"jams and produce" by kthread (CC BY 2.0)
We tried another new idea, a distilled idea. We’ve done pop-up restaurants, pie parties, figure drawing, and workshops. We’ve long dreamed of house concerts, dance parties. We want to be a venue where people bring their goods, extra produce, music, art, and especially sense of community.
So was born the Summer Salons and Urban Farm Market.
Yesterday, coincident with the salon and market was a post on Love and Trash, “Building Genuine Community”. It’s a flattering review of the Big Picture of what we are trying to do here on our little urban farm. I’ve known the author, Father Mayhem, for many a year, he knows what he’s talking about.
This morning I woke to a wonderful blog post by Kristen Taylor (@kthread), who came with Margaret Rosas (@mrosas), Quiddities chief and fellow Santa Cruz open source geek.
Kristen did a great job of capturing how a Fairy-Tale Farm event goes. It’s the kind of story telling that we’d like to be able to do, if we weren’t so busy living the story. My heart did a leap when she said, “This has to be documented,” camera in hand. To have such an avid and piercing community person and food enthusiast show up is the kind of serendipity we keep having at each event. (I’d stopped into NextSpace for business and ran into Margaret, and at the tail end of “public media” and “the open source way” and “opensource.com” geekiness, I made sure she got one of our flyers and a reminder about the event, and she said she’d bring her friend Kristen.) This past eighteen months we’ve had the whole spectrum from new best friends to new great business relationships, all circled by the simple human love of communal effort.
We had art, glass jewelry (Saskia LOVES her new earrings), lip-smacking confections (chocolate dipped and sea salted gooey caramels! lavender cookies! flavored marshmallows! fresh strawberry lemonade!), perfect cauliflower and jasmine rice ready to eat, basil and kale and chard and peas and such freshness from an organic garden, and two square feet of homemade jams. Yeah, I’m sure I forgot something.
I was very stoked with Vishnu’s Secret playing, for so many reasons. I was at their debut in 1992, and with all the passing of years I’m still struck by the brass audacity, beauty of sound, and tearing of story. Aimee’s ethereal vocals (yeah, words lose me here) and Bob’s string virtuosity (oh, the cello!), joined these years by Trey’s equally deft hands. That’s the first time anyone has played for us in this house concert format, something we’ve long dreamed of. The fact that it came on the eighth anniversary of our moving in to this house we are dreaming in to a home … that was just a cherry on a very well iced cake.
So, what are you doing next Thursday?
Tags: art, community, food, jewelry, market, music, pictures, sweets
1