Ok. Finally harvested half the honey. It was a multi-staged process that took a week. I am at 25lbs right now. Thats about $125, great! Well, minus the jar I gifted to Mr. Danny Glover, cuz you know, its Danny Glover. Mr. Glover is an excellent conversationalist preferring topics of social change and human rights. In fact, turns out he did an event a while back with Food First. Doesn’t surprise me.

What did surprise me was this morning’s news. San Diego, CA has approved an urban agriculture plan for its residents which includes fowl, goats and bees. “Last March, the city received a $50,000 grant to promote healthier living and urban agriculture. On Tuesday, the City Council voted 8-0 to make it easier for residents to grow and sell food, as well as simplify rules for residents to keep chickens, goats and bees.”
 
There is a great summary table of their regulations which makes it much easier to decipher what you can and cannot do.

If conservative San Diego is willing to support their community to grow and raise their own food (especially during an economic downturn), I am sure Oakland will as well once the ordinance is proposed.

Big changes for the new year. It can be tough to tally up the lessons learned in a previous year and be ready to let go of habits and things that no longer really serve the purpose we sought out to accomplish. However, wisdom dictates it is the best thing to do. And when we fear a change, lean into it.

With that, I have been paying close attention to the rhythm of my little farm project for the last year. I’ve also been paying attention to the amount of energy I put into the project as this is one of the first questions folks ask me when they tour the space. How long does it take? How much effort is it? My answer to them is that if they are maintaining their space to be tour worthy each season, it takes a ton more time and energy.

I’ve also decided on some changes. First, I don’t eat enough rabbit meat to require a full rabbitry (this is what I am calling my two doe, one buck set up). With several friends now keeping rabbits, I can actually seek out their bucks to impregnate my doe. This means two of my rabbits found a new home. I miss them and feel sad but I can also visit them so that helps.

I am also doing something I never thought I would do. I am clearing a portion of my main growing space to accommodate a new building project of my significant other. I wrestled with this as I have been working to build the health and fertility of that soil for nearly eight years. However, my husband is a clever man with many great ideas. So, though I have to witness my soil being covered by concrete (or some such material), I have confidence it will be well worth the sacrifice.

In the midst of this my bee colony disappeared…or died or both. It happened in December. I did not know they swarm in December and I never saw proof of this but lo and behold, one day the hive was dead silent. I checked it and only a few dead workers remained. They were just dead in the middle of whatever task they were doing like their battery plum ran out. So odd. However, with an empty hive I can now move it to a new space without risk of disrupting my colony. Though a loss for now, the timing was incredible. They also left an amazing bounty of honey behind.

Now I set out with the challenge of reconfiguring growing and walking space and try like the dickens to keep up with our Bay Area pace of the season. Good lord. We only get one month off in our season. Its January and I can already see slight buds swelling on the bare tree limbs, which means I have to prune asap. December was my only reprieve but it was a well used one.

Wow. I am finding it hard to keep up with the flurry of articles about projects and initiatives that are generating a new food landscape. Here are a few to catch up on over a cup of hot coco.

Oakland City Council approved a pilot project that will allow mobile food vendors to offer their creative concoctions in more areas around the city. In fact, we can look forward to a new year of food events through Oakland where caravans of food trucks (and bikes!) will huddle up to new areas, kind of like a lonchera flash mob. It will be fun to stay up to date and catch these hip events! Read more.

Now imagine if you will, a pod of mobile food vendors located adjacent to an Oakland urban farm abuzz with community members. If you need any inspiration as to what this could look like, read about this very thing unfolding in Brooklyn.

Wondering if this is pie in the sky thinking? Don’t think you can make this happen in your city? Well consider the District of Columbia’s “Food Production and Urban Gardens Program Act of 1986.” Read more about it here.

The Turner Environmental Law Clinic at the Emory University School of Law, in partnership with Georgia Organics, have released one of the most comprehensive looks at urban agriculture policy in the U.S. The study provides a look at urban agriculture policies implemented by many of Sustain Lane’s top ranking sustainable cities. Download the report here.

Grody but pragmatic. It is necessary to know what normal and abnormal waste looks like from your birds. To this end, the Poultry Page Forum has created an online guide to poultry feces. Great job PPF! You can view what they have created thus far but be forewarned, its not pretty. Read more…

The apples were languishing on the branches. The figs being stolen and half eaten. It has started to get chaotic. With a more aggressive schedule, how do I keep up? My approach is to do frequent walk throughs and take small steps each day to keep the space in balance. Though I  let go of the reigns with the apples and figs. They just all came in at once. So I did what I could. I schlepped the ladder from its storage place and set it up, left it there overnight and with the threat of rain and being barked at by the hubby for leaving the ladder out in the rain, I was motivated to strip the tree of apples and grab the figs while I was at it. Now to deal with 23lbs of apples and 5lbs of figs. I need great fig jam and chutney recipes. Anyone?

A toolkit providing a framework and model language for land use policies that local policymakers can tailor to promote and sustain urban agriculture in their communities (click on image to download pdf).

Uh. I just got busy. Really busy. I’ve been mentioning on and off for years, the work of the Oakland Food Policy Council (OFPC). I have had high hopes for this advisory body. In fact, I have had high hopes in general for the ability of the city of Oakland to be a national leader in developing alternative food systems and creative food entrepreneurship.  Putting my beliefs into action, I have now taken on the role of Coordinator for the Oakland Food Policy Council.

This is a fascinating development in the “urban farm experience” as it is taking my action out of my backyard and into my city and beyond. OFPC is being incubated by Food First, an inspiring, highly credible and deeply informed think tank on global food justice. I am now surrounded by motivated thinkers schooled on social theory. Love it.

What’s going on at the farm: The rain came and yet again I did not prepare by digging a drainage ditch in the chicken run, damn it. Also, I just decided that I’ll never actually make time to tan my rabbit pelts so I just started doing it. They are defrosting now. Following Kitty’s lead, I will follow the steps of the Mother Earth News article on the topic. Or more likely, text Kitty constantly to find out what to do next. Thank god we urban farmer folks are now connect via text! This could not have happened a year ago.

Upcoming posts: Kate Marie, I am going to follow up with the Mexican Herbal Remedies you asked about. I’ll also post about the tanning process once I’ve completed it.

I love mapaches (raccoons). They are such specialized and excellent scavengers. Ultimate bandits really. I recently read about a friend losing a hen to a raccoon. While such events can be deterred with predator proofing, it helps to stop and consider the animal you are dealing with. For example, consider this- Animals that have a brain with a cortex have a region that is devoted to somatic (body) sensation. Human, primates, and other mammals have localized regions to process this information. This are a can be mapped to determine regions associated with particular stimuli.

In a raccoon, the forepaw (hands) occupy 60% of their primary sensimotor area.¹ While I did not find a like statistic for human hands, we do not even come close to this degree of sensory specialization. In fact, one distinct difference between human hands and raccoon forepaws is that in humans each finger sensation is processed in the same region, while in raccoons each digit is represented in individual cortical regions.²

What this means: Raccoons have incredibly intelligent hands.

While a human can tinker with something to figure it out, a raccoon is a Master Tinkerer. So if you think you’ve raccoon proofed your animal enclosures think about a creature that can open, lift, pry, unlock, reach an arm in and figure out how to make things happen. My coop is located within an enclosure (the run) covered in poultry wire. We dug a ~18″ trench around the run and extended the wire into it, curving it upward and covered it with soil. The have a lockable automatic gate latch on our door about 4′ off the ground. While we have lapses on actually inserting a lock in the mechanism, I think the location off the ground has deterred unwanted visitors.

For those of us outwitted by a determined raccoon, take solace. While El Mapache has flipped you the proverbial finger, at least it was one very smart finger.

¹Herron, P. (1978). Somatotopic organization of mechanosensory projections to SII cerebral neocortex in the raccoon (Procyon lotor). Journal of Comparative Neurology. 181: 717-728.

²Robinson, CJ, Wurster, RD. (1997). Testing Peripheral Somatosensory Neuroprostheses by Recording from Raccoon Cortex. IEEE Engineering in Medicine and Biology Society. 5 (1): 75 – 80.

I’m wishing I planted more than six peanut plants now. Turns out the dry summer in the south has caused a shortage of peanuts. I recently read that peanut butter will go up in price by as much as 40%. Its alarming. I have always looked to peanut butter as a dependable survival food. I spent childhood as a latch key kid eating government program food. We would get boxes of food that always included a huge metal can of government branded peanut butter. I lived off that stuff. So in my mind peanut butter is what you can turn to when there is nothing else.

I am not a doomsayer…not at all. I don’t grow food because I think the world is going to collapse. I do it because I think it is essential. I think we need to recall our human knowledge about where food comes from and how to produce it. We need to keep it active and strong. I believe that by doing so, we have a better chance at developing appropriate alternatives to a food system that has been failing us. That said, I cannot help but be alarmed by the ever increasing prices of basic foods.

I am feeling glad to be in a community of active local food producers working with others to teach them how to grow food and to distribute excess food throughout the region. That said- those of you in the East Bay, don’t forget you can get a winter garden in place for food through the coming months. You can extent your summer crops by using floating row covers, plastic or other heating trapping techniques. General rule of thumb, cover crops will grow in two hours of sun or less; leaf vegetables need two to four hours; brassicas and root vegetables need four to six. Direct sow your roots. Do it now!

What to put in the ground now: Read more…