potrero view
Photograph by Mary Purpura

Photograph by Mary Purpura

The cob oven at Double Rock Community Garden.

February 2010

Bayview Garden Engages in Earth Building

By Mary Purpura

Located at Griffith Street and Fitzgerald Avenue at the Alice Griffith Housing Development in Bayview, Double Rock is one of San Francisco’s largest community gardens. Nearly two fenced acres enclose a young fruit tree orchard – including plum, fig, apple, lemon, cherry, and mulberry trees – vegetable beds for individual gardeners – some of which feature built-in benches to make gardening easier for people with limited mobility – a greenhouse and compost area, and a wood-fired oven sculpted from cob, a building material made from a mixture of clay, straw, and sand.

The cob oven came about through a collaboration between Double Rock Community Garden gardeners and members of the Ecology Center of San Francisco, a nonprofit formed in 2006 to promote sustainable communities. On a recent Saturday in January, the two groups came together again to offer a cob-building workshop, this time resulting in a curved earthen bench created under a mature shade tree.

Double Rock Community Garden originally operated under the auspices of the San Francisco League of Urban Gardeners (SLUG).  After SLUG dissolved in 2006, Alice Griffith resident Jackie Williams took over, and has remained the garden coordinator ever since. “A lot of volunteers have helped to keep the garden going,” said Williams.  

Organized groups from Southwest Airlines, Cliff Bar & Company, and Wells Fargo have worked at Double Rock. But a dedicated team of neighborhood young people provide the main source of ongoing labor.  “Six teens, from twelve to nineteen years old, all from the Bayview, work here on weekends,” explained Williams, who makes sure her teen helpers go home with fresh vegetables from the garden. The youth participate in the Hunters Point Family Project, a nonprofit organization that helps

young community members find employment.

Adult volunteer Naomi Goodwin comes out on most weekends too. Goodwin believes that it’s an important time for those who care about the garden to keep an eye on what’s going on. “There’s a lot of development planned around here, and we want to make sure this garden space doesn’t get absorbed into all that,” said Goodwin.

Given Double Rock Garden’s long history of volunteer input, a collaboration with the Ecology Center of San Francisco was a natural fit.  The Ecology Center has recently undertaken a number of projects in the Bayview Hunters Point neighborhood. “We worked with a huge volunteer workforce to build a big cob bench at Bret Harte Elementary School, and we’re teaching a gardening class in the after-school program at Malcolm X Academy in Hunter’s Point,” said Sam Hartman, one of the Ecology Center of San Francisco’s founding members.

“We’re interested in the cultural change that happens when people get outside and do things together,” said Davin Wentworth-Thrasher, another Ecology Center founder. “Earth is the most common building material in the world, and more than 30 percent of the world’s people live in earth houses. This is a vernacular building method and a good, readily available building material that connects us with people around the world,” he said. “I believe that we learn and grow through experience,” he added.

Wentworth-Thrasher pointed out that San Francisco’s oldest standing building is the Old Mission at Mission Dolores, which is made from adobe, an earth-building technique that is a close cousin to cob. While adobe construction involves drying bricks made from clay and straw and then using them for building, cob builders work with a wet mixture of clay and straw, sculpting it into the desired forms. Whole cities in Yemen have been built from earth.  Some of those buildings have stood for thousands of years.

The Ecology Center of San Francisco has partnered with the School of the Arts (SOTA) to create an urban research farm and ecological design demonstration site at the school. “While the farm and design demo site will be used by SOTA students during the week, weekend workshops will be open to the larger community,” said Tori Jacobs, the Ecology Center’s third founding member. The center will also house its lending library—hundreds of titles on all sorts of topics involving sustainability, such as locavore diets, urban homesteading, traditional cultural practices, and survival skills—at SOTA.

“A lot of people think their volunteer contribution isn’t important,” said Wentworth-Thrasher. “But when you’re making something like a cob bench or oven, or a garden bed, two extra hands can really make a big difference in how quickly a project is done. We welcome all volunteers, and I encourage everyone who might consider volunteering to come out and give it a try.”

The Ecology Center of San Francisco will hold a free earth-building workshop at SOTA on February 27. Check “upcoming events” on their website for details on this and future workshops: http://www.eco-sf.org/.

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