rootstofruits

10:00 – 10:30    Urban Goats: Heidi Kooy

Heidi will discuss the the rewards and challenges of raising goats in an urban environment. Topics covered will be responsible goat ownership, housing, fencing, feed, exercise, and health care. The workshop will include a milking demonstration, milk tasting, and discussion of food products to make with goats’ milk.

Heidi Kooy is a former anthropologist turned small business owner and urban homesteading enthusiast. When she is not busy sewing for her handmade craft business, Pie Dough Productions, or bossing around workers for her construction contracting business, she is enjoying organic gardening, cooking, canning, preserving, and tending to her collection of small livestock. Her city farming adventures are detailed in her blog, Itty Bitty Farm in the City. She is also the garden coordinator at her daughter’s school, Monroe Elementary, a member of the San Francisco Urban Agricultural Alliance, and a member of the San Francisco School Food Coalition, an organization dedicated to improving school lunches for San Francisco public schools. heidikooy@yahoo.com

10:45 – 11:15    The Tree Doctor is In the House (general tree healthcare): Fred Bove

Like all of us, fruit trees can live long and productive lives, or they can be waylaid by pests, diseases and environment stress.  In this interactive workshop, Fred will present some common afflictions of fruit trees and their associated conditions, cures, or ounces of prevention.  Bring your blighted examples for diagnosis and treatment.

According to family sources, Fred knew the names of the plants and flowers in the gardens and woods surrounding his home at the age of four.  His lifelong study of plants as food and medicine led him to permaculture – a system of design that imitates the brilliance and abundance of nature.  He is a Certified Permaculture Designer, consultant and teacher and is a UC Certified Master Gardener. 

Recently, Fred served as Associate Director of Adult Education at the San Francisco Botanical Garden, where he developed programming, exhibits, tours, and public events designed to connect plants with people.   He currently teaches permaculture at UC Berkeley Extension, serves as the Outreach Director for The Great Sunflower Project, a citizen science project designed to collect information about pollinator service nationwide.

11:30 – Noon    Pruning Training Dwarfing: Jason Mark

Jason Mark is a writer, urban farmer and longtime advocate for ecological sustainability. His writings on agriculture and the environment have appeared in The San Francisco Chronicle, The Nation, The Progressive, Gastronomica, and Earth Island Journal, where he serves as the editor. For the last five years he has been a co-manager at Alemany Farm, a three-acre organic fruit and vegetable garden in San Francisco.   

Noon -1 pm    Keynote Speaker Author Pam Peirce will talk aoubt Using San Francisco’s Microclimates to Grow Food and Flowers   <<sponsored by The Urban Farmer Store>>

Pam Peirce to Discuss Fruit Trees in Your Microclimate

San Francisco’s microclimates offer excellent opportunities to gardeners who learn to use them well. Food and flowers grow in all of San Francisco’s microclimates. Finding out which will succeed in your own garden is just a matter of learning the basics and then experimenting a bit. Possibilities vary within neighborhoods and even in different locations in the same garden. Come learn how understanding microclimates will help you to have a productive and beautiful San Francisco garden. Start growing now and learn what your garden can bring to your table!

Pam Peirce is the author of Golden Gate Gardening, a bestselling regional food gardening book just out in its Third Edition. She has written several other books, including Wildly Successful Plants: Northern California, on regional old garden ornamentals and Controlling Vegetable Pests , a book in the Ortho Books “Environmentally Friendly Gardening” series . Pam teaches horticulture at City College of San Francisco, writes the weekly column “Golden Gate Gardener” for the San Francisco Chronicle (sfgate.com), and maintains a blog at goldengategarden.typepad.com.

1:00 – 2:00    Special Guest Speaker John E. Preece, Ph.D. on Why is a gene bank for fruit and nut crops important

2:30 – 3:00    Grafting 101:    Nik Dyer

The invention of grafting made it possible for us to enjoy the huge diversity of stone and pome fruits we enjoy today! Apples, pears, peaches and plums, oh my! This workshop will provide an explanation of the importance of grafting in fruit tree production as well as an introduction to the concepts and practice of this ancient art. Ten lucky participants will get to go home with a freshly grafted apple tree!

Nik Dyer is the owner of Purple Carrot, an edible garden design and coaching company based in San Francisco. He has a BA in Agroecology from UCSC, a MA in Ecological Agriculture from New College of California, and over 10 years hands on experience in agriculture and horticulture. He is passionate about empowering people to grow their own food. Planting and caring for fruit trees is one of his specialties! Please visit: www.purplecarrotgardening.com

Join us at the ECOSF Handcrafted Outdoor Oven where Roots to Fruits will highlight all the delicious succulent fruits and breads that can come from summer. Bring your appetite, the samples will be sure to please.

10:00 – 10:30 Fruit Galettes with Joe Schuver

Joe will show how to cook with fresh fruit, using royal blenheim apricots picked fresh off the tree. He will be creating rustic galettes, a very simple and easy way to present fresh fruit for parties, brunches and impress your friends and guests.

Destination Bakery’s owner and head baker Joe Schyver grew up in the Midwest with a family of passionate pie and bread makers. He has been fortunate to make baking his life’s career for the past 30 years.  Joe is the owner of Destination Baking Company in the Glen Park neighborhood of San Francsico, which features simple “home made” baked goods, especially those featuring seasonal fruit from California and the Northwest.

11:45 – 11:30 Farmhouse Jam Making with Mat Rogers

Jam is a delicious way to preserve and concentrate the favor of fruit.  Mat will demonstrate how to make a low sugar jam recipe that lets the flavors of fresh fruit shine through and can the jam so it’s safe to sit on the panty shelf for up to a year.

Mat Rogers is an ecological engineering doctoral candidate and the director of Agrariana, a non-profit dedicated to preserving an agrarian worldview and rural lifeways.  Agrariana’s programming includes Rural Thrift, the Backyard Seed Bank, Meet Your Meat events, and the Food and Farming Film Festival (4-F).  Mat practices a practical and inexpensive form of farmhouse canning learned at his mother’s knee in rural Missouri, where serious canners escape the heat in purpose-built summer kitchens.

<<NOON Pam Peirce Author of Golden Gate Gardening will give the Keynote speech at the Outdoor Classroom>>

1:00 – 1:30 Seeding is Believing with LisaRuth Elliott

Lisaruth will go through the stages of her take on no-knead bread, you’ll get a recipe, and we’ll bake a few loaves.  To bake the bread she uses a cast iron dutch oven with lid.  The bread requires a long “rising” time (overnight), and you are welcome to mix one up at the workshop and bake it at home the next day.  If you would like to start a loaf for yourself, please bring a 2-3 quart (8 – 12 cup) container with lid (tupperware is great) and a set of measuring spoons.  Apron optional, but we ARE working with flour… Flour and other ingredients will be provided.  Note: this bread is full of gluten!

Lisaruth’s Lovin’ From the Oven, a breadmaking instruction endeavor, started with kitchen experimentation using a no-knead bread recipe in San Francisco in 2008.  Soon she began baking multiple loaves at once – if you’re baking one, why not bake two? – keeping her household in bread, giving some away, and bartering for goods and services.  Inspired by the San Francisco Diggers’ notion of FREE, she started giving informal breadmaking instruction workshops that brought dozens of friends, family, and strangers alike around her kitchen table for food and conversation.  Students have gone on to not only win baking contests, and start a Community Supported Bakery, but they also now provide themselves with fresh daily artisanal bread.  Lisaruth Elliott also co-directs Shaping San Francisco, coordinates volunteers for the SF Bicycle Coalition Valet Bicycle Parking Program, has worked as project director and assistant to muralist Mona Caron, and trained as an ecological horticulture apprentice at Alemany Farm where she still regularly volunteers.  Lisaruth desires to live in a world where we all move from being bread WINNERS to breadMAKERS!

1:45 – 2:30 Farmhouse Canning with Whole Fruit with Mat Rogers

Using whole fruit to during the peak of the season is one of nature’s best gifts. Mat will show us how to preserve the freshness of whole fruit using local, delicious fruit.

Mat Rogers is an ecological engineering doctoral candidate and the director of Agrariana, a non-profit dedicated to preserving an agrarian worldview and rural lifeways.  Agrariana’s programming includes Rural Thrift, the Backyard Seed Bank, Meet Your Meat events, and the Food and Farming Film Festival (4-F).  Mat practices a practical and inexpensive form of farmhouse canning learned at his mother’s knee in rural Missouri, where serious canners escape the heat in purpose-built summer kitchens.

2:45 – 4:00 Fruit Pies with Kids led by Lindsey Goldberg

Kids of ALL ages are welcome to join us in the Outdoor Kitchen from 2:30-3pm as we explore the delicious and beautiful world of RAW desserts. Learn how to make an easy and healthy sweet treat all year long! This is a kid-friendly process and families with children are encouraged to attend. We will enjoy the bounty of stone fruits by making a raw pie crust together and filling it with the sweetness of summer.

Lindsey Goldberg is a culinary artist born out of her LOVE of fresh, seasonal, and locally grown goodness. Lindsey has been experimenting in the kitchen since she was a little girl; growing up with a baker as a dad, Lindsey’s curiosity of food, and infusing kitchens with all things delicious and beautiful began at a very young age. Lindsey is a teacher whose practice is rooted at the creative intersection of ecology and art, she facilitates youth education programming at Hayes Valley Farm and Graze the Roof, Glide Memorial Church’s Foundation Building. She is a permaculture designer passionately engaging in the urban agriculture movement in San Francisco where she is compelled by soil building, bee keeping, and the incredible biodiversity abundant in our bioregion. Lindsey’s newest passions are edible/medicinal weeds, seed saving and kefir.

Turn your backyard into a garden oasis! Come visit the Backyard Showcase Garden at our July 23rd event, and learn what it takes to turn your garden into a food forest while conserving energy and water.

10:00 – 10:30 Greywater by Laura Allen

Reusing greywater, water coming from sinks, showers, and washing machines, is a great way to save water, while keeping your garden green. Learn the do’s and don’ts of simple greywater reuse, common systems, and about rebates and incentives for installing these systems.

Laura is a founding member of Greywater Action and has spent a decade exploring low-tech, urban sustainable water solutions. She has a BA in Environmental Science, a teaching credential and a masters in education from New College of CA. She is a co-editor of the anthology Dam Nation: Dispatches from the Water Underground. Laura leads classes and workshops on urban ecological sanitation technologies of rainwater harvesting, greywater reuse and composting toilets. Laura also works with the Greywater Alliance to help remove institutional barriers to sustainable water use.

10:45 – 11:15 Making Every Drop Count by Tom Bressan

A short workshop of tips and techniques for water conservation in the landscape. Including things to consider before you plant. A quick over view of water delivery systems and how they are set up, including drip irrigation systems. The proper adjustment of watering times for conservation, including “smart” weather based controllers. And will talk briefly on how rainwater and gray water can fit in.

Tom Bressan is the founder of The Urban Farmer Store, with locations in San Francisco, Richmond and Mill Valley. He is the author of many articles and technical papers on irrigation and lectures on all aspects of water use in the garden to both professional and homeowner groups. Tom has served on numerous boards and is currently with the San Francisco Green Schoolyard Alliances

11:30 – Noon Rain Harvesting by Shain Herbert

An overview of rain-catchment systems and a demonstration of the site set up with linked cisterns.

Shain works for The Urban Farmer Store and is ARCSA certified.

<<NOON Pam Peirce Author of Golden Gate Gardening will give the Keynote speech at the Outdoor Classroom>>

1:00 – 1:30 Urban Chickens: by Heidi Kooy

Learn the basics about keeping chickens in a city backyard. The workshop will cover housing, health, city codes, and responsible livestock ownership.

Heidi Kooy is a former anthropologist turned small business owner and urban homesteading enthusiast. When she is not busy sewing for her handmade craft business, Pie Dough Productions, or bossing around workers for her construction contracting business, she is enjoying organic gardening, cooking, canning, preserving, and tending to her collection of small livestock. Her city farming adventures are detailed in her blog, Itty Bitty Farm in the City. She is also the garden coordinator at her daughter’s school, Monroe Elementary, a member of the San Francisco Urban Agricultural Alliance, and a member of the San Francisco School Food Coalition, an organization dedicated to improving school lunches for San Francisco public schools.

1:45 – 2:15 Urban Fruit Tree Pollination by Karen Peteros

Pollinators are necessary for the flowers of fruit trees and many other food producing plants to develop fruit, vegetables, nuts and seeds. Come learn about the most common bee pollinators in San Francisco – the honey bee and our native bumble bee – and what you can do to help sustain healthy populations in our urban environment so there are enough around to pollinate our backyard gardens and orchards.

Karen has been beekeeping since 2006, at times up to 50 hives. She is a past-president of the SF Beekeepers Association and co-founder of non-profit, San Francisco Bee-Cause, and regularly teaches urban beekeeping classes.

2:30 – 3:00 Understory by Kevin Bayuk

Plant a tree and you need to take care of it. Plant an ecosystem and it will take care of you. Let’s explore selecting, planting and maintaining a community of plants that will support your fruit trees and provide an abundance of yields for you and all the life in your garden.

Kevin leverages his skills in entrepreneurship, having spent nearly a decade starting and growing technology companies, activating projects and organizations that regenerate healthy ecosystems and socially just and joyful environments. He is a co-founder and partner of Lift Business Coaching, leading local business and ventures into the next economy and the Urban Permaculture Institute. He serves on the Board of Directors for the San Francisco Urban Alliance for Sustainability, the San Francisco Permaculture Guild and the Haight Ashbury Neighborhood Council. Kevin facilitates permaculture trainings and teaches food systems design with Earth Activist Training, UPISF.com and UC Berkeley Extension.

3:15 – 3:45 Tree Selection & planting – Urban Tree Management    by David Cody

All about how to select a tree that will thrive in our unique SF micro-climates. We will explore where and how to plant it, leveraging design to find the best spot in your garden for the tree. Finally, tips on how to manage the tree through its lifetime with the goal of providing health for the tree high quality fruit.

David is a true jack-of-all-trades. He has worked as a chef, a machinist, a general contractor, a graphics designer and web developer and currently teaches permaculture at the Urban Permaculture Institute, www.UPISF.com  

Urban Composting Station (all day) by Susie GFE

How to turn your leftovers into gardeners’ gold! – Jump-start your garden with homemade compost! Composting encourages beneficial soil organisms, provides nutrients to your plants, helps break the life cycle of pests and disease, as well as keeps valuable waste out of the landfill. Join GFE and explore the easy steps involved in setting up and maintaining your home worm composting system!

Garden for the Environment (GFE) maintains a nationally acclaimed one-acre urban demonstration garden and offers environmental education programs about organic gardening, urban compost systems and sustainable food systems. Since its founding in 1990, the garden has operated as a demonstration site for small-scale urban ecological food production, organic gardening and low water-use landscaping. Garden For the Environment’s teachers are local, Bay- Area experts offering their knowledge and experience to San Francisco residents on almost every Saturday of the year. Our workshops and classes are held in our demonstration garden and cover the wide spectrum of urban organic gardening focusing on hands-on education.

Lisaruth Elliott’s Lovin’ From the Oven will be one of the featured demo’s at our Adobe Outdoor Kitchen! We caught up with Lisaruth for a moment to ask her about her early roots, and how she began.

Q: How did you get started baking bread?

I’m a breadmaking instructor, and just started with kitchen experimentation using a no-knead bread recipe in 2008.  Soon I was baking multiple loaves at once – if you’re baking one, why not bake two? I enjoyed keeping my household in bread- giving some away, and bartering for goods and services.  Inspired by the San Francisco Diggers‘ notion of FREE, I started giving informal breadmaking instruction workshops that brought dozens of friends, family, and strangers alike around my kitchen table for food and conversation.  Some of my students have gone on to win baking contests, open a Community Supported Bakery. I feel fortunate that I could help provide them with information to create their own fresh, artisanal breads.

As a Permaculture Design student visiting from Germany I am reporting from The School Farm, where the fruit tasting event will take place July 23.

The set up of the site is in progress – until now important but less visible and spectacular but very important items are prepared: a windbreak fence that marks the dimensions of the Backyard Showcase Garden and an incredibly long irrigation line for the whole School Farm. It leads to two 1550 gallon water tanks that will be used to collect rainwater.

The site stretches out in an east-west-direction on the edge of the School Farm area and has the size of an average San Francisco backyard – 25 x 40ft.

They will showcase a tasting orchard, but not only with fruit trees, but also a bunch of other great vegetables and native plants that can grow in the small space of an urban backyard. And it will be not only contain plants, but also chickens, bees, and examples for infrastrutural solutions like reuse of greywater and rainwater harvesting by local experts who have designed water systems for many years.

I really love the idea, it’s so clear and easy to capture! To feel the narrow space of the backyard and then see the density of possibilities even in that small, shared space is key. Then its time to start to rethink your perception that your backyard is only a dull and shady place and see it in other lights; it could become a little paradise dedicated to sustainable food production. Or, if you are already gardening, it can be a native wild habitat, or pollination mecca for bees and butterflies.

I’ve seen the fantastic brand new cob oven and the table tops for the Garden Café tables. Plus I’ve learned about the long-term visions for the School Farm, and its made me recognize the importance of seeing design from the many components that make up the whole.

After I helped sheet mulch the back part of the garden, and the patch next to it I left, deeply impressed by the School Farm project and its newest growing extension, the Backyard Showcase garden. There was a workday this Saturday so I am curious to see how the site changed since my visit last Thursday. And of course … very excited for the upcoming Roots to Fruits event! Hope to see you there.

by Judith Henning. Check out her Metagarden blog.

Medlar Apple Fruit. Occidental, CA

If love be rough with you, be rough with love. Prick love for pricking and you beat love down. Give me a mask to put my face in. A mask to put over my other mask. What do I care if some curious person sees my flaws? Let this mask, with its black eyebrows, blush for me.

Mercutio. Shakespeare, Romeo & Juliet

Love, such a prickly thing! In the case of ancient fruit, this special apple, the MEDLAR, believe to originate in Asia, surfaces in Shakespeare’s Romeo and Juliet. Its an apple that is only edible, once its near spoiled. Once its bletted, and nearly fermented, one can enjoy its sweet, sharp, irresistable flavor.

In today’s produce marketplace, who has time to wait for a fruit to ferment for three weeks, before selling it or consuming it? In ancient Rome, the culture placed a special value on beauty and differentiation, and patience seemed easier to cultivate. They could process the fruit because behind the prickly exterior shape lie an applesauce-like flesh, which was a delicacy to savor, and worth the wait.

The genus name, Mespilus, comes from Greek mesos (half) and pilos (ball) in reference to rounded fruit form. The fruit pictured above is thriving in Occidental, CA, just an hour and 20 minutes North of San Francisco.

What does this tell us about what can thrive in our unique temperate climate? The possibilities are thriving for rare fruit; and the comeback story of Rare Fruit is being told by many patient people, including many members of the California Rare Fruit Growers Association.

Roots to Fruits Fall Apple and Pear Tasting Fair will attempt to uncover this. Mark your calendars for October 8 to taste some of the unique and deliicious descendants of the Medlar Apple Tree, Grandmother of our modern apples and pears trees. And if you can’t wait til then, come and sample some of our stone fruit this July, at our upcoming Roots to Fruits kickoff event, Tasting our Shared Fruiture.

photo by booka alon

We Welcome All Small-Scale Producers to Come Aboard

Our Marketplace will be teeming with home-crafted goods and produce on July 23 at our kickoff event, Tasting Our Shared Fruiture.

July 23 we proudly invite you to join us inside our Urban Locavore Marketplace, to sell your homemade specialties, produce and value-added goods including edibles and homespun concoctions.

Together, we invite you to show off your mad skills in the kitchen, your specialty goods and YES your backyard veggies, herbs and fruit! Got plums? Come and celebrate our inspiring web of community resiliency by selling what you grow.

• growing it locally
• producing it locally
• sharing it locally

We will collectively lower our carbon footprint and offer a place where supply meets demand, by providing a new kind of marketplace for farmers and foodies.

Click on the image above for more details and to register. Click here for Spanish flyer.

Special Thanks to our Community Partner, The San Francisco Urban Agriculture Alliance (SFUAA), for continuing advocacy and support of backyard farmers.

Fill out the form below or click here to enter

Plum Full of Family Fun!

Roots to Fruits Presents, A Kickoff Party -TASTING OUR SHARED FRUITURE!

The School Farm @ School of the Arts (SOTA)
555 Portola Drive (entrance on  O’Shaughnessy) Click here for Map.
Saturday, July 23
10:00 AM – 4:00 PM

Keynote Speaker: Pam Peirce, Author of Golden Gate Gardening, she teaches horticulture at CCSF and writes a weekly column for the SF Chronicle

Special Guest Speaker: John Preece, Ph.D., Lead Researcher, National Clonal Germplasm Repository

Highlights: Tasting Orchard, Backyard Showcase Garden, Outdoor Kitchen & Fun Contests.

For more information, read our newsletter.

Raspberries are doing so fabulously well this year! They are really an incredible plant for an Urban Homestead. Neighbor’s fence too high? These babies are shade tolerant; mine grew over 5′ tall to reach for the sun! Want to use greywater or plant something other than fern in a boggy area? Raspberries are happy in just about any soil!

Find a friend that grows them, take cuttings, or trade services and ask them to grow starts for you. =)