"jams and produce" by kthread (CC BY 2.0)
We tried another new idea, a distilled idea. We’ve done underground restaurants, pie parties, figure drawing, one-day cafes, and workshops. We’ve long dreamed of house concerts. 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. Click to read more …
Tags: art, community, food, jewelry, market, music, pictures, sweets
This Summer, beginning July 1st, we have our Summertime Salon! Every Thursday evening, from 5-9 PM, we have a wonderful dinner from the garden, FREE figure drawing with a live model, Music jams, Collage, and Games! You can figure draw for an hour, then join in with the musicians and sing a few songs. Then sit down at a table and play Magic with the masters. It goes like this:
- Music over here (bring your instrument, and just play with whoever shows up)
- Art/figure drawing over there (to make this free, I need free models! Sign up now for summer. You don’t have to be nude, come in costume if you’d like. I have a few easels, but bring your own art supplies and extra easel if you have one.)
- Collage on that table (bring your own supplies, especially magazines to cut!)
- Games on this table (bring a game you want to play)
- Kids craft table (anything from feather hair clips to nosegays. Craft from the garden.)
- Or just chase the chickens
We have coffee, tea, a delicious vegetarian dish from the garden, and pie for sale. Menu is dependent on what’s fresh from the garden. Pie is seasonal fruit. Sometimes we have biscuits and fresh jam.
Urban Farm Market: Now every Thursday of the month bring your excess produce, flowers, honey, homemade cheese, art, jewelry, sweet treats, etc. to our Urban Farm Market tables to sell or trade with the other vendors. Our intention is to grow a farmer’s market for the DIY community who don’t make enough to sell at the Farmer’s Market. This could also be a great time to barter. Just bring your goods and a fair price for them, and we can begin the underground market! If this is popular, we could do it every week, and into the Fall. It’s proving popular, so we’re extending the Urban Farm Market to every week.
You don’t have to RSVP to come play. Please let us know if you’d like to sell at the market, though, or if you’re interested in becoming a figure model. Tell all your friends, and come hang out into the night with us and dust off your talents! May your community, artistic, and creative dreams come true.
Tags: art, candy, cards, collage, dancing, dinner, figure drawing, food, games, jewelry, market, music, sweets
Recently we had the great pleasure of supplying flowers for India Joze’ flower festival. Pictures of these flowers are below.
Held 16 May at Joze’ new restaurant location, the scene I saw at the Flower Festival was the evolved artistic food expression I’ve come to know from Master Chef Jozseph Schultz. You can look at their pictures (Facebook pictures and event page) via the India Joze Facebook page. What I captured here are shots of our flower delivery. (These pictures are available under a Creative Commons BY-SA 3.0 Unported.)
Nasturtiums, rose petals, borage, lemon petals, and edible pea flowers.
One of our Araucana chickens, Sparrow, likes her privacy when she’s laying her eggs. She’s also the strongest flyer, and flies the coop each day to lay her egg out in the greater homestead. She keeps her secret spots to an area that is not much more than 5000 square feet (464.5 square meters), but the combination of her low height, clever camouflage, and willingness to find somewhere new keeps us active. Whenever we find her latest clutch and start collecting the eggs, she soon gives up on that location and starts over with a new one. Because Araucanas lay blue-green-grey eggs, the experience reminds me of an Easter egg hunt.
This video shows the latest location Sparrow has been laying, the most difficult one she has devised. I’m afraid there are other locations she can reach that are more unpleasant to crawl to than this one was. One lesson learned – do the crawl with thick gloves on.
Tags: chickens, eggs, funny, how-to, Sparrow, sustainability, video
Even a small working urban farm such as ours needs a way to get essential farm materials brought here. Currently we are a bicycle-only house, although we car share with our neighbors and rent cars whenever we need to go out of town.
When I come back with a rental car, if there is time I like to run a few errands before returning it to the agency. The below videos are a quick view of how I fit three rice straw bales in the back of a Toyota Corolla:
I put a tarp down to cover the rear seat. This is a lesson learned from past experience. One time I brought back a mini-van that I had filled with seven bales of straw, then did a fair but not perfect sweeping job on it. When I returned it, the rental folks were bent out of shape. I was kind but firm; I didn’t do anything wrong, really, and I offered to clean the car further, especially if they’d lend me the shop vac, but I wasn’t paying any fees. In the end, it turned out they thought I had laid down a bed of straw to transport farm animals. Sheese! It’s just some straw, folks.
While I was checking the videos, I found Nancy Day, a woman in Ontario(?), who last year who got thirteen straw bales on her Toyota Corolla. Wow! However, when I watched how she loaded and strapped them in, I realized I could never get that load home across my city. She mentions at the end of the second video that she has to drive home via back roads. There aren’t back roads between my straw sources and Fairy-Tale Farm. I could get lucky and not be spotted with a huge load, but I’m more likely to get a citation for an unsafe or too-large load.
Next time, though, I’m going to shoot for five straw ebales using some borrowed techniques.
Tags: challenges, city living, how-to, mulch, straw, strawbales, sustainability, video
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