preoccupations

part-time farmer of organic cut flowers and asian vegetables

farm manager for an educational urban farm

masters student of landscape architecture

greenhouse & nursery operator

edible landscaper

gold digger

degenerate

rebel

Now, some photos:

It's my last week in the field.

Drip irrigation, yes!

Bee hive initiation :D

underground markets

Held in an empty parking lot in Oakland on a summer's eve last year, we anxiously waited in a line going down the block, paid a $2 entrance fee, signed a waiver promising not to sue, and finally gained access to various local food makers who lacked legal legitimacy as vendors due to high start-up costs and business barriers. That night, we ate well, homemade everythings from chocolate to chicken bowl. Sadly, SF Forage, whose mission is to give local food artisans a boost toward legitimacy, announced today that the Underground Market has been officially shut down.

Seven hours south by car, in our hometown off the main street (one of the highest traffic-dense streets in Los Angeles County), is a 3-acre farm run by a Taiwanese immigrant family, growing Asian vegetables and aggregating produce from local community growers. It's a for-profit, peri-urban family farm selling vegetables and homemade buns+cakes directly to Chinese moms out of an underground market/shack at prices lower than most grocery stores. Running business for over ten years, the lady at the market puts a free ginger and garlic clove in our bag after we give her cash for the goods.

The most legit food, maybe it comes from the illegitimate, inexpensive family kitchen.

blueberry equivalents

Today felt like *summer - warm, slow, and sleepy. The main activity of the day was to pick blueberries off the blueberry bushes. I definitely ate a bunch of the less ripe ones that I'd accidentally picked, which may be contributing to some kind of disenchanted relationship to the blueberries I once thought precious and rare. A good thing and/or a bad thing.

In total, we picked $720 worth of blueberries this afternoon, 12 flats or 144 baskets at $5 per basket. They all fit into one vermont cart, in my mind, the worth of one month's rent for a single room in a Southside Berkeley apartment in blueberry equivalents.

These blueberries are precious, though. They're actually locked in an enclosed, netted structure that protects them from human and avian theft. Today's blueberry harvest alone took 18 man-hours of amateur picking. Each basket took about 7.5 minutes to pick, not to mention all the additional hours and inputs invested into them prior to harvest. Like every other crop I'm developing a closer relationship to, I'm finding that good food in all aspects is a labor of love and their value, multidimensional. Like organic blueberries: enchanting, sweet, healthy, expensive, laborious, lovely, blue.

*Officially, though, the first day of summer is in exactly one week, June 21st, 2011.