potrero view

April 2010

Interactive Garden Celebrates its One-Year Anniversary

By Mary Purpura

Walk down Hooper Street from 8th to 7th Street, along the border of the California College of the Arts (CCA), and you’ll notice a series of mounds, roughly three feet high and ten feet wide, planted with vegetables and flowers.  Further down Hooper, beyond the mounds, mustard greens and alfalfa grow in a flat area.  A sign at the corner of 8th and Hooper explains that this project is called FARM (Future Action Reclamation Mob), and that it received a 2009 San Francisco Parks Trust Innovator’s Award.

While on sabbatical from Sacramento City College where she teaches graphic communication, FARM founder Robyn Waxman pursued graduate studies in design at CCA.  Waxman’s teaching job informed her CCA studies.  “I’m interested in the millenials —the generation aged 18 to 29 years old — and designing effective ways to get them off their computers and engaged with community activism. My thesis looked at the role of design in the millenials’s relationship to protest.”

Waxman didn’t set out to grow food.  She created a series of experiments to determine how to use design to engage young people — who she sees as atomized and disengaged from the public sphere — in community life.  One of these experiments — an interactive, digital poster located on Hooper Street — posed six questions about food justice.  The screen changed daily to incorporate the responses that had been input by passers-by, many of them CCA students.  “This was my initial exploration,” said Waxman, “and I found that the millenials were not interested in what I might consider more traditional forms of protest, such as marching and carrying signs. They weren’t interested in becoming gardeners — they thought of that as something older women do — but they were interested in being farmers.”

In response to these findings Waxman organized a workday on March 28, 2009.  One of her goals was to bring together the three transient populations that make up Hooper Street’s demographics:  CCA students; day laborers who congregate at 7th and Hooper; and the nearby homeless population.  Fifty people showed up at the first workday, including local residents, CCA students and their partners, and a day laborer, who remains involved in the project. “I invited the homeless people in the area again and again to join us, or to help themselves to whatever was growing,” said Waxman, “but they were pretty suspicious of the food we grew.” Waxman recounted harvesting 50 fresh, ripe strawberries from the FARM, which the homeless people declined to eat. “I think a lot of homeless people have a real alienation from fresh food, maybe because a lot of what they eat is packaged or processed,” posited Waxman.

Before launching her urban farming experiment Waxman sought input from community members with expertise in cultivation. “We’re art students; we didn’t know anything about growing food,” she laughed.  Testing revealed that soil samples from ten different locations along Hooper Street were contaminated with lead.  “People from the Permaculture Guild explained how we could use sheet mulching to safely grow food on the site,” said Waxman.  A sheet of plastic was used to cover the lead-contaminated soil, on top of which was placed a layer of cardboard covered with compost, which in turn was covered with organic mulch from Bayview Green Waste.  Further down Hooper Street, the FARM project is using bioremediation – a process that relies on organic agents, such as plants, to remove or neutralize contaminants in polluted soil or water – to try to remove lead from the site.  FARM project members plan to conduct annual soil testing to track the progress of the bioremediation effort.

“We’ve learned so much about agriculture, and how different plants will respond to different amounts of sun, shade, and water,” said Waxman. “By accident, we learned that oyster mushrooms grow like crazy on that site, probably because we have limited sunlight,” she said.  At the FARM’s one year anniversary a new mound was dedicated completely to mushroom cultivation.  A variety of other projects were also undertaken at FARM’s birthday party, including tree pruning, bench building, planting, and tending to bioremediation.

Food grown at the site has been donated to the Mission’s Free Farm Stand and to San Francisco’s Food Not Bombs. Waxman invites anyone who’d like to harvest fruits or vegetables from the space to do so, and to feel free to add plants and seeds. “We are so used to things being private,” said Waxman.  “We’ve watched a trend toward privatization of everything over the last 30 years. The FARM project undoes that by introducing millenials to a publicly shared, publicly owned space. We see this as a moral issue: we cannot simply go on as independent entities. That is not a way to ensure our survival.”

Since Waxman graduated in 2009, CCA students Chris Kluthe and Ashley Weiss have co-coordinated the FARM project. “We set up a seed adoption program this year,” explained Kluthe. “We used old egg cartons as little planters.  Individual students took responsibility for nurturing a seed into a plant. Then they planted them out into the mounds on Hooper Street on their own schedule.  Part of the enjoyment of FARM is working with something so tangible.  In our classes, we work with ideas and drawings, in the realm of the theoretical. There is something very nice about being outside and literally getting your hands dirty.”

A rainwater collection system was also recently installed.  A CCA industrial design student repurposed corrugated sheet metal that was left over after the college’s graduate center was constructed. The metal sheets were placed on the college’s roof to catch and direct rainwater to a pipe that leads down the side of the building to four 55-gallon drums that were donated by an apple farm. The barrels are daisy-chained together with galvanized piping, with a spigot on the last barrel that can connect to a hose for watering the garden. At the birthday celebration, the final length of pipe was welded into place, closing the rainwater catchment loop.

“The FARM works on the gift economy — we’ve received so many serendipitous donations —flats of flowers that an anonymous donor just left for us; 200 packets of seeds from Renee’s seeds; manure from someone with horses in Davis; and the mulching material from Bayview Green Waste. In the same spirit, anyone interested in working at the Hooper Street FARM is always welcome, including harvesting and taking food home,” said Waxman. Waxman pointed out that she and her colleagues are available to help other groups develop strategies to bring people together to work on community projects.

To learn more about FARM, or to contact Waxman or Kluthe:  http://thinkdiscussact.org/farm/index.html.

 

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