested produce, then filled their baskets and bags with plums and purple potatoes and gave away basil and beet greens. True to their roots – along with kitchen staples such as carrots, strawberries, and rosemary – Berkeley growers showed up with some less well-known produce including loquats, grape leaves, and angelica. It was all very civil and low-key.

The hour-long gathering seemed like a truly hyper-local affair with people walking or biking their fruits and vegetables over, visiting with friends and neighbors, and swapping recipes with fellow traders. “How do you cook beet greens?” asked one. Another, who took home a stalk of angelica, picked up a tip to add the herb, which has a flavor similar to cilantro, to the batch of ice cream she planned to make.

Eggs, lavender and rosemary in the mix at a crop swap. Photo: Christina Diaz.

Three years ago, the group behind the Oak Park Crop Swap of Sacramento, California, took back a blighted park that was a haven for negative activities like panhandling, drug dealing, and prostitution, and turned it into a positive gathering place where people feel safe, explained Kara Thomson, who organizes crop swaps there during the summer months.

Participants at Oak Park Crop Swap sign in, weigh their produce, listen to a featured speaker, and then start trading.This year, crop swappers have heard from a beekeeper, a worm composter, and an irrigation expert. “This was a challenging neighborhood, but now the crop swap and a farm stand that followed have turned it into a civilized social scene,” Thomson observed. About 20 local residents swing by each week, she said. Those with shady yards swap blueberries and leafy greens with residents whose sunny plots produce heirloom tomatoes and watermelons.

In the Internet Age, it’s not surprising that some crop swaps start out as virtual exchanges, the online food tool equivalent of Craigslist. “Tons of Leeks,” “Garlic Galore,” “A Bumper Crop of Beans” announce typical entries on such sites as the recently launched Massachusetts Food Trader and Portland Food Exchange, which allow produce suppliers and seekers to find each other online first before making their own arrangements to trade in person.

The Massachusetts Food Trader (which allows excess CSA or Community Supported Agriculture box trades) also promotes local real-time events hosted by Boston Food Swappers and the Somerville Trading Post. The site has 40 registered users since it started in July, though many more may check out what’s on offer.

Some come to website trading after limited success with classifieds and community bulletin boards. “I’ve been trading extra garden vegetables and veggie starts for a few years now and felt that we really needed an easier way to exchange food,” said Brian Connelly, on the Portland Food Exchange site. “This is a simple, yet very effective, means for people to barter food in our community.” And some people just prefer to swap with a local grower, Connelly maintained, than frequent a large supermarket stocked with produce from around the globe.

Comparing and sharing baskets of produce. Photo: Christina Diaz.

There are challenges – at the first Berkeley crop swap an overabundance of lemons comes to mind – to these local produce trades. Thomson said she’d like her events to attract a more diverse crowd, but hopes that word of mouth and flyer distribution will help with that. And, of course, few other parts of the country are blessed with as long a growing season as California. Consumers who opt to exchange with growers they find online are advised to meet in a public place, at least initially, for personal safety, though no issues have emerged on this front to date.

For those with concerns about food safety, it’s a “trader beware” situation, say swappers. This concern is raised more often in relation to preserved foods, where the liability lies between the two parties involved in the trade, according to Jake Benner, who co-runs MA Food Trader. Consumers should check preserved foods and produce for contamination and spoilage, he advised.

As interest in growing food increases around the country, crop swaps are likely to sprout in other locations. Some communities hope to take matters a step further, by running canning and preserving workshops in community kitchens so people can prepare for lean seasons and make full use of summer and fall’s abundance. Stay tuned.

This story originally appeared on Shareable and was republished on Civil Eats.

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It’s that time of year when the abundance from a backyard vegetable garden can be a tad prolific. How many zucchini squash can one family eat? Or perhaps your produce problem comes from human error: you simply planted way too many onions and not enough greens.

Help is on the way. Beginning tonight the people behind the newly formed grassroots group Transition Berkeley invite residents to share their harvest at a Crop Swap in the public park next to the Ohlone Greenway on Sacramento Street.

It couldn’t be simpler: you show up with your freshly harvested lettuces or lemons and share or swap them for some plums or potatoes. That’s it. No money changes hands.

Berkeley is just one of a grassroots network of more than 300 transition towns around the globe organizing their communities to become more resilient, self-reliant and sustainable. In keeping with that philosophy, the Berkeley coalition, which numbers 80 members and counting, encourages locals to lower their carbon footprint, grow food close to home, pool resources, reduce their use of fossil fuels and foster community. Such behaviors are critical, transition advocates say, to facing challenges such as climate change, oil dependency and depletion, and a persistent economic downturn.

The nascent group, which held its first meeting at the Ecology Center in February, has co-sponsored a garden building day, conducted an emergency preparedness workshop, and hosted a potluck film screening. Members hope to work with local government, business, and community leaders to achieve its mission. One defined goal: to help the city cut greenhouse gas emissions 80% by 2050, as mandated in the Climate Action Plan.

But back to the far easier matter of exchanging excess fruits and vegetables. Gardeners who grow their own food have always shared their surplus with neighbors. Who among us hasn’t been the beneficiary of spinach, rhubarb, or cucumbers from the avid grower next door? Or, as Leah Garchik recently noted in her Chronicle column, arugula and cilantro, the Berkeley equivalent of summer surplus.

The Crop Swap simply invites fellow urban food farmers to trade kale or carrots beyond their block. Similar swaps are already under way in Albany and Oakland.

“We hope this will be a forum for people to get to know others in the community who grow produce and exchange ideas about growing food,” said co-organizer Carole Bennett-Simmons, a retired public school teacher, who tends a plot at the Peralta Community Garden, where she’s currently harvesting Swiss chard, bok choy, and beets.

Folks are encouraged to walk, bike, or catch public transit and come share their homegrown, ripe goods, including fruits, vegetables, herbs, and flowers. Plans are to run the Monday meet-up through October and then return in the early spring with seeds and starts for garden planting.

Share food, save money, eat well. Sounds like a Michael Pollan-inspired recipe for success.

Crop Swap takes place on Mondays, starting July 18, from 6:30 to 7:30 p.m., in the public park next to the Ohlone Greenway on the east side of Sacramento Street at Delaware, across from the North Berkeley BART station

This post originally appeared on Berkeleyside.

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Families enjoying the activities at the Urban Adamah Grand Opening and Farm Festival. Photos: Sarah Henry

Sunday marked the grand opening of Urban Adamah, the first faith-based, modern urban farm in West Berkeley, at 1050 Parker Street near San Pablo Avenue, opposite Fantasy Studios. The one-acre farm with Jewish roots offers a residential fellowship program for young adults, summer camps for kids and teens, and plans to help feed the needy in the community.

On an uncharacteristically warm June day, several hundred people, including many families with young children, turned out to tour the farm, meet chickens, bake pizzas, pickle cucumbers, make ice cream, and whip up bicycle smoothies — as well as learn a little about the philosophy behind the farm, currently boasting greens, squashes, tomatoes, and other summer crops.

Local urban farming icon Novella Carpenter welcomed the newbies to the neighborhood, along with Assemblymember Nancy Skinner and Councilmember Darryl Moore.  Fellow West Berkeley urban farmer Jim Montgomery, who walked his goats over to say hello, was a big hit with the younger set.

“The more urban farms we have in this area to help fill a gap in accessibility and availability to fresh, healthy produce the better,” said Skinner, who grows her own backyard bounty in walking distance of Urban Adamah. Skinner has done so since the 1970s when she lived in The Integral Urban House, a pioneering collective residing in a converted Victorian home that grew its own food and recycled gray water long before the current batch of urban homesteaders took up city farming. ” We need to demonstrate to people that we can grow food anywhere and people need to see where there food comes from.”

Urban Adamah is the brainchild of UC Berkeley graduate Adam Berman, who explained the name thus: “Adamah means earth in Hebrew and also shares the same root word as the word adam which means human. The word connotes the connection between the earth and earthlings. We like that.”

The farm marries Berman’s interest in social justice issues like hunger and food security, with environmental stewardship and spirituality. His own religious practice combines progressive Judaism with Buddhist teachings.

Urban Adamah executive director Adam Berman. Photo: Christina Diaz

Berman spent seven years as the head of the Isabella Freedman Jewish Retreat Center in Connecticut, where the seeds for the farm’s fellowship program, known as the Jewish Sustainability Corps., were first sewn. But the 40-year-old, who now lives in North Berkeley with his wife, said he always knew he’d bring the idea back to the Bay Area, where the interest in sustainable food and social justice made it the right fit for the pilot project. “Berkeley feels like home for me,” he said.

Urban Adamah offers a three-month in-house leadership training program three times a year for young adults that integrates urban organic farming, social justice community service, and progressive Jewish practice.

Currently, a dozen fellows, who represent a range of Jewish beliefs, live in a rented house near the farm. The intensive curriculum, in a kibbutz-like setting, is designed to equip fellows with tools to become agents of positive change in their communities, said Berman. As part of the program each intern volunteers at food security organizations in the area, including The Ecology Center’s Farm Fresh Choice, Cooking Matters (formerly Operation Frontline), City Slicker Farms, and People’s Grocery.

Berman said that the Jewish tradition’s core values of ahava (love), chessed (compassion) and tzedek (justice) inform all the activities on the farm, which, he added, seek to strengthen young people’s bodies, minds, hearts, and souls. Urban Adamah also practices age-old Jewish customs such as Bal Taschit (do not waste), Shmita (letting the land rest), Peah (leaving the corners of the field for the poor), and Tzaar Baalei Chayim (preventing cruelty to animals), all carried out amid the environmental and social realities of a 21st Century urban farm.

Most of the farm’s harvest is intended for local food banks and homeless kitchens; Berman hopes the plots produce about 8,000 pounds of edibles this year. In the near future he plans to approach restaurants in the immediate area for food scraps to feed the farm’s chickens and add to the soil.

The annual budget for the farm is around $360,000. Public programs are slated to bring in about $15,000 a year and fellows pay $1,200 each to attend the leadership training, but Berman still needs to raise significant funds to keep the nonprofit farm afloat. To date, core support has come from The Dorot Foundation, Walter and Elise Haas Fund, Nathan Cummings Foundation, Repair the World, Saal Family Foundation and UpStart Bay Area.

Summer crops at Urban Adamah in West Berkeley: Photo: Christina Diaz

Berman got one lucky break: land owner Wareham Development agreed to host the farm rent-free for two years on the previously vacant lot. Hence the mobile feel to the farm: all crops are grown in above-ground pallet boxes, the chicken coops are on wheels, classes are held in tents and the greenhouses can be moved too, should a relocation prove necessary when the current lease is up.

Despite its transitory nature, Berman sees his program putting down roots. “I hope that Urban Adamah becomes a national model for engaging Jewish young adults in environmental sustainability and urban community renewal,” he said. “The program is highly replicable. There could be an Urban Adamah site in a half dozen cities across the country within the next ten years.”

Monday marked the first day of summer camp at the farm. On Wednesday evening Urban Adamah will kick off a series of movie nights with the funny and informative food documentary Food Stamped, shot locally by a couple who attempted to eat healthily on food stamps alone. Read a review on Lettuce Eat Kale. An optional farm tour starts at 6:30 p.m.; the screening begins at 7:00 p.m.

This post originally appeared on Berkeleyside, was republished on The Bay Citizen and Civil Eats and featured on Food News Journal. Find more of Christina Diaz’s images here.

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Sophie Hahn, founder, Berkeley Edible Garden Initiative.

Should city dwellers be allowed to sell their backyard bounty?

Sophie Hahn thinks so. The North Berkeley resident wants to share the abundance from her residential produce plot and offset some costs she incurs maintaining her edible garden.

But Hahn ran into hiccups with the city last year trying to get her idea off the ground. “I had no idea it would be so complicated,” she says. “It’s actually easier in Berkeley to have a pot collective than to have a vegetable collective,” a frustrated Hahn told  a New York Times reporter in August.

Or pretty much any other home-based business. That’s because Berkeley’s zoning codes prohibit selling or otherwise conducting commerce outside a house in a residential neighborhood. Never mind that many residents (this writer included) toil from inside their homes. City codes allow for small, low-to-moderate impact home businesses, such as piano teachers, explains Dan Marks, director of planning and development for the city.

But outdoor activities where cash changes hands remain a no-go. The laws are designed to protect the quality of residential communities from traffic and parking problems, as well as offensive or objectionable noise, odors, heat, or dirt.

Fair enough. Still, Hahn was hardly about to set up a produce stand and solicit customers via a bullhorn in her sleepy, leafy corner of the world. Her forty-by-sixty foot micro farm produces only enough food for about five or six families. She just wanted to charge a weekly fee for a basket of food, modeled along the lines of what local farmers do with Community Supported Agriculture (CSA) boxes, where residents pay a subscription in return for regular deliveries of fresh, seasonal eats.

Willow Rosenthal harvests a Berkeley backyard garden./Photo: Sarah Henry.

Hahn and her supporters find it ironic that such obstacles to urban agriculture exist in a city that included building a local food system as part of its long-term Climate Action Plan.

An attorney by training, PTA president at King Middle School, and former City Council candidate, Hahn wanted to go the legitimate route. She did approach city officials about what it would take to get an exemption to the current code, but decided that the cost, public hearing, and wait period was prohibitive.

For Hahn, putting the land behind her home to good use was a no-brainer. Still, it’s not cheap: there’s the initial set-up costs, including garden bed construction, drip irrigation, animal, seed and plant purchases — in addition to ongoing payments for the two farmers who tend the garden.

Since Hahn is not a green thumb herself, she hired urban gardener Willow Rosenthal to turn her terraced, sloping backyard of ugly sod into a thriving produce garden. Eight planter boxes boast leafy greens like chard, lettuce, and kale, root vegetables, and herbs. There’s a compost bin for green waste, a chicken coop, a dozen or so hens — and more food than Hahn’s family of five can eat. It’s a clean, green, quiet, productive plot.

Plenty of other local residents grow veggies, raise chickens, and keep bees for their own use, of course, and some admit to bartering with neighbors or selling surplus on the sly to friends and acquaintances — or even to local food businesses and restaurants.

But Hahn, a longtime Berkeley dweller, is the first of a new breed of Berkeley D.I.Y. urban homesteaders to cultivate controversy by challenging what she sees as an arcane law.  Needless to say, changing city code is a lengthy and complex process, but not without precedent. In San Francisco a similarly restrictive zoning code was recently overhauled, after an outpouring of support for Little City Gardens, which ran into pushback there when it tried to expand.

Elsewhere around the country, cities including Detroit, Kansas City, Mo., and Seattle have recently relaxed bans on produce selling by farmers.

Guerrilla gardener Novella Carpenter./Photo: Sarah Henry

Following a citizen complaint, ghetto grower, Farm City author and Berkeley business owner Novella Carpenter was recently singled out by officials in Oakland for selling chard without a business license at her pop-up farmers’ market stand at her Ghost Town Farm and keeping livestock (rabbits, goats, and chickens) without a conditional use permit.

A community outcry ensued for the iconic urban farmer. As of yesterday, revised Oakland city codes no longer prohibit Carpenter from peddling her greens.  But selling chickens, ducks and rabbits is still illegal, since the new laws don’t apply to livestock. (Carpenter has previously made rabbit potpies available by donation.) The city will return to the issue in coming months and judging by comments on Carpenter’s blog, sympathetic press coverage, and support for the guerrilla gardener from allies like the Oakland Food Policy Council, officials can expect a healthy show of support during public comment.

Marks concedes urban agriculture code changes may be happening faster in other Bay Area cities because of community backing for high-profile cases. There’s simply not been that kind of outpouring of support in Berkeley, says Marks, adding there are no plans to tackle the matter any time soon as it remains a low priority for his department.

Such sentiment doesn’t sit well with Hahn. Berkeley’s residential gardens are a significant untapped resource for the production of fresh food for the the community, she says. Hahn has founded the Berkeley Edible Garden Initiative to put pressure on the city to update codes so small-scale ventures like her own can operate. Hahn has the support of fellow residents, including councilmember Jesse Arreguin, author Michael Pollan, and the Ecology Center, whose magazine Terrain first reported on her dilemma last Spring.  Supporters can register online on behalf of Hahn’s cause.

“I value and want to protect the residential quality of our neighborhoods,” Hahn says. “I think we can do that while still allowing reasonable economic activity associated with a social good — in this case growing fresh food to share.”

For now, Hahn gives her excess greens to grateful neighbors for gratis.

This post originally appeared on Berkeleyside.

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Author and green schoolyard advocate Sharon Gamson Danks./Photo: Maia and Ayden Danks.

In the course of her travels researching her new book Asphalt to Ecosystems: Design Ideas for Schoolyard Transformation, Sharon Gamson Danks was struck by two things: First, the United States is a world leader in school food gardens and Berkeley is firmly at the epicenter of that movement.

And second, the U.S. lags far behind other countries when it comes to building green schoolyards with eco-friendly aspects beyond a produce patch — in other words spaces that encourage play with potential risk. We’re talking less asphalt and metal structures, and more nature nooks and shaded ponds.

An environmental planner, Danks and landscape architect Lisa Howard run Bay Tree Design in Berkeley, which specializes in designing ecological outdoor play spaces. They incorporate ideas picked up from Danks playground adventures overseas.

The UC Berkeley graduate (she has masters in both landscape architecture and city planning) has visited over 200 green schoolyards and parks in North America, Europe, Great Britain, and Japan, where she witnessed their impact on children’s play, education, and health.

Danks and Howard are wrapping up a master plan project for 29 schools in the San Francisco Unified School District, which is revamping many of its playgrounds thanks to a chunk of funds from two bond measures; she has worked on dozens of other green schoolyard projects.

The 39-year-old lives in the Berkeley hills with her husband and two expert playground testers, and tends a garden that boasts some 15 different fruit trees. She documents the bounty she harvests in a journal and on her site Edible Places.

Danks serves on the advisory board of the San Francisco Green Schoolyard Alliance and will speak on Saturday, at 5 p.m., at the San Francisco Flower and Garden Show with colleagues Arden Bucklin-Sporer and Rachel Pringle, co-authors of How to Grow a School Garden.

We met this week in the patio at Berkeley’s Café Leila.

Can you give some examples of model green schoolyards around the globe?

At the Coombes Primary School in England the children have woods to explore, a pond, and a fire pit in their play area, which is near a large patch of stinging nettles. On the day I visited, the children were making stinging nettle pasta on an outdoor stove. The only people who got stung were the adults. As the director points out: how will we raise capable, responsible humans if we don’t present them with some risk in their environments?

Americans confuse safety and liability but these are not the same things.

A play structure at Berkeley's Adventure Playground. Photo: Sharon Danks.

While on that subject, it’s amazing that a place like Adventure Playground survives in such a litigious country. How do you rate that play space?

I love Adventure Playground and am happy that it exists here in Berkeley. My two daughters’ favorite things to do there are ride the zip-line, climb the net structure, and use various built pieces as forts. It provides a wonderful, unstructured environment for kids that allows them to play in challenging ways and express their creativity and imagination as they explore the site. I think it’s great the playground provides real tools for children to use, and an appropriate environment to use them in.

What about other overseas child-centric playground ecosystems of note?

In Lund, Sweden there’s an after-school recreation center with a permaculture theme. It’s a superb example of green building techniques in a progressives town, not unlike Berkeley. The barn for the farm animals, built by middle school students, is a wooden beam and clay structure; the site has solar panels and wind turbines. It was built  over 10 years ago. It would be considered LEED platinum by today’s standards.

In the heart of Tokyo — you couldn’t get a more dense city — I went to a school where an extensive nature study area and wetland garden with a recirculating spring covers more than one third of the primary school grounds. Their edible garden includes a rice paddy, garden vegetables such as taro and herbs like shiso. They also grow a green curtain of vines each year in planter boxes along the school building wall, which is both aesthetically pleasing and provides needed shade.

Children at Malcolm X School in Berkeley tend beds and harvest vegetables in the garden. Photo: Sharon Danks.

Every Berkeley public school has an edible garden. Do any stand out?

Well, I’m partial to Rosa Parks Elementary, since my daughters go there. I’ve volunteered to help create a green schoolyard master plan. We have buy-in from many parents and teachers; it’s a compelling example of community stewardship. Garden teacher Tanya Stiller just installed a rainwater harvesting barrel. We’ve put in nibbling gardens, solar panels, a rock border, a pond with a solar-panel driven fountain, wooden fences and picnic benches.

What garden teacher Rivka Mason does at Malcolm X is fabulous; it’s one of the first places I bring visitors. I’m impressed by her teaching style and she listens to the kids and runs with their ideas. A whole generation of children are growing up on “weedos” (veggie burritto-like wraps made from sour sorrel, beet greens, or dinosaur kale).

The LeConte farm and garden, which also includes animals — in the past goats and ducks, currently chickens and rabbits — has a micro-climate that’s conducive to a long-growing season. Founded in 1982, the program is also one of the oldest continuously tended school gardens in California.

Honestly, I think all the schools in Berkeley offer creative garden curriculum with modest resources.

What about the Edible Schoolyard?

They’ve accomplished so much and it’s a model for what a cooking and gardening program can look like with significant resources. I’ve volunteered in the garden, which is always changing and evolving, as gardens should. The students at that school are free to roam the entire garden, not just tend one particular bed or plot. The outdoor classroom under the ramada is wonderful.

I’ve also volunteered in the kitchen and the teacher, Esther Cook, is impressive — both in how she ties cooking to the curriculum and the way she connects with the kids. I look forward to my daughters having those experiences.

Where do you source your own food?

In addition to foraging from our own backyard, we receive a weekly CSA box from Full Belly Farm in the Capay Valley and we buy most of our meat directly from Wind Dancer Ranch. We frequent the farmers’ market too.

What’s next?

I’m planning an international conference in September, co-hosted by the San Francisco Green Schoolyard Alliance  and Architects/Designers/Planners for Social Responsibility, which will take place in Berkeley and San Francisco. We’ll offer public tours and show visitors what we’re doing here to make children’s outdoor environments places of vibrant exploration, challenge, and wonder.

The San Francisco Flower & Garden Show runs through March 27 at the San Mateo Event Center. Many Berkeley food and garden folks will do demos or give talks, including Alice Waters and Esther Cook from the Edible Schoolyard, Sean Baker from Gather Restaurant, Chris Dehenzel from UC Berkeley’s Department of Landscape Architecture and Environmental Planning, and Andrea Hurd of Mariposa Gardening and Design.

This post originally appeared on Berkeleyside.

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Willow Rosenthal harvests a Berkeley backyard garden./Photo: Sarah Henry

The aptly named Willow Rosenthal grew up around trees in Sonoma County, California, in a community that farmed its own food. Raised by hippies who didn’t have a lot of money, she nonetheless ate well. She also learned how to grow her own food by working on an organic farm and for a local nursery.

She came to the San Francisco Bay Area in 1997 knowing she wanted to do social-justice work; an internship with Food First and volunteering with the Organic Consumers Association followed.

When she moved to West Oakland, Rosenthal was immediately struck by the absence of greenery, how much vacant, unused land there was, and the lack of grocery stores. She had landed in a community bounded by three major freeways that is also home to a busy port and extensive industrial pollution. People in this predominantly low-income, African American and Latino neighborhood had nowhere close by to buy healthy, affordable food. The area had plenty of corner liquor stores and fast-food joints, but not a single full-service supermarket.

An idea took root. Rosenthal decided to put her farming skills to good use and began gathering community support for a produce plot. In 2000, Rosenthal founded the non-profit food security project City Slicker Farms, after scraping together enough funds to purchase what would come to be called Center Street Farm.

Willow Rosenthal (rear, second from left) with West Oakland residents. Photo: Anne Hamersky.

Today, City Slicker Farms has seven urban farm gardens, produces more than 7,000 pounds of produce a year, and has built over 100 backyard gardens for residents of this neighborhood, which has struggled for decades. City Slicker also operates a weekly farm stand where people pay on a sliding scale under the inspired categories “free spirit,” “just getting by” and “sugar mama/daddy.”

After eight years running City Slicker on a shoe-string, Rosenthal, who suffered serious injury from police at a 2003 anti-war demonstration, stepped aside as the director of the group, though she remains on the organization’s board. In November, City Slicker was awarded $4 million in state bond funds for a community market farm and park at a 1.4 acre vacant lot in West Oakland, greatly increasing the group’s ability to grow and distribute food in the community; plans call for a large edible garden and orchard, a chicken coop, beehive, dog run, tot lot, and open space.

A pioneer of the urban farming movement, Rosenthal is featured in the recent Farm Together Now, which last December Michael Pollan called “his favorite book of the season”.

The 39-year-old has joined forces with her friend and fellow urban gardener Novella Carpenter to write a how-to guide, The Essential Urban Farmer, due out next year. Rosenthal works one day a week in the backyard produce garden she built for North Berkeley resident Sophie Hahn, a former City Council candidate active in community affairs, who is working on an edible garden initiative.

When not tending gardens, Rosenthal works as a teaching assistant at the Berkeley Rose School and is earning a teaching credential from the Bay Area Center for Waldorf Teacher Training.

We spoke this week at Hahn’s garden, which features root vegetables, leafy greens, herbs, and chickens, and is in walking distance from Rosenthal’s own Berkeley home.

Was it hard to give up the reigns at City Slicker Farms?

I never thought about it in those terms. It wasn’t “mine,” it has always been a collaborative effort. City Slicker belongs to the community and I’m glad I was able to shepherd it through to its next phase and knew when to leave with grace. The day-to-day management of running a non-profit is exhausting. I’m grateful that we’ve accomplished what we set out to do and that the work continues.

Fellow farmer Laurel Sharp tends a Berkeley produce plot with Rosenthal./Photo: Sarah Henry

In the past you’ve said you didn’t want to just grow food for wealthy people, and now you are. How do you feel about that?

Well, we all end up doing things we say we’ll never do, right? My point really is that everybody should have access to healthy organic food. I  needed a job while I’m back in school. And I know how to farm. So I put up a flyer near where I live and Sophie saw it and hired me. The beauty of what she’s doing is she gets it, she really walks the talk. And while it’s not cost-effective for her, she’s doing this garden and paying fair wages to farmers because she believes it’s the right thing to do from a health and environmental point of view.

What do you like about living in Berkeley?

I like that I can walk into Berkeley Natural Grocery and I don’t even have to ask, I know all the produce there is organic. Same thing at the Thursday Farmers’ Market. And what an innovator and trailblazer The Ecology Center is; the place acts out of the highest good. Its programs and people are impeccable.

I love the natural beauty here. When I lived in West Oakland I would come to Live Oak Park just to see trees. I find being in a beautiful tree-filled place is good for my health, energy, and mood.

And I love the food at Saul’s — I used to come to Berkeley just to eat there — I’m Jewish, so it’s familiar comfort food for me.

Who are your local heroes?

Daniel Miller at Spiral Gardens was really my first inspiration for farming in an urban setting. I reached out to him early on. Joy Moore is another person I’ve crossed paths with and her energy and integrity is something else. She’s sheer, well, joy. And selfless. And, of course, my good friend Novella Carpenter: She’s just out there showing people what can be done — growing food and raising farm animals in an urban setting, which isn’t easy.

What’s next?

I want to inspire the younger generation through farming and garden education.

This post originally appeared on Berkeleyside and was republished on Civil Eats.

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Joy Moore: Community Food Reformer
Garden Teacher Kim Allen Offers Youth Space to Grow
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Spiral Gardens Helps Needy Feed Themselves
Adventures of an Urban Farm Gal
The Urban Homestead: An Old Idea is New Again

Retired City of Berkeley health outreach worker Joy Moore, 59, is anything but retired.

A long-time local food activist, Moore has played a key role in community efforts to reform school lunch in the Berkeley Unified School District, co-founded Farm Fresh Choice, which brings quality, affordable produce to people of lesser means, and was a member of the Berkeley Food Policy Council, a coalition of community and city groups founded in 1999 to increase community food access and improve health for all the city’s residents.

One of the council’s projects: Farm Fresh Choice, which provides local, sustainable fruits and vegetables to residents in West and South Berkeley neighborhoods who may have economic, transportation, or cultural obstacles that prevent them from, say, shopping at Berkeley Bowl or frequenting the regular Berkeley Farmers’ Markets. The Ecology Center serves as fiscal sponsor for both farmers’ market options.

Nowadays, Moore can be found tending the school garden, talking up healthy eating, and serving fruit smoothies and sauteed greens at the other high school in town Berkeley Technology Academy (B-Tech), designed for students who struggle to succeed at Berkeley High. She also runs an after-school cooking program at the school her grandson attends, Claremont Middle School in Oakland.

In 2007 she earned a horticultural certificate from UC Santa Cruz and she currently takes classes at Berkeley City College, with the aim of getting a teaching credential. (In the 1970s Moore attended UC Berkeley and explored theater, womens’, and African American studies programs but did not graduate.)

A volunteer producer at KPFA radio and occasional guest host for programs such as About Health, she is also featured in the film-in-progress Edible City. You can view a clip of Joy Moore’s Edible City interview.

Moore lives in a downtown apartment and is board secretary for Affordable Housing Associates. We met near her home at the Royal Ground Coffee House and continued our conversation on a walk to B-Tech, where Moore checked on the garden.

This Sunday, Moore will be a special guest at the Lunch Love Community big screen launch at the Pacific Film Archive at 2:30 p.m. Lunch Love Community, which features Moore, is a series of shareable short films (which will form the basis of a pending longer documentary) about the community effort to overhaul school food in Berkeley.

Joy Moore provides an edible education to students at Berkeley Technology Academy./Photo: Sophie Constantinou

Why did you get involved in school food reform?

My daughter, who is now 36, was having dozens of seizures a day when she was younger, she also didn’t eat or sleep well, and experienced behavioral problems at school.  Through a lot of trial and error I discovered that she had severe allergies to artificial colors, flavors, and preservatives. So I had to think very carefully about what she ate. When I cut out processed food her seizures subsided and her behavior improved.

But at the time, the medical establishment — which I’m wary of anyway — the school district, and MediCal tried to force me to put my daughter on Ritalin to address behavioral issues in school that they said were associated with Attention Deficit Disorder.

I never accepted that diagnosis and found a respected allergist, Ben Feingold, who supported my approach to deal with my daughter’s health concerns through dietary change.

When I saw what was available to eat at my daughter’s school– it was just terrible–I knew I had to do something to improve cafeteria food for all the public school kids in Berkeley.

How do you approach giving young people an edible education?

I’m trying to elevate the status of food and gardening in our culture. Good nutrition is associated with so much: I tell my kids it gives you muscles, strong nails, impacts mood, acne, energy — whatever it is they care about now — that’s how you reach them.

Everything we put into our mouth’s isn’t food. I want kids to know that and make smart choices for themselves. So I’m trying to raise the consciousness of all our children about food and health. My mission is really simple: It’s to get kids to value good food.

There’s nothing like biting into an organic peach and having that delicious juice dripping down your face and onto your neck. But many of our children, who only eat conventional produce–if they eat it at all–often haven’t had that experience. They’ve only known hard, tasteless produce. I try to change that.

What was your intent at the recent EcoFarm Conference panel you moderated on urban youth and food?

For people to see the positive things happening in all our communities around food and farming. When most people think of urban youth they think of crime, right? Violence, gangs, drugs. Here were examples of youth involved in food and gardening programs like Rooted in Community, Oakland Food Connection, and Urban Releaf all bringing about change in under-served neighborhoods. All young people of color. I did not have to look hard to find them.

Joy Moore teaches elementary school kids about nutrition, as featured in Lunch Love Community./Photo: Sophie Constantinou

What’s good about working on food access issues in Berkeley?

The collaboration of so many people in the community working together to bring about change and make a difference. Farm Fresh Choice has always been a group effort. It was inspiring working with other parents like Eric Weaver, Marcy Greenhut, Beebo Turman, and Yolanda Huang on the city’s Child Nutrition Advisory Committee to help get rid of soda machines in the Berkeley schools and bring in farmers’ market salad bars.

What’s challenging about trying to make change in this town?

I don’t see many brown people running the programs for our people. And when someone like Alice Waters serves up barbecue at Berkeley High, as she did, and she makes shredded, pulled-pork tacos with no sauce — what I think of as frou frou food — there’s a tremendous cultural disconnect, particular with the African American students.

Alice Waters has done many good things to change school food but if you look in her kitchen you won’t see many brown people, and you don’t see many brown people working in the garden at the Edible Schoolyard either. You know what I’m saying? We need to start our own Chez Panisse.

Some might decide to take it easy at your stage of life but you keep working hard. What motivates you?

The Berkeley Public Health Department did a study about 10 years ago that revealed huge racial disparities in life expectancy in this city. Fifty percent of brown people in this town die before age 75, compared with only 36 percent of European people, and many of those deaths are due to chronic diseases that could be avoided if people had access to nutritious food. I don’t want that for my grandsons. That’s what keeps me going.

This post originally appeared on Berkeleyside and was republished on Civil Eats.

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Garden Teacher Kim Allen Offers Youth Space to Grow
Cultivating Controversy: In Defense of an Edible Education
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Inside Berkeley’s School Kitchen

For four years Kim Allen has served as garden program manager for Berkeley Youth Alternatives (BYA), which provides a minimum-wage, internship program for socio-economically challenged adolescents ages 14 to 18. Some come to the garden through word-of-mouth from family or friends, others as part of mandated community service.

During the school year Allen’s youth garden crew, typically a group of six to eight, work and learn alongside her in two community garden plots in West Berkeley. There’s the half-acre Bancroft Community Garden, which the BYA shares with two dozen community gardeners on Bancroft Way, and the smaller Community Orchard garden on land the nonprofit owns on Bonar Street. The fruit tree garden includes many heirloom varieties, donated by Trees of Antiquity – among them citrus, apples, and pluots. The Bancroft Garden boasts typical farmers’ market fare.

In the summer, BYA offers an eight-week program for a dozen youth, who put in about 20 hours a week. The organization runs a small Community Supported Agriculture (CSA) during peak harvest season. It sells flowers and whatever is in abundance in the garden to Bill Briscoe, who owns The Bread Workshop. Briscoe puts surplus fava beans, sunchokes, garlic, and other vegetables to good use in his in-house soups. BYA youth harvest about two to four boxes of produce a week for The Ecology Center’s Farm Fresh Choice program, which serves low-income residents. Every other week the garden provides perishables for a local food bank pick-up point.

Allen, 33, lives in a semi-cooperative house with a garden (that her roommates tend) in walking distance of her job. She hails from a horticulture and outdoor education background and will represent the national grassroots network Rooted in Community at next week’s EcoFarm Conference, where she’ll speak about working with youth in urban farming settings. We talked in the garden earlier this week.

What do you enjoy about your job?

I love working outside and witnessing things grow — both the gardens and the youth. Everything in life is always changing and evolving. There are always new challenges and things to learn. A garden is a good metaphor for life.

What do you like about working with youth in a garden setting?

I like the confidence it gives them; they leave knowing how to create their own garden. They also learn about the life cycle, the value of growing food and the interconnectedness of plants and garden species. Some of our youth come in scared of insects but they leave with an understanding and respect for their role in nature.

Maybe more than anything else the garden is a safe, peaceful place where these adolescents can come and forget about other things — whether it’s personal struggles, academic issues, family problems, or concerns about violence in their communities — and just work together doing physical labor in a social setting.

Are there any misperceptions people have about what you do?

When I tell people that I run a garden program for youth in Berkeley they always assume it’s the Edible Schoolyard, because they’ve heard about that garden. Many people don’t realize that there are school gardens in every public school in Berkeley. And of course that particular garden is beautiful. It’s nice to see what’s possible if you have resources like they do.

We’d like to be able to hire more youth and give step raises or incentives to our crew as they move into leadership roles. In terms of equipment: our wheelbarrow is about to fall apart and we can always use tools. We don’t have a truck so it’s a big help if someone with a truck can pick up soil. We can always find jobs for people who can repair things. It’s good to have more money to do the things we want to do, but finding people willing to do physical labor is key.

Growing greens for the community./Photo: Courtesy BYA.

Are there any wrong assumptions that people make about food in Berkeley?

A lot of people don’t realize that hunger is a real issue in this city. Because Berkeley has a reputation as a food town people forget that there are a lot of poor people here who don’t have access to good food.

Who are your local food heroes?

The people who have the passion and dedication to nourish our under-served communities. I’m thinking of Farm Fresh Choice, run by Gerardo Marin (who just left) and Hunia Bradley. School food reformer and food justice advocate Joy Moore has tremendous positive energy and teaches youth about growing and cooking healthy food. Daniel Miller at Spiral Gardens is another food security activist in our area doing good work. And Willow Rosenthal, who lives in Berkeley now and started City Slicker Farms in Oakland, which builds produce gardens in people’s backyards and sells locally grown produce through its food security program. She’ a role model and a colleague and I admire that she knew when it was time to move on, she worked her arse off doing hard, physical labor at that non-profit and recognized she needed to find balance in her life.

What plans do you have for the garden?

If we could find both the funding and someone to manage it, I would love to put a chicken coop in the garden.

I’d like to move the front fence and open up the entrance so that more people in the neighborhood can come and visit. I’d like to make it a place where people can sit and enjoy the peace we have here.

I’d also like to create a memorial garden space. A lot of youth in our program have dealt with family or friends dying. Violence is a constant in some communities. I’d like the memorial space to evolve, with new and different plants, just as life evolves, but the space would be a permanent refuge and a safe haven in nature.

View a student video of the Berkeley Youth Alternatives garden program.

This post originally appeared on Berkeleyside and was republished on Civil Eats and The Bay Citizen.

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Berkeley Bites: The Bread Workshop’s Bill Briscoe
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Farm Together Now

Given the growing interest in small-scale sustainable agriculture and the people who run these farms, it should come as no surprise that books on the subject aren’t far behind.

Earlier this year saw the release of Farmer Jane, East Bay author Temra Costa’s take on female farmers and the role they play in the emerging food movement.  That book was followed by Growing Roots: The New Generation of Sustainable Farmers, Cooks, and Food Activists by Katherine Leiner, who crisscrossed the country to meet cheese mongers, mushroom foragers, and beekeepers, and shares their stories and recipes in an anthology collection.

Now comes the home-grown Farm Together Now: A Portrait of People, Places, and Ideas for a New Food Movement by Amy Franceschini and Daniel Tucker (Chronicle Books, hard cover $27.50).

Tucker calls Chicago home, but folks may know San Franciscan Franceschini for her role in the city’s Victory Gardens project. A member of the artist collaborative Future Farmers, Franceschini was approached by Chronicle to, well, chronicle a crucial time in the nascent alternative farming movement.

In the summer of 2009, Franceschini, Tucker and San Francisco-based photographer Anne Hamersky took separate road trips around the country, and logged thousands of miles and hundreds of hours of face time with farmers. This book is the result, a portrait of 20 farms that gives readers a sense of the challenges faced by people pursuing an alternative food system to conventional Big Ag.

The guide, which takes a Q&A interview format, gives immediate voice to a diverse range of farmers and food activists.

Barbar Ann Christian harvests strawberries from a City Slicker Farm project./Photo: Anne Hamersky

Close to home we meet Willow Rosenthal and Barbara Finnin of Oakland’s City Slicker Farms, an urban farm, backyard gardening, and farm stand project in one of Oakland’s most food-challenged areas. Farm Together Now was completed  before City Slickers received a massive $4 million dollars in state bond funds to expand their works, a poignant coda to their story, which documents the real hardship of making change in communities with scant funds.

We also hear from the people who run Freewheelin Farm’ in Santa Cruz, an organic fruit and vegetable producer focused on conservation measures. To that end, farmers Kirstin Yogg, Amy Courtney,and Darryl Wong deliver Community Supported Agriculture (CSA) shares by bicycle and trailer.

Franceschini notes that while there’s a growing band of young, modern agrarians in the U.S., there’s also a massive collapse in small ag and the knowledge inherent in small-scale farming.”My hope with this book is that people take away a sense of urgency and a willingness to support local farmers and get involved intimately with the producers of the food we eat,” says the artist and designer. “I also hope the examples in the book reveal the true cost of food: social, material, and mental.”

Farmer Darryl Wong of Freewheelin' Farm washes arugula./Photo: Anne Hamersky

Pressed for a thumbnail sketch of sustainable ag, photog Hamersky adds: “It runs the gamut from window box basil to chickens raised by urbanites on squatted land to biodynamic large-scale production farms that feed thousands of families.” Why now? “We’ve latched on to this movement for many reasons: safer ecology, personal health, deeper community, simpler economy, and plain old deliciousness.

Hamersky feels that some of the most interesting stories in Farm Together Now come from folks whose families have been conventional farmers for generations who have now embraced sustainable methods of food production, lived and worked on both sides of the issue, and have a lot of wisdom to impart. These trailblazers, she notes, are often living in very conservative communities across the road from lifelong neighbors who don’t easily trust new work methods.

City dwellers, she says, may be surprised at the sophisticated, progressive farm philosophies and business models created in the middle of “nowhere.”

Check out the Farm Together Now YouTube video.

Locals can learn more from Franceschini and Hamersky at their book launch event (Tuesday, December 21) at The Green Arcade.

(Full disclosure: Hamersky is a professional colleague and long-time friend.)

[This post originally appeared on KQED's Bay Area Bites.]

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Just around the corner and down the street from where I live on a stretch that includes liquor stores and the dodgy characters who frequent such places, you’ll find Spiral Gardens, a slightly disheveled verdant oasis on a fenced in corner of a formerly empty city lot.

It’s a welcome addition to the neighborhood. For the past six years in this location, the community food security project has developed a four-pronged approach to reaching low-income residents, particularly people of color, on the southwest side of Berkeley. The nonprofit is home to a nursery chock full of edible starts and trees, culinary and medicinal herbs, and California native plants for folks who want to grow their own food. Nursery sales help fund other programs the group offers.

Across the street the urban garden center’s community farm is full of summer bounty, such as tomatoes, greens, and amaranth, in one large collective plot that everyone works on together. Around half the harvest is given free to people in need, such as the homeless and elderly, the remainder is distributed among the volunteers who help the garden grow. There’s a pen with chickens and ducks too.

The organization runs the cheapest produce stand in town; every Tuesday afternoon it offers organic greens, fruit, eggs (supplied by a local jewelry store owner who raises hens), and such from the usual farmers’ market suspects at cost. Note to local readers: The stand serves all comers and appreciates those of means rounding up or kicking in a little extra to support the program.

And on Sundays the nursery-garden provides ongoing free farm classes, such as how to grow food in an urban setting, cooking produce from the garden, and beekeeping for beginners.

Daniel Miller has served as the executive director of this worthy edible experiment for 16 years. It is largely a labor of love. Miller is only paid a few months of the year, he supplements long days at Spiral Gardens with edible landscaping jobs and says he foregoes many standard accoutrements of modern life such as a home he can call his own, a car, and new clothes.

The 42-year-old father, whose Twitter handle describes him as “a gritty optimist dedicated to the compassionate reimagination of how we live,” resides in Oakland. We chatted at the nursery while Miller repotted plum trees.

1. Who are you trying to reach with this project?

We believe everyone has a right to fresh food that’s good for you. Studies show that in areas where people lack access to fresh produce, sometimes called food deserts, there’s a higher rate of negative health outcomes such as heart disease, stroke, and diabetes. On average, poor people of color live 10 years less than those who have access to such food. Our target audience is the poor and hungry.

2. What are some of the obstacles you run into trying to reach your target community?

There are many. We have to first let people in the community know we’re here. We find doing door knocks and leaving fliers an effective way to get the word out. We also educate people about why it’s important to eat farm fresh food. Some people automatically think that organic food is too white, chi-chi, and expensive.

3. Do you feel like you’re making a difference in the neighborhood?

I do.  The farm stand is a positive, wholesome  presence that attracts people. I’m convinced we’ve lengthened some people’s lives. I know we’ve put a lot of plants out there in this community that will provide food for years to come. And we fill a safe, social aspect in the area, we give people something positive to do. I’ve seen people who are homeless, drug abusers, mentally ill, or with other severe obstacles to overcome benefit from our produce and programs — even start growing their own food.

Even in seemingly small ways we have an impact: Our heirloom tomato starts have become the impulse buy down the street at Biofuel Oasis.

With the downturn in the economy all kinds of people are showing up at Spiral Gardens. People are really struggling and there’s an increased interest in growing and making your own food.

4. What are the rewards of this kind of work?

I’m proud that we exist. And that every day we’re doing something to help people eat well and grow food that has a positive impact on their health and environment. I think any time you can get people to interface with soil, which we all need for our survival, that’s a good thing. We have a dozen or so hardcore volunteers who water the plants, weed the farm, feed the animals, and generally keep everything going, though on a farm project day 50-100 people may show up to help. We’ve cultivated a great sense of community.

5. Are there any local food activists you admire?

The people who live at Fort Awesome, which is located not far from here. It’s a collective house with solar panels, graywater recycling, an urban farm with fruit trees and chickens. It’s across the street from my son’s school, sometimes when I drop him off I’ll see a wayward chicken crossing the street.

6.  What’s next for Spiral Gardens?

I’d like to see the nursery expand — it would be great if we could be a full-service, one-stop nursery, selling people their soil when they pick up their plants. I’d also like us to become completely self-sustaining. And it would be great to get paid for what we do. I want to offer more classes and serve more people in need. There’s always more we could do, it just takes resources.

This post originally appeared on Berkeleyside and was republished on Civil Eats.

You might also like:

Garden Teacher Kim Allen Offers Youth Space to Grow

Operation Frontline: Teaching the Needy to Cook

Dig It: Growing Greens, Creating Community, and Feeding Families

Grow Your Own Row

Farm Together Now